It’s been a while since I’ve been blogging. I’ve not posted anything in about a year, for various reasons (well, excuses). I’d like this to change and so I’m going to be experimenting with splitting up my blog. I’ll be posting more personal and whimsical stuff on posterous, keeping xerode.net for more “serious” content like code and animation/graphics.

I’ll be toying with different ways of bringing all my content together on my homepage through lifestreaming software or I may just stick to using my flavors.me account for that.

I’ve got many reasons for the above but most of it boils down to re-evaluating what I want to do with this site and various new goals I’ve set for myself. Ideally I’d like to make this site more professional and start integrating my portfolio and creative projects into it, while keeping the more personal content elsewhere but still accessible from my homepage.

So this is the last of these kind of posts you’ll see here. Instead expect more about coding and graphics – I’ve got a few drafts about ActionScript to finish and I’d like to post some of the work I’ve done in Processing, as well as document my first steps in OpenFrameworks territory. Hopefully this blog will end up with more purpose, instead of being a neglected mish-mash of mostly unrelated content and the occasional angst.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to completely gut this install of WordPress as I think it’s long overdue. I’m probably going to end up moving it to the domain root, clear out my unused plug-ins and carefully configure existing and new ones, all to make the site more functional. Once I’ve got everything running as smoothly as I’d like, I can sit down and flex my atrophied design muscles to create a more interesting visual identity that I can then use across the sites I post to.

Hopefully my small amount of subscribers will find this as interesting as I do and will be able to contain their excitment until it’s all finished.

ETA: unknown

It took 4 shops before I managed to find a pair in stock. Annoyingly they were a size too big but as they were the last pair in the store and limited edition I still bought them. They’re Converse, so I can just do them up tighter and pray I won’t get blisters.

This was all part of a shopping trip for clothes, as aside from some cheap tat from Primark, I can’t remember the last time I updated my wardrobe. I also picked up some new t-shirts, including two with prints of Shepard Fairey’s recent works and another with the Laughing Man logo.

Have three balls bouncing around the screen.

• There must be gravity
• The balls should bounce off the sides of the screen and back in
• The balls should bounce off each other

I’ve yet to hear back from them, so I decided to do a little bit more tweaking and post it up here. The different types of balls have slightly different properties such as bounciness, mass and size.

There’s some basic interactivity, allowing the balls to be picked up and dropped. This can cause a few problems when a ball is dropped in a position that intersects another ball, so I’ve still got a little bit bug-fixing to do but overall I’m happy with it.

Instructions

Move the mouse to the centre of the Flash movie and then move it around. That’s about it.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s an awful lot of work put into the exhibition and it contains a stunning collection of documents and artifacts of the history of civil liberties in Britain. However, the whole tone of Taking Liberties seemed to be so horribly self-congratulating that it left a really bad taste in my mouth. Most of the questions asked of the visitors were populist and lacking in any real substance. Considering that the advertising promoted it as something hard-hitting, I thought that topics such as tuition fees were really weak and almost missing the point.

Speaking of the questions, the interactive element of the exhibition involved swiping a barcoded wrist-tag with a unique ID underneath a POS-style laser scanner each time you wanted to participate. Maybe it was just the way it was presented but it seemed to miss the irony of the obvious comparison to ID cards, data-mining and the database state and even if it didn’t, it really should have made more of this.

The main problem with Taking Liberties is that it concentrates too much on the past when it should be asking harder questions about the present and the future. What’s the point of cheerleading these achievements when they’re slowly being eroded away?

Don’t go to the exhibition. Watch the documentary of the same name instead.

Omnipotent and yet unable to perfect queueing theory. Either that or even God relies on the excuse “the cheque’s in the mail”.

Found in Whitechapel, the home of the Salvation Army.

It’s scrappily written but if you want the source code it’s available on the next page.

A man and his wife were having some problems at home and were giving each other the silent treatment.

Suddenly, the man realized that the next day, he would need his wife to wake him at 5:00 AM for an early morning business flight.

Not wanting to be the first to break the silence (and LOSE), he wrote on a piece of paper, ‘Please wake me at 5:00 AM’ and left it where he knew she would find it.

The next morning, the man woke up, only to discover it was 9:00 AM and he had missed his flight.

Furious, he was about to go and see why his wife hadn’t wakened him, when he noticed a piece of paper by the bed.

The paper said, ‘It is 5:00 AM. Wake up.’

Men are not equipped for these kinds of contests.

Now, I love jokes that tackle the difficult subject of stereotypes as much as the next person but I spied an interesting footer after the final joke: “SEND THIS TO SMART WOMEN WHO NEED A LAUGH AND TO MEN YOU THINK CAN HANDLE IT !!!”. I decided to test her sense of humour and see what she could “handle” by responding with the following:

Funny. Here’s my favourite “men and women” joke: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/ashe1108.pdf

The punchline?

“Excluding overtime, the median hourly earnings of full-time men were £12.50, an increase of 4.4 per cent, compared with £10.91 for women, an increase of 4.1 per cent. The stronger growth in full-time men’s hourly earnings excluding overtime compared with women’s has meant that the gender pay gap has increased to 12.8 per cent, up from 12.5 per cent in 2007.”

I’ve yet to receive a response.

Health

• The perennial favourite, quit smoking. Well, I’m still smoking although recently I’ve been cutting back a lot when I’m at work and pretty much restricting myself to fags at lunch. If only I can do the same while I’m at home or out and about and I’ll have this addiction licked.
• Go to a dentist and try and get my teeth sorted. I had a couple of visits last year but I’ve missed my 6 month check-up.
• Improve my diet. Since my relationship with a soon-to-be-ex-housemate ended, I’ve been very lazy when it comes to cooking and for the past few weeks I’ve been living on junk food. I need to start cooking for myself again and stop eating so much crap. Success! After a lot of pizza earlier in the year, I’m eating healthier and home cooking again, resulting in losing 2 stone in weight compared to this time last year.
• Cut down on boozing, especially beer. After a few too many alcohol-fueled embarassments, I’ve been working on this and keeping it in mind while drinking.
• Lose some weight and exercise more. The gym nearest to my house has the inevitable “New Year, New Body!” promotion on, meaning there are no sign-up fees. As I’ve used sign-up fees as a reason not to join before, I have no excuses for not getting my membership sorted. As mentioned above, I’ve lost weight, now I need to keep it off and tone up. I’ve got the membership but went to the gym a grand total of two times, so I really need to improve on this or cancel my subscription.

Money

• Start saving instead of blowing all of my wages each month. At some point in my life I would like to own a house or at least have the option of doing so. Still need to start on this one.
• Blow some of these savings on a holiday and some kind of snowboarding trip. I didn’t make it to the Bangface Weekender or Machinenfest last year, so these are my priorities this year. Anything else will be bonus.

Social

• I seem to have ended up in a relationship so I guess I should make an effort not to mess it up as I did with my previous two. Well this pretty much went to shit. I think I need to be single for a bit while I get my head together and get over my ex. As much as I’d love to get back with her, I doubt it’s going to happen and I just have to accept that.
• Respond to text messages, phone calls and e-mails in a timely manner, instead of ignoring them and wondering why some people take offence. No real improvement so it’s back on the list for this year.

Creativity

• Finish my blog and keep it updated/Expand my portfolio and put it on-line again. As I’ve combined my blog and fledgeling portfolio into one entity, these are really the same. I overhauled the design and although it’s not 100% to my liking, I’m pretty pleased with it. I need to start posting more updates as I’ve slacked off since November and I’ve got half a dozen posts sat waiting to be finished and published.
• Blag a DJ set somewhere. I failed at this last year but it looks like I’ve managed to get a gig in March. I’ll believe it when I’m actually standing there “spinning” tunes from my laptop though.
• Get back into photography and use my flickr account more. More success! The Anonymous protests really got me back into photography and I’ve been snapping a lot more, appreciating the beauty of RAW and playing with LightRoom.
• Start learning German. I pretty much ignored this once I realised I wasn’t going to make it to Maschinenfest. As I’m now adamant about going this year, I suppose I really ought to learn the language.
• Have some kind of tuition for the piano/keyboard. I stopped working on music around the summer to concentrate on Flash. I’m starting to play around with it again now but I’ve realised it’s never going to be anything but a hobby. Tuition would be nice but I’ve got more important things to spend my money on.

2008 was pretty tumultuous for me. Changing jobs and all the stress that involves, particularly at the hands of useless recruitment agents. Heartache when my then-girlfriend goes travelling and breaking up with her, not realising it’s likely for good. Seeing someone else on the rebound and having to realise this. Moving house and severing part of my “support network” in the process.

On the plus side I’ve moved in with a fantastic housemate, I’m out of Saffron and really progressed my Flash work, started on some freelance work and it feels I’ve started a career of sorts.

I’d like 2009 to be better but after yesterday’s events, where I realised that I’m still in love with somebody who doesn’t feel the same way, I don’t have any particular hope. I think I need some time out to sort out where I’m going and what I want from this year, to try and mature emotionally and stop running from one relationship to another, as it feels that’s what I’ve been doing these past few years.

I used BitmapData’s perlinNoise function to generate a grayscale image and played with the values until I found something useful. This image was merged with the flag to provide shading and then used as a displacement map for a DisplacementMapFilter applied to the shaded flag.

The effect was animated by changing the offsets of the Perlin noise, constantly increasing the x offset to provide the scrolling while using Sine waves on the y offset to simulate turbulence. Sine waves were also used to modulate the DisplacementMapFilter’s x and y displacement values to make the animation less uniform. The frame was then merged with the previous frame, to slightly soften the output.

I’m more satisfied with this result than my original attempt – it’s higher quality and renders faster. Although I pretty much had to disregard my previous work and it’s still a pretty useless effect, I’ve learnt more about some classes that’ll be useful when I come to look at particles and sprite rendering in games.