Archive for September, 2004

Thursday, September 30, 2004

Sep 30 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Shadrone kindly asks if I’ve posted all of my VR story thus far anywhere. Oddly, I thought I had, but I can’t find the file anywhere. I’ve made a note to myself to post it when next I have the chance, and I’ll mention it here when I do.

My book o’ the week of about a month ago was Joseph Lowman’s Mastering the Techniques of Teaching, written primarily for college instructors but aimed at anyone who has to present material to a group over time.

I found it a bit difficult to read, despite Lowman’s straightforward English. Mainly, it’s because I’m not a college professor, so I don’t have to worry about establishing office hours or determining course objectives.

But to be fair, the book’s not about office hours or course objectives; it’s about improving teachers’ skills. The book advocates a holistic approach, encompassing the students, the environment, and the teacher itself.

Ironically, Lowman proposes that the best way for teachers to improve is for them to focus on their students. But understanding students’ perspectives and problems, the teacher can present the most effective material in the most effective manner.

I found the section on student types most interesting, as it listed a handful of common student attitudes so that teachers can better empathize with them. The attitudes are:

  • “The typical compliant student is notably teacher dependent, conventional, and highly task oriented. Unlike other types, tehse students are comfortable with being dependent and are content simply to learn what the instructor wants them to know. Compliants speak in class most often to agree with the instructor or ask for clarification. They rarely pos problems or question the teacher’s control.”
  • “Anxious-dependent students…can be spotted early by their excessive concern about grades. Like compliant types, anxious-dependents want to learn exactly what the teacher wants them to know—but these fear that they will miss something….[they] distrust teacheres and expect trick questions or unfair grading practices. Their combination of high ambition, anxiety, and suspiciousness suggests that they feel angry about having less power in the educational setting than they would like.”
  • “Discouraged workers…make comments in class that communicate a depressed and fatalistic attitude towards themselves and their education….Some may have worked so hard to earn high grades in the past that they no longer find learning pleasurable; they have burned out. Often they are older students coming back to school…who find it hard to regain their youthful enthusiasm. Some have jobs or families….”
  • “Independent students take what instructors have to offer and pursue their own goals in equal measure. They are comfortable (perhaps even detached or aloof) in doing what is asked of them…high participators, make friends with instructors easily, and identify with them to some extent, much as many graduate students relate to their professors.”
  • “Heroes…lack the detachment of the indpendents, and seem anxious to make the teacher notice immediately what great students and interesting people they are. Most critically, heroes routinely fail to deliver on their initial promise. They are the erratic, optimistic underachievers who initially excite an instructor with their intensity and grand plans for independent projects, only to disappoint later with poor execution.”

These are all presented in the spirit of identification, so that teachers can recognize the dynamics of the class early. None of these types are flawless, and of course there are innumerable variations on each.

Lowman does not focus exclusively on the students, though; a full forty-five pages are devoted to the instructor’s craft. How can the teacher most effectively utilize the drama inherent in lecture? The lecture hall is a dramatic stage, after all. Lowman spends twenty pages answering that question.

So, overall, it’s a good book. If I were a professor, it would be my bible; instead, it’s a solid discussion of a complicated subject.

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Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Sep 29 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Had a pretty good night last night. Didn’t write a thing, but I did manage to exercise and paint some more of my bedroom. It felt good to get something done. It always does.

Now, more VR story:

Thomas pulled up a window, typed a few commands, and closed his eyes. He ignored the growing sounds of creaking wood and horse hooves on cobblestones, giving himself room to be calm. He always had difficulty with social games.

He opened his eyes to find himself in an eighteenth century coach, surrounded by dark woods. Rich curtains hung, swaying, from the windows. He was momentarily thankful that VR couldn

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Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Sep 29 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Had a pretty good night last night. Didn’t write a thing, but I did manage to exercise and paint some more of my bedroom. It felt good to get something done. It always does.

Now, more VR story:

Thomas pulled up a window, typed a few commands, and closed his eyes. He ignored the growing sounds of creaking wood and horse hooves on cobblestones, giving himself room to be calm. He always had difficulty with social games.

He opened his eyes to find himself in an eighteenth century coach, surrounded by dark woods. Rich curtains hung, swaying, from the windows. He was momentarily thankful that VR couldn

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Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Sep 28 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Huzzah! Thanks to Brennen‘s tremendous work over the past few weeks, this journal is back to normal. I can post like usual again. Thanks, Bren!

In other news, I’ve been feeling rather blue for the past couple of days. I suspect I may be fighting off an illness.

The weekend was a bit of a dud. Saturday was unexpectedly busy; I spent it driving all around the area doing various errands. One annoying thing about the D.C. area is that it’s so spread out. You can’t just walk to the local grocery store. Old Navy? Sure, half an hour away….

It’s particularly annoying when you want to buy, say, a dual 2.0 Ghz Power Mac G5 with 1.5 GB of RAM. Like I did.

Ahem.

Okay, I’ll stop being coy. It’s amazingly fast, yes, but I’m not geeking out about it. Really. To be honest, it’s an Otherspace Productions computer. I bought it specifically so that we can render video and do other animation-related tasks rapidly. I can already tell that it’ll speed us up. Heck, it’s already sped me up in terms of being able to generate sample animations. So, the computer isn’t my toy as much as it is a company resource.

Not that that will stop me from installing Neverwinter Nights on it, probably.

My slight shade of blue is due partly to my parents being out of town, which means I’ve had to take care of one of their dogs, and check in on my grandmother every day. Both of whom have been great; they’re just extra gravitational stresses that have pulled me off-orbit. (Wow. Pardon the needlessly confusing metaphor.) They’re both distracting in the same way that a low-level background process eats up processing time for a computer. I can still function; I’m just not totally here.

My little motivational intentional living thing has been working out well, though. I have kept up with it, so far. I’m running and performing strength training according to schedule, I’m writing every weekday night, I’m reading the Bible consistently, and I’ve been keeping up-to-date with Otherspace Productions responsibilities. It’s been amazing to see that defining specific personal goals has an immediate practical benefit.

And in closing, if you ever get a chance to see it, Mezzo TV will kick your tail from here to Mars.

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Friday, September 24, 2004

Sep 24 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

When am I going to have time to get out in the garden?

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Thursday, September 23, 2004

Sep 23 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

I’ve been a lot more responsible lately.

For example, last night I put the last dish in the sink, looked down at it, and though to myself, I want to have a clean, empty sink. So I cleaned all the dishes, gave the sink my Chlorine Enema™, and wiped it down with Clorox. And afterwards I felt good.

This is in contrast to my attitude at my old apartment, which I can summarize as ”Eh.” Picture a Gallic shrug to accompany it. It’s not that I hated cleaning; I just had no particular desire to do so, and afterwards I felt no better than I had before.

This may be a result of my personal intentions, which I’ve been satisfying every day this week. And boy does that feel good. I’m really accomplishing things that are important to me.

Here’s the townhouse that’s receiving the benefits of my increased responsibility:

[Townhouse Exterior]

If you walk in the front door, you’ll come into the living room. I took this picture just before I moved in. There’s a lot more furniture now.

[Townhouse Living Room 1]

If you were to walk all the way back to that stepladder and turn around, here’s what you’d see:

[Townhouse Living Room 2]

Then if you went upstairs, you’d come to a bathroom and two bedrooms. Here’s the front bedroom:

[Townhouse Bedroom]

It’s a nice little townhouse, really. It’s just too bad that nothing works….

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Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Sep 22 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Apparently, summer has grumpily decided to play ball once again. Temperatures were back in the 80′s on Tuesday.

I had a tough time concentrating at work on Tuesday. I had a good day; more productive than almost any other day in months. But Monday was better, and I’m probably a bit worried that my initial enthusiasm is already waning. I was tired and generally a bit bored with documentation work. Hard to blame myself for that, really, and I shouldn’t expect a good system to completely and permanently revitalize my work attitude. It’s a work in progress.

I left work mercifully early to meet with my art teacher, who has returned from a summer of rest to her teaching. We worked on charcoal sketches of a skull, which was great, messy fun. There’s something satisfying about messy art; perhaps it reminds me of very early days of finger-painting and pastel chalks, when art was messy and joyful and nobody minded.

I came home to my list of personal improvements, which I now realize I haven’t explained here. I’ve chosen five areas of my life that I want to focus on improving: my body, my spiritual life, my job, my writing, and my animation company. I wrote goals describing how I want to be in those five areas a year from now, and what I need to do in the next three months to move towards those goals. Most of that ended up being daily activities, such as writing two hundred words of fiction a day.

I achieved all of them, including a twenty-minute run, a fifteen minute Bible reading, and a writing session that got out of hand and I didn’t stop until I’d written six hundred words. There’s an auspicious start to my personal improvements, I must say.

Unfortunately, I got almost nothing else done; for some reason I cracked my copy of Watchmen and couldn’t put it down until I’d read half of it (to the point where Rorschach had just finished describing his genesis). What a depressing, frustrating, discouraging, bleak, brilliant book.

Now, more VR story:

He frowned. “What would happen in a player’s death on this game that would keep them totally offline?” he asked. “Have you died recently? Have the deaths changed?”

She looked away, seeming a tad embarrassed. “Nothing’s changed. I…well, I have to be honest with you Deathie, I haven’t died since then. I mean, I haven’t gone on any real dangerous missions. I just…haven’t really wanted to for the past couple of weeks.”

He felt himself gape again, and allowed himself to, partly to show her he realized the importance of her admission. Surge’s full name was “Surgeon,” and she’d earned it after so many players had described her nearly miraculous aim as ”surgical.” She was one of the best pilots in the game, she’d been on hundreds of missions, and she was always one of the first to volunteer for another one. And now she was so frightened she was avoiding combat?

She looked back at him. “I just had to tell someone. Sorry to dump on you.” She forced a pathetic laugh. “Didn’t mean to freak you out. It’s probably just all my imagination anyway. I’ve been dealing with a lot of stuff outside of here. You know.”

He nodded, slowly, his head spinning. He pulled himself together and looked her square in the face. “Listen. I’m in trouble. Somebody’s after me…outside. I don’t know why. Has anyone here been sniffing around?”

She shook her head. “No, nobody. Though it might’ve slipped by me, frankly. Are you in trouble, Deathie?”

His avatar gave her a sardonic grin. “Apparently. I don’t know why they have a problem with me, though. But listen, Surgeon, you have to keep quiet about this. I know I can trust you. Don’t tell anyone that anything out of the ordinary is going on. If anyone asks about why I logged in, tell ‘em I just wanted to check in with you. And tell me. Okay?”

She nodded and said, “I promise.” He breathed a relieved sigh. He knew several hundred people seriously in VR. He trusted perhaps five of them. Surgeon was one of those five.

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Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Sep 21 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Sunday, fall arrived like a hammer blow. I woke up to a 70-degree house and that nip in the air that can only be found in fall. Spring can be cold, but it’s a gentle kind of cold. Sunday morning hinted of falling leaves and leather jackets.

Sunday was pretty much perfect. I woke up at noon, which negated my morning but left me completely rested, so I figured that was a net plus. I then drove to my parents’ and gave them their birthday presents—Dad’s birthday was last week and Mom’s was that day—and a plate of gingersnap cookies. We sat in the side garden I planted and simply enjoyed its lush elegance, now overflowing with plants that Mom planted. We then drove to Clyde’s for a lovely dinner on the brick sidewalk, next to a sparse Oktoberfest tent from which emanated the sounds of a band playing everything from Edelweiss to Bad Bad Leroy Brown.

We then walked around to the movie theater to discover they their showing of Hero had started nine minutes previously. After a moment’s deliberation, we decided to go for it, and slipped into our seats just as the final preview was ending. Huzzah!

Hero was brilliant. It’s in the same visual and stylistic vein as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, though of course the story and the spine were completely different. Hero is about larger aspects of courage and dedication to an ideal, while Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon focuses on aspects of maturity.

Hero is certainly a gorgeous film, filled with imagery that is clearly meant to be simply visually beautiful. I was tickled to see that CT, HD has spawned this new style of Hong Kong film: epic, bold, and beautiful.

(I was also tickled to see Donnie Yen, a personal favorite Hong Kong actor of mine.)

Then I returned home, to run stress tests on the Syllable file system and climb wearily into bed. A good day.

I slept late Monday morning, which is common for me. After stopping by Starbuck’s to check my e-mail (which is a good example of why nobody can predict the future—imagine ten years ago predicting the trend of ubiquitous wireless internet access in coffee shops), I went to work and began using a time log.

The time log is a sheet of paper on which I note what I’m doing throughout my day. It’s inspired by one of the articles at dexterity.com. The idea is to measure your time at work, to see what you’re spending your time on. I began doing this last Thursday, and was shocked to discover that I was only spending 35 to 45 minutes a day actually working. The rest of the time was escaping out the valves of co-worker chats, e-mail, snack breaks, etc.

As I began keeping my time log on Monday, I discovered it was motivating me to think about what I was doing. I was much more conscious of my time. As a result, I spent three and a half hours actually working on Monday, about a six-fold increase. Excellent. I would like to eventually more than double that, of course, but it’s an excellent start.

Monday night I went to a writer’s group that meets once a month at a local Barnes & Noble. We critiqued two stories, and I handed out excerpts from the VR story (which I do intend to start posting again, now that I’m a little more used to the foibles of the new server) for critique. I’ll be very interested to hear people’s thoughts next month.

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Saturday, September 18, 2004

Sep 18 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

Balance is a lie.

I’ve talked about life balance before, I think. Balance says that you should find a way of doing everything in its proper proportion. It says that, in a given week, you’ll always be giving a certain percent of your time to work, another percent to your family, another percent to your friends, and so on. It says that you should seek a way of serving all your needs and goals essentially at the same time.

I think this is wrong.

I think that life changes too much to allow that. I think that sometimes we have to give 100% to work, to the exclusion of the rest of our lives. I think that sometimes we should sacrifice everything for a friend. I think that we should let our lives be unbalanced.

This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t pursue all of our goals, or that we should let one thing dominate our lives. But I think a lot of people are pursuing an empty dream of balance, a goal that can never be reached.

A personal example: This past summer, Saalon needed an extra pair of hands in making his latest movie, Dreaming by Strobelight. So I took a week off work, drove six hours to Pittsburgh, and assembled sets and hauled props for sixteen hours a day. A very unbalanced thing to do. I had to put the rest of my life on hold, too. But it was one of the grandest experiences of my life. I would gladly pay to experience that week again.

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Thursday, September 16, 2004

Sep 16 2004 Published by under Miscellaneous

How to summarize the last few weeks?

I’ve moved in to my townhouse. That took quite a while, actually, about a month’s worth of trips to and from my old apartment. I just have so much stuff; computers, musical instruments, clothes, books, CDs, DVDs…and none of it is easily trashed.

I’m not truly settled in yet, though. I still feel like I’m living in a hotel. I want to feel settled, like this is home, but I suppose I shouldn’t expect that when I’ve only been sleeping here for a couple of weeks.

Work is interesting. I should write a full entry about that. I had my performance review, which went well; my bosses generally praised me but raised a few challenging issues. I need to change. And I’m changing.

[Neverwinter Nights box]

Meanwhile, I bought Neverwinter Nights a week ago, and have been playing it regularly. It’s quite addictive. They designers made the smart choice of littering the world with quests; my character can hardly move fifty feet without bumping into somebody who needss a hero. And because the quests don’t need to be solved in any particular order, there’s always something else to do. If I get tired of one quest, I can always work on another.

It’s just a shame that the Mac version is so expensive compared to the Windows version. I’m paying $50 for just the game (new), and the expansions cost $30 each; Windows users can get NWN and one expansion for about $20 (used) on eBay.

Would I buy a PC just so I could play cheap games? Not a chance. Windows is not worth my time.

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