So inspired by my wife’s bravery in taking on the study of Law through Deakin Off-Campus, I decided to get myself a bit of a degree too.  Being lazy, I’ve gone for studying the area I work in, so hopefully I’ll get a bit of RPL, aka credit for stuff I already know and do.

I decided to go through Open University, as this allowed me to start in June rather than waiting for start of year intake.  Also I can do a few units before enrolling for a degree (in fact you have to), so if it just doesn’t fit into my life I don’t have to pull out of the degree and feel like I’ve given up, I just finish the unit I’m on and then move on.

So why bother since I’m well entrenched in a job?  A few reasons. Obviously being degree qualified gets a foot in the door when applying for a job, although I’m pretty comfy and paid OK at my current job so I have no plans to move in the foreseeable.  Another is also professional, I’ve got lots of on the job learning and self taught skills, some short course knowledge and whatnot, and for a sysadmin I think that stuff is far more valuable, but it’s still useful to expand your knowledge and put some polish on your professional toolset.  Also if I have a degree, I can always go do post-grad education if I ever want a career change :)

The bigger one is the simple joy of learning – as well as the IT related stuff, I have to do a 4 unit minor in another discipline, as well as 8 electives from any other Open Uni course.  Broadening your education simply makes you a more complete person.

Watching Mon slave night after night over text book, articles, course documents and court reports, as well as listening to lectures and spend an hour or so in class online chat, I was feeling less excited.  My darling holds herself to a high standard, and will never be happy with anything less than the best she could possibly do, and so far her hard work has been rewarded, with a HD on her assignment and, while she doesn’t have her exam marks yet, she’s happy that she studied well and was confident while doing the exam.

So how am I going?  Well, I started my first unit, Java Programming 1, on June 1.  On Monday morning just passed (8 June), while Connor ate his breakfast and watched cartoons, I completed the reading and half the tutes for week 3.  Although to be fair, he does like to take his time over breakfast.

OK, so it’s a programming subject, and while I’ve never used an object oriented language like Java, I do know my array from my elbow, so maybe I’m breezing because of that and it will get harder down the track.  Right now though, I do feel a little ashamed that at the end of all our work, Mon will have done ten hours a week and I’ll have done one, and we’ll both have something called a Bachelor…

People like to complain about having guilt laid on them all the time as part of growing up Catholic.  I don’t even see it, post Vatican II the emphasis changed a lot, but it probably did happen a lot more to our parent’s generation – eg you are always sinful, you need to confess all the time. ‘Catholic Guilt’ is the conception that this is so drilled in to you that you feel constantly inadequate and guilty for every small thing you do wrong.  It can be very trendy to complain about it, joke about it in sitcoms etc, and  plenty of people use it as their excuse for moving away from the Catholic church.

I think it’s probably a real thing for some people, who had parents or convent schools or whatever that got the wrong end of the sin/forgiveness stick, but google for catholic guilt and look around popular media, and a lot of the people who complain about it are Gen X/Ys who want to smoke/drink/screw/cheat/pillage/whatever, but their ‘Catholic Guilt’ haunts them when they do. It’s become more of a catch-all for the conflict between modern society and living a Christian life – it doesn’t occur to people who’ve moved away from faith that it’s not some ‘ghost of Catholic guilt’ nagging them, it’s their conscience telling them that deep down they know the way they are living isn’t right.

Other Christians talk about it because the Catholic church still teaches sin+confession+forgiveness whereas you can just go find a church that offers  ‘cheap grace’, where God loves you just the way you are and the day you accept that Jesus is God you are permanently saved and don’t have to challenge anything else you believe or do. I’m not saying God’s love is not unconditional, or trying to challenge the conception of grace freely given, but that this grace places responsibilities on us, in the way that we live and act, and to take grace ‘cheaply’ lessens the honour and respect God gives us with His forgiveness.

There’s a positive thinking example used to illustrate the fact that you have the power over your reactions to the events around you.  Roughly the story goes that you wake up in the morning and you really feel like weetbix.  You pour your weetbix, go to the fridge and ‘Oh noes!’, you are out of milk.

So now you have the choice of how you let this affect you.  You could go all emo and decide “I can’t believe I was out of milk, everything goes wrong all the time, this day is just ruined’, or you could have toast and get on with it.

You go to get dressed and ready, and you can’t find your hairbrush. You look everywhere for ten minutes and finally give up and have to use the stupid old hairbrush you hate.  “Stupid hairbrush, I hate that brush, now my hair won’t be right and I’ll look stupid all day” vs “Phew, good thing I keep that spare hairbrush”

Then cos you wasted time looking for your hairbrush, you miss the bus and have to catch the one that gets you to work ten minutes late.  Do you let this wash you with guilt and humiliation, or do you just say “no prob, I’ll work into lunch a bit and still get off on time”?

And so on. It’s actually a good illustration of how you can use cognitive behavioural methods to control the way you decide to react to things, and CBT has been a big help in changing my thinking.

However, you have to note that the person in this story is already having a bad day. Sure that’s only three things that went wrong, and as long as they didn’t get fired for being ten minutes late there’s nothing too dramatic, but there may be more things throughout the day, and surely there has to come a point at which you are allowed to go ’screw it, this day is clearly fubar and nothing is going to go right.’

Let me give you a short summary of my last week.  I was sick on Monday, but went in because there was an issue I really had to work on. No prob, early night and I’ll be fine.  Then on Tuesday, the uninterruptible power supply at work was interrupted, causing sudden failure of a bunch of servers.  No prob, that has happened before, turn them back on.

One of the virtual machines got stuck at 95% of loading, no prob, that has happened before and we knew a fix for it and did that.

That server came up and threw whole heaps of crazy errors.  Not so good, but we’re quite clever, we can fix it.

Many of the other servers rely on this server for information, time sync, authentication.  Hardly anything is actually working.  No prob, we can find some workarounds to get most stuff working.

Meanwhile we’ve fixed several problems on the offending server, but now when people connect they have no data from this year, and the server thinks it last spoke to the network five hours in the future. Turns out it has reverted itself to a snapshot from January.  And there’s no way to recover from that.

That ’s pretty bad, but at least it’s not the finance and management database, that’s on another server, plus we have backup tapes, we’ll just put them in.  Except the backup tape from the weekend says it doesn’t have the weekend backup.  The server is supposed to eject the tape when it finishes, but instead it glitched and kept the tape and put the Monday night backup on it, destroying the weekend backup.

Am I allowed to give up yet, or do I still have to keep being positive? I even sacrificed my sanity day off and went to work to keep on top of things,but it should be ok, we can go back to the previous weekend’s backup, and then put the Thursday night incremental backup in, to bring us up to then and we’ll only have lost two days really. Restoring from tape is really slow, but we’ll get there.

Unless the Thursday tape is corrupt and won’t restore. So we send tapes for recovery, $1000 and no success, we’re now back to data that is a week and a half old, and that’s the best we’ll get.

This story actually covers about three days, it was an exhausting and distressing week, but between the fact that I work in a caring and supporting Christian environment, and that I’ve been learning the cognitive skills to cope with stuff, I got through OK. I was tired, but calm and kept my chin up.

But wait, there’s the proverbial more.  On Saturday my son accidentally deleted some playlists out of iTunes.  That’s a tiny thing, no prob, they were on my iPod and there’s a trick where you can get them back by turning them into on the go playlists and then resynching your iPod.

Except that my aging iPod has been on the way out, I can’t afford a new one, so I’ve been putting up with the fact that every week or two it locks up and freaks out, and the way to fix it is to erase it and start again.  Which is exactly what it did when I went to recover the playlists.

This is the point at which I lost my shit. And now there’s no fixing my iPod.

But I’m OK with that, the iPod probably only had a month or two left in it, and I think we are allowed to have a tipping point, and I think it’s fair to say I had lasted well.

Although looking back it does all seem a little unfair.  Given that there was plenty of milk for my weetbix on Monday, how was I to know what was coming??

Ash has started playing soccer, and we noticed that neither we, nor 10 years of PE teachers, have ever taught her to run properly.  This is unsurprising, as nobody ever taught me to either.  I vaguely remember people saying ‘run on your toes’, but never actually taking the time to explain properly what that meant, or to teach me how to develop the habits of doing that unconsciously.  Most of us learn to run wrong, and never fix that. Connor argues that he is fast enough for basketball running flat foot, that other flat footers are even faster than him, and he’s right.  But it’s not just speed, it’s efficiency – by the end of a game, Ash, or Connor, or me back in the day, are exhausted and out of energy, while the proper runners still had some left in the tanks and run circles around us.

Talking to one of the other parents at soccer, he agreed.  There’s an assumption that by being born bipedal we’ll automatically work out how to run properly, in the same way we just sort of guess how to crawl and walk, but the reality seems different. There are some who seem to get it, but for most people the natural way of running is just a faster version of walking – body upright with  long strides.our legs reach well out in front of you, and your heels strike the ground first.  Then your leg drags you forward and you roll over that foot while you swing the other leg through. At its worst, this looks like the ‘fat kid’ run, the way that the kids at the back of the pack always seemed to be almost leaning backwards and working so hard even as they struggled to catch up.  A much better running style is a forward lean, your legs don’t reach as far out in front of you, rather they hit the ground in line with your center of gravity and just lever you forward – your knees lift higher but your legs don’t extend way out in front the way they do in a flat foot run, and you come down on the ball of your foot, instead of flat. This guy knows what he’s doing, look at the lean of his body :

So here’s the science.  A proper lean forward ball-of-foot run is not just faster, it’s actually less work, and less wear and tear on the body. Landing on the ball of your foot means your ankle can work like an extra fulcrum in the complex lever of your leg – look at the leverage a dog gets from those crooked hind legs.  That’s because that backward second knee is equivalent to your ankle, and the last section of leg is a really long foot, with the dog’s foot equivalent to just the ball of your foot.  Make sense?  So the dog has this great long lever to spring forward, and that’s why he can outrun you so easily if you try and take a shortcut across the yard he is guarding…

So you’ll never catch a dog, but you’ll run a good bit faster if you use that leverage.  The second piece of physics has to do with gravity. Leaning back, graviy is working against the direction you want to run, so you are working harder to balance and pull your body forward, whereas leaning forward, gravity is giving you an assist in the direction you want to go, so your legs have less work as they are just catching you and springing you for the next tiny fall forward.

Want some more physics?  Let’s bring in conservation of energy. When you run, your muscles create kinetic energy, i.e. movement, and when your flat foot smacks into the ground like a bellyflop, the energy is lost into the tarmac and dissipates as noise, heat, and into the ground.  Some of the kinetic energy also goes back up your leg and is lost as wear and tear on knee and hip joints.  When you land on the front of your foot though, there’s less noise, less ‘impact’, and the kinetic energy can be stored as potential energy – you land right, stretching the tendons and ligaments that are like springs and are designed to take that potential energy, instead of up your skeleton which just rattles when you flat foot. The energy of the impact becomes potential energy stored in those springs, which can then be released as more kinetic energy swinging your leg and moving you forward.

There’s an animation on this site that gives you some visual represention of the different running styles.  They are trying to sell you shoes of course, but the animation still gives you an idea of where the forces go and how they affect you, and they recommend that to learn the ideas you start off running barefoot.  They aren’t the only ones to suggest this, the idea that our shoes develop bad posture and movement habits.  The Tarahumara indians of Mexico are known for amazing stamina and decent speed running barefoot or with only a thin sandal (doesn’t affect the shape of the foot, just keeps out sharp stones and poisonous scorpions).  The Tarahumara are known to continue running into their 80s and 90s without the knees and hips and achilles and acl and so on that we are so prone to.  Pop-Sci talks some more about them and the idea that we are natural runners when we are barefoot, but our shoes change us.

So it appears that we are in fact born to run, but we put shoes on and learn otherwise, so we do need to be taught how to run properly, and unlearn our bad habits. Here’s 6 quick tips from boot camp, to keep in mind when you are running. Once we are conscious of how you run, and of the mistakes you have learned, then you can relearn to run the way you were born to.

I love that phones have cameras.  They may not take the greatest shots but they are always handy for something weird.

I mentioned an animation I was working on. It’s moving along well, I’m learning a lot – for example, it’s important to properly secure your set to the table if you don’t want random earthquakes in the scene. Lighting is also a killer, even though I’m inside with the blinds shut, scenes shot in daytime are much brighter than those at night, as I’m just relying on the flouro tubes in the playroom. If we decide to do more of these, I’ll have to get a couple of anglepoise lamps or something.

Hit a slight snag today, there’s a scene where a wizard casts a spell, and I decided to use another retro technique and rotoscope the magic bits. I’ve done rotoscoping before, using a piece of software called Cheap-o-Scope. This was for a school musical a couple of years ago, the director was after something Impressionist looking, so I filmed the ballerinas that would be on the stage and rotoscoped this :

Cheap-o-Scope a simple utility that converts Quicktime file into an Adobe Filmstrip file, or vice versa. You then open the Filmstrip file in Photoshop, and do your actual frame by frame editing/drawing/whatever in that. Save it in the same format, then Cheap-o-Scope converts it back to a Quicktime file which you can import into iMovie and edit, put sound in, and so on. In some ways it’s better than a full rotoscoping program, as you can use the full features of Photoshop to manipulate your frames, rather than being limited by what your rotoscope will do for you. It’s also free.

The downside is that it was a one man project, and Jeff Lamarche that wrote it has moved on to other projects, so when Quicktime 7 came out, Cheap-o-Scope stopped working. You can export to Filmstrip, but it barfs on reimporting, and the only other way to convert Filmstrip to video is with Adobe Premier, which I do not wish to pay for.

It’s not a big disaster, I can reshoot the scene and do the magic with stop motion, I just thought it would be cool to jazz it up. It would also be helpful for removing the highly visible fishing line in a couple of scenes.

So if anyone knows how to program for OSX, the source code for Cheap-o-Scope is here on the Wayback Machine and waiting for you to update it for Quicktime 7!

Your car is my airbag

About this time last year, the mighty HJ had to be let go. Too much rust, particularly in the chassis rails and such expensive places, not to mention odds and ends of mechanical work needing doing, adding up to $6k or more worth of work to end up with a car worth maybe $3k. It had only done 1,495,000 kilometres, so it was a shame we didn’t get better use out of it.

Anyway, that was a legend car, which has been replaced by an embarrassment of a 95 Lancer. The car is in good enough nick for a 14 year old car, runs fine, no rust, we trust our mechanic and bought it from his offsider so we knew what we were getting, it actually has more boot space than the HJ did (cos the HJ had a boot full of gas cylinder), and any number of good things to recommend it, except for the fact that it’s just a bit lame.

One thing it genuinely does have over the Old Holden is fuel efficiency. Last time I measured, I was getting 28L/100Km from the HJ on gas.  Yup, you read that right, that equates to 8 1/2 miles per gallon  US or 10.9 UK.  (Why are they different?  No idea.  Perhaps US miles are longer.)  Anyway, I guess it’s due to the big, old engine, and its less efficient running on gas etc. Plus, you know, you’re driving a beastie Kingswood (Premier technically) you aren’t gonna drive Miss Daisy.

The Lancer on the other hand, has a slightly smaller engine.  Slightly smaller than a milk bottle that is.  1.5l.  1500cc.  Smaller than a big motorbike.  91 cubic inches, compared to the Holden’s 202.  And it’s an auto, and it’s a carby model, no fuel injection, you can put your foot down all you want, there is no excitement to be had driving this car.  So to make it interesting, I set a fuel consumption challenge for myself.   Mon wants to have a go, she’ll probably kick my butt since she drives like an old lady, but the challenge in my mind isn’t to see what the car can do, but what I can do.  I don’t like to go slow, so it’s a mental game to remember to accelerate gently, ease into the lights so I don’t have to stop fully, etc, practicing moderation and self control.  I’m not hypermiling by any stretch, but it least it makes driving the thing a bit more interesting. And as we’ve seen before, the number one fuel saving idea is driving less aggressively.

So how am I going? Well a couple of weeks ago, I hit my record of 10.5 L/100Km (22 or 26mpg for US/UK), and I’ve been consistently at or below 11 for most of the time.  So I decided to reward myself by just driving however I want for one tank of petrol.  Zoom off the lights, overtake, drive however, etc etc.  Can you imagine how inefficient that must have been? What ludicrously high fuel usage did I have that week?

11.6

That’s right, 11.6L/100km, instead of the 10.5 I was getting when I was really trying.  OK so that’s around a 10% increase, not insignificant over a year and probably worth doing, but talk about a low ROI.  I feel like I’m working so hard to drive gently and that’s all it’s getting me? There’s a few possibilities of course.  One is that I didn’t drive as hard as I thought on the free tank.  Another is that I’m just not that good at driving gently when I do. The third is that the tiny engine enforces gentle driving anyway. So which is it?

Here’s the research.  The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (cos those things all make sense together…) has a searchable Fuel Consumption Database for older cars (86-03), so I could just punch the Lancer into that and see what it says.  And it says 8L/100km for city driving, so that would suggest PEBCASW, that the problem exists between chair and steering wheel (or more likely accelerator pedal).  I could make excuses about that being the rated usage when it was new, and it’s 14 years old, and such like, but what it probably means is that I need to try a heck of a lot harder to make a difference when I’m driving gently.

Or I could try some other fuel saving tips, like pumping the tyres a bit higher, driving under the speed limit, or pulling some unnecessary weight out of the car, like all the junk, the back seats, some of the panels, the speakers, the dash…

The cover of Spacebase 2000

When I was a teenager looking for new worlds to escape to, I found a book called Spacebase 2000. Written like a reference book (and I’m pretty sure I found it in the reference section of the Belconnen Library), it contained glossy full page prints of paintings of spaceships and space scenes, accompanied by detailed writeups and histories.  There were references to events, people and places encountered by the Terran Trade Authority, fleshing out the stories behind the ships shown in the artwork.

I loved this book and borrowed it regularly.  It tied in well with the fact that I was playing Elite obsessively around this time, I could imagine myself as a dodgy space trader in the backwaters of a galaxy where this book described mighty battles and heroic efforts being played out in other systems. We would talk about this book at school, design our own ships and stories around them.  We occasionally wondered what the game or series of books was that Spacebase 2000 referred to.

So warp ahead to 2009 :) Wandering the internets, I came across Concept Ships, a blog showcasing artwork of imagined spaceships and aircraft.  There’s a lot of work from deviantart people, as well as other amateur artists that post to ther forum and then get featured on the blog. There’s occasional special features, at the moment they have Russel Chong, who is a concept illustrator at Lucasfilm talking about the designs for the Clone Wars series.

Awesome!  This was just like Spacebase 2000, but without the stories.  What should have been apparent to us at the time was that Spacebase 2000 was actually a bunch of sci-fi novel cover art, with a fleshed out story to make it so much more than just an art book.  It may have said that in the foreword, who knows?  Either way, the Concept Ships site was like being a teenager reading that book again, a feast of futureal visions, but with a space for me to add my own backstories.  What’s it like piloting one of those?  Where’s that big launching ship going?  What is the purpose of that big red bit on that one?  Sort of thing.

Spacebase 2000 was part of a series of books by Stewart Cowley, released in the late 70s/early 80s. You can read more about them on this page about the Terran Trade Authority books, or on the Wikipedia entry for the TTA.

More art from Concept Ships, this by Andree Wallin

Water is still a big issue in Victoria, in spite of all the rain we seem to have had over the last month or so.  It’s quite amazing the amount of water people are apparently using.  F’rinstance, we have restrictions on usage, and you may have heard of the Vic government’s promotion encouraging us to limit our water usage to 155 litres per person per day.The state average was 165 in November.

Hmm now, let’s see, there are four people in our house, so that’s 620 litres per day that we have to get our household water usage down to. Let me check the last water bill and see how we’ve gone.  To be fair, I’m slack about fixing washers so some of the taps drip for a few weeks before we fix them.  And we have a small vege patch that we water from the hose on days we’re allowed, so that must use a bit.  And I’m finding it hard to be out of the shower before the little egg timer runs out, and the kids have baths instead of showers which uses more water. So it isn’t looking really good for our family as far as keeping down to 155/person/day, but lets have a look at the bill :

My water bill

Err ok, so 37  kilolitres used, and 17 November to 19 February inclusive is 94 days.  37000/94=393.6 litres per day (yes, I know that was written there).  Divided by 4 is 98.4 per person per day.  About 2/3 of the average.   Apparently we need to increase our water usage by 50% to reach the 155L target.  What are you people doing???

OK, likely answer is that most people are completely ignoring the water restrictions, watering four or five days a week, washing cars and paths with town water, filling pools and spas.  We’ll discuss them in a moment.  The other problem is people not living consciously.  By this I mean, just not thinking about what they do, and not seeing water as a precious and limited commodity.  The Dune series of novels should be compulsory reading for all Australians, with the way the desert dwelling Fremen look at every drop of water with a religious respect. Water is seen as belonging to the whole tribe, and anyone who wastes it is referred to as a ‘water thief’.  When in the desert, the Fremen wear stillsuits which reclaim any moisture that the body might lose, and when they die they aren’t buried or cremated, rather rendered down and their water “returned to the tribe”.

OK so we aren’t quite at that stage yet, but we could still learn a lot about the way we look at water. I sincerely hope that there are few people left who leave the tap running while they brush their teeth, but there are plenty of these kind of unconscious water-sins we still commit, and a couple of ways to address them. Tap washers dripping I already confessed to, that’s easy, just be less lazy and replace the washer.   Running the tap to hot and letting that run straight down the sink/shower is a gimme, fill the kettle or your filter jug if you have one, or even keep some other jug handy. If you don’t have a garden to water you can be at a loss for what to do with the bucket of water from running the shower.  You could try dumping that into the washing machine ready for the next load, or some people use it to flush the toilet (ie, just tip the bucket in instead of hitting flush).

One I see too often is a running tap to rinse the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Seriously, by the time you’ve done that you may as well wash them in running water and skip the dishwasher.  If you really must rinse, do it in a sink of water rather than running the tap, but I just scrape the chunks off and chuck ‘em in as is, between the speed of the water and the terrifying chemicals in your dishwasher detergent, they’ll get clean.  All it means is that you might need to empty the filter occasionally.

If you stop and think any time there’s some water involved, you’ll find other places where you are wasting it. Check your water bill and see how you are going.I believe the trick is changing your thinking, and instead of seeing water as a thing you pay for and deserve to have as much as you want, see it as a thing which is running out, which belongs not to you but to the ‘tribe’, and which you have a responsibility to everyone around you to conserve as carefully as possible.

Water Thief

Which brings us to those with a complete disregard for the water restrictions, and for the communal water supply.  The pool fillers and driveway hosers, grass waterers and car washers.  It’s not just about rules and laws,  it’s the complete disregard for using a reasonable share of something that belongs to all of us.  There’s a lot of feeling that if you ‘dob someone in’ for breaking water restrictions, that you’d be unAustralian, but what’s that mean?  If you’re going for cliches, being Australian is looking after your mates, taking care of others.   It’s unAustralian to miss your shout, or take the last sausage roll off the tray, so what do we do with those who treat us with disrespect in their water use?

You could do another thing Australians do, and take care of it.  You don’t want to dob someone in? Fair enough, talk to them yourself, remind them that you’d like them to leave enough water for your home brew kit.  If that doesn’t work, take off their hose connectors, write ‘water thief’ on their emerald lawn with Round-Up, and if it still doesn’t work…you might have to reclaim their water for the tribe….

This is a quick snippet of the animation I’ve been working on.  Connor’s been helping me which is fun.  This hasn’t had any cleanup done on it – particularly, I need to lighten it up a bit as we were working just with the fluoros in the playroom which seemed bright enough at the time but weren’t.  The dialogue will be rerecorded at some point, with the kids helping.  So you can see what kind of movie we’re making anyway :)