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[drawing every day 2024 post seventy-three]: random sketches

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More from the Wizard Basic Training How to Draw book. It surprises me how much I got out of doing the stick-man and outline sketches - they showed me limits of my existing practice (and conversely, how much I've progressed in other areas, like hand shape and arm length). Still, a lot of work to do.

Also, some superhero costumes REALLY look like lingerie in disguise. Just sayin'.

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day seventy-three]: independent confirmation at last

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At last! Thanks to Bing, I found an online calculator whose numbers confirm the calculation I did on my own for the interplanetary distances from my story "Shadows of Titanium Rain"!

[ from https://www.vcalc.com/wiki/l1-l2-lagrange-points based on data from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASP-121 ]

This is VERY close to the numbers I got from doing this in Mathematica based on the equations from (as I recall) the NASA page https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ContentMedia/lagrange.pdf :

AND, despite a good bit of reading [ https://www.amazon.com/Orbital-Mechanics-Foundation-Richard-Madonna/dp/0894640100 , https://www.routledge.com/Orbital-Motion/Roy/p/book/9781138406285 ] I was not able to find a ready source which gave me a simple formula without solving a bunch of equations.

But the calculator gave the same result that I got earlier on my own.

SO! Failaka is a quarter million kilometers from Tylos.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day seventy-two]: right there buddy

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I can't tell you how frustrating it is for Present Anthony for Past Anthony to have set up a single place where all tax forms should go during the year, except for Past Anthony to not have used that system for the one paper form that cannot be replaced by looking it up online.

I'm sure it's here somewhere.

-the Centaur

Pictured: I have been working on taxes, so please enjoy this picture of a cat.

[drawing every day 2024 post seventy-one]: expanding the reach

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For years I've been carrying about the book The Best of Wizard Basic Training: How to Draw: Getting Started, trying to make progress in it, and failing. But, my new methodical approach based on Goldman's book seems to be working, so I'm going to add the Wizzes into my drawing rotation. Let's see how it goes.

Frankly speaking, if I was to do it all over again, I'd start with the hands and feet, as they're the hardest part, and when you start trying to draw a person but can't finish it due to the hands and feet, it's hard to really feel that the drawing is done. I don't really feel that anymore, though I know I have a long ways to go.

Drawing every day, methodically, through a set of exercises.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day seventy-one]: cheers

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Unabashedly, I'm going to beef up the blog buffer by posting something easy, like a picture of this delicious Old Fashioned from Longhorn. They're a nice sipping drink, excellent for kicking back with a good book, which as I recall that night was very likely the book "Rust for Rustaceans."

Now, I talked smack about Rust the other day, but they have some great game libraries worth trying out, and I am not too proud to be proved wrong, nor am I too proud to use a tool with warts (which I will happily complain about) if it can also get my job done (which I will happily crow about).

-the Centaur

Pictured: I said it, yes. And now we're one more day ahead, so I can get on with Neurodiversiverse edits.

[twenty twenty-four day seventy]: fix it the way that works

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So, this is worthy of a longer blog post, but the short story is, looking under the streetlight for your keys may provide visibility, but it won’t help you find them unless you have reason to think that you dropped them there.

A lot of time in software development, we encounter things that don’t work, and problems like stochastic errors and heisenbugs can lead software developers to try voodoo solutions - rebooting, recompiling from head, running the build again, or restarting the server.

These “solutions” work well enough for us that it’s worthwhile trying them as a first step - several times recently I have encountered issues which simply evaporated when I refreshed the web page, restarted the server, retried the build, or restarted my computer.

But these are not actual fixes. They’re tools to clear away transient errors so we can give our systems the best chance of properly functioning. And if they don’t work, the most important thing to do is to really dig in and try to find the root cause of the problem.

On one of those systems - where I literally had tried refreshing the web page, restarting the server, refreshing the code, reinstalling the packages, and rebooting the computer - the build itself was something that you had to run twice.

Now, this is a common problem with software builds: they take a lot of files and memory, and they can get halfway through their builds and die, leaving enough artifacts for a second pass to successfully solve the problem. I had to do this at Google quite a bit.

But it isn’t a real solution. (Well, it was at Google, for this particular software, because its build was running up against some hard limits that weren’t fixable, but I digress). And so, eventually, my build for this website failed to run at all, even after a reboot.

The solution? A quick search online revealed it’s possible to change the parameters of the build to give it more memory - and once I did that, the build ran smooth as glass. The “run the build again” trick I’d learned at Google - learned where, for one particular project, it was not possible to fix the problem - had led me astray, and overapplying this trick to my new problem - where it had partial success - kept me from finding a real, permanent fix.

So, if a fix feels like voodoo, stop for a minute - and search for a better way.

-the Centaur

Pictured: What do you mean, you haven't updated the package configuration for THREE YEARS?

[twenty twenty-four day sixty-nine]: dodging a bullet

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SO! I’ve spent more time than I like in hospitals with saline drips restoring my dehydrated blood after food-poisoning induced vomiting, and pretty much all of those episodes followed me thinking, “Huh, this tastes a little funny … ehhh, I guess it’s OK.”

That led me to introduce the following strict rule: if you think anything’s off about food, don’t eat it. 

Now, that seems to make sense to most people, but in reality, most people don’t practice that. In my direct experience, if the average person gets a piece of fruit or some soup or something that “tastes a little bit funny,” then, after thinking for a moment, they’ll say “ehhh, I guess it’s OK” and chow down straight on the funny-tasting food. Sometimes they even pressure me to have some, to which I say, "You eat it."

Honestly, most of the time, a funny taste turns out fine: a funny taste is just a sign that something is badly flavored or poorly spiced or too ripe or not ripe enough or just plain weird to the particular eater. And in my experience almost nobody gets sick doing that, which is why we as humans get to enjoy oysters and natto (fermented soybeans) and thousand-year eggs (clay-preserved eggs).

But, frankly speaking, that’s due to survivor bias. All the idiots (I mean, heroic gourmands) who tried nightshade mushroom and botulism-infested soup and toxic preservatives are dead now, so we cook from the books of the survivors. And I’ve learned from unexpectedly bitter-tasting experience that if I had been a heroic gourmand back in the day, I’d have a colorful pathogen named after me.

So if anything tastes or even looks funny, I don’t eat it.

Case in point! I’m alive to write this blog entry. Let me explain.

When I’m on the high end of my weight range and am trying to lose it, I tend to eat a light breakfast during the week to dial it back - usually a grapefruit and toast or half a pummelo. A pummelo is a heritage citrus that’s kind of like the grandfather of a grapefruit - pummelos and mandarins were crossed to make oranges, and crossed again to make grapefruit.

They're my favorite fruit - like a grapefruit, but sweeter, and so large that one half of a pummelo has as much meat as a whole grapefruit. I usually eat half the pummelo one day, refrigerate it in a closed container, and then eat the other half the next day or day after.

You can see this saved half at the top of the blog - it looked gorgeous and delicious. I popped into my mouth a small bit of meat that had been knocked off by an earlier cut, then picked up my knife to slice it ... when I noticed a tiny speck in the columella, the spongy stuff in the middle.

Now, as a paranoid eater, I always look on the columella with suspicion: in many pummelos, there’s so much that it looks like a white fungus growing there - but it’s always been just fruit. Figuring, “Ehh, I guess it’s OK”, I poke it with my knife before cutting the pummelo - and the black specks disappeared as two wedges of the fruit collapsed.

A chunk of this fruit had been consumed by some kind of fungus. You can kinda see the damaged wedges here in a picture I took just before cutting the fruit, and if you look closely, you can even see the fungus itself growing on the inside space. This wasn’t old fruit - I’d eaten the other half of the fruit just two days before, and it was beautiful and unmarred when I washed it. But it was still rotten on the inside, with a fungus I’ve not been able to identify online, other than it is some fungus with a fruiting body:

I spat out the tiny bit of pummelo meat I’d just put in my mouth, and tossed the fruit in the compost. But the next day, curious, I wondered if there were any signs on the other half of the fruit, and went back to find this:

Not only is the newer piece visibly moldy, its compromised pieces rapidly disintegrating, the entire older piece of fruit is now completely covered with fruiting bodies - probably spread around its surface when I cut the fruit open. From what I’ve found online, the sprouting of fruiting bodies means this pummelo had already been infested with a fungus for a week or two prior to the flowering.

So! I was lucky. Either this fungus was not toxic, or I managed to get so little of it in the first piece of fruit that I didn’t make myself sick. But it just confirms my strategy:

If it looks or tastes funny, don’t eat it.

If you don’t agree with me on a particular food, you eat it; I’m going to pass.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Um, I think I said it. Lots of pictures of bad grandpa grapefruit.

[drawing every day post sixty-nine]: more porsche practice

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Trying a continued focus on the shape of faces and position of eyes. I think it's getting better, though the tilt of the face is off a bit; at least it is decently proportioned and the eyes aren't all over the place.

This is the last of the Porsche character sheets in this series, and I'm going to dive in to finishing the hands and feet Goldman book before switching gears to faces. Still, this exercise turned out not too bad ... and I am now seven days ahead on drawing every day AND scheduling them for posting.

Drawing every day, on average, posting as far ahead as I can.

Next up: editing work on SPECTRAL IRON, Dakota Frost #7!

-the Centaur