Happy Birthday Mom, and Valentine’s Day

February 14th, 2010 Thomasso

Yes, I know, this is a cheap way of doing it this year. But Mom, I have just being so busy to get out and send you off a proper birthday card. I know you sometimes feel that saying it public, like this, makes you uneasy, but at least this way I know will find it. So happy birthday Mom, and may this one be the best ever.

Also, today is Valentine’s Day, a day when you are supposed to give your “sweetheart” a gift of something that somehow conveys a romantic feeling to it. Because I have no “special” sweetheart in my life at the moment, I will dedicated part of this post to all those sweethearts who do not have that special someone in their life, and send out a blanket, virtual, Valentine’s day card to you all.

Maybe this will put a smile on someone’s face.  À bientôt!

[ADDED] I remember a long time ago when me and my father had a very deep discussion about the symbolism of the Valentine’s heart and the arrow through it, it left me wondering why we give cards to everyone when I was in grade school, and should it be a good idea if it is just a repetitious commercialised act we do today? He came up with some very interesting ideas of what could be alternative meanings to it, but when you start to add critical thinking to these ideas they start to loose their fun very quickly. Of course symbolism is the mainstay of why we use such things as cards and gifts on various days throughout the calendar like Valentine’s Day, but do we really know where they started from?

We know that the arrows come from the Greek myth Cupid, whose arrows strike those who have fallen in love. When the arrow hits you, you become transformed and fall love with whomever is near you, or the first person you see. I suspect that the kiss comes from this too, as the shape of the lips, in particular the top outer lip becuase it is shaped like a ancient bow from which you would draw an arrow from.

The heart shape we see today is where my Dad had came up with the weirdest part of this idea. We know that the human heart is not shaped like a Valentine’s heart, but rather like a potato or pear, and is not perfectly symmetrical like the drawings we see. Instead, what we draw today as the “heart” could very well be a symbolic representation of a woman’s buttock. Oh, it gets weirder yet: the arrow is like a pin, or mark that indicates that the buttock has being taken, or the sender wishes to take it. Tthe arrow could very well be a symbol of the penis, and putting it through the heart could be the romantic act in its purest form.

Although this conversation took place over twenty years ago, it still makes me wonder if it has any validity to it. I know that all societies have buried in their cultures dual meanings to their beliefs that we see today. All religions have their origins from older forms of cultural symbolisms that have evolved into what we see today. I never bothered to go out and research this, but perhaps I should? I would be interested in what other ideas there are that have laid claim to this symbol of love?

Posted in Birthday, Events, General, Photographs | No Comments »

Is this Incredible Weather or What?

February 6th, 2010 Thomasso

For the last five weeks, I must admit, I was paranoid about having to go through another winter like the one we had last year in the Fraser Valley. For the first couple of week in December it looked as if we were going to endure another super cold one, but as luck would have it, we are getting California like weather in the middle of winter for 2010. Is this Incredible Weather or What?

I know that we should be worried about having such wonderful weather in a place like Canada this time of year because it is unnatural, and nature has a way of turning such a nice thing into a huge nuisance later on down the road. I am thinking of the mosquito problems we have here along the Fraser River. With every warm winter, there follows a wet spring, and mosquitoes love water to lay their eggs in. There are other bugs too that are loving this weather, take the Roach for example. Yes Fort Langley has Roaches–although some people I know will not admit it and call them something else, like a Termites. I saw one zipping out of the storm grate alone Glover Road yesterday when I was walking back home. That congered up bad memories from when I lived in Toronto, Ontario. Toronto is a place that has a huge roach problem. Also there is the infamous Pine Beetle that has destroyed a large portion of our Pine forests in BC–can  we say “Global Warming.”

Not having to deal with shovelling, huge heating expenses and the inconvenience of driving on snow and ice, I can enjoy this weather in the short term. I say keep it coming! I love thisI In fact, I am asking myself if I should even bother heading to Mexico, in stead, stay here where it is warm?

Posted in Bitching about weather, General, Humour, Photographs | No Comments »

Woo-Hoo, First Post for 2010 & Drawing Cherries With InkScape!

January 1st, 2010 Thomasso

Now, …what should I type? Awh, later.

OK, I am back. Today I am going to talk about InkScape, becuase I am getting a lot of emails from my friends about some of the images I have being posting on my blog. First of all, if you are the unfortunate who is running Window$, and  feel for you, you are still in luck becuase InkScape does run on it, but I have noticed that it is not completely stable in my experiences on the OS. With that out of the way, Vector image programs are completely different from those programs that manipulate images. InkScape does work with photographs, but not in the same way that programs like the GIMP do.

Think of Vector images as drawing with Math, in other words, every shape or element of the image you create is just a bunch of numbers that represents what you are seeing. This means two things. First, you can increase, or decrease the size of the image without compromising any loss of detail. Second, you must render the finished product into a image so that your audience can see your lovely creation.

I have created these cherries.

Each cherry has six elements, or components in it. The two basic shapes, or primitives, are a circle and a rectangle. The stems are made of two rectangles, twisted to curve into the shape and each shape also is shaded with a different colour, darker colour on the bottom, and the lighter on the top layer. The cherry is just one big circle with red colour fill, and three smaller circles, with different sizes, each with lighter colours, with the effects of transparency and blur added to give the reflective look from the light in the virtual room the cherries are in.

If you want to see the SVG file for yourself, click here, “Cherries01.svg” to down load it, and then run it with InkScape. Also note that this was created on  version 0.47 at the time of this writing. Enjoy the file.

Posted in Art, Events, General, Humour, Linux, Photographs, Software | 2 Comments »

Happy New Year! Another Has Come and Gone!

December 31st, 2009 Thomasso

Well, I can’t really say that 2009 was one my best years. In fact, I would put this year close to the lower end of the average scale. I am however, looking forward to this new year for a couple of reasons. One, I will graduate with my BA, and hopefully an honours degree attached to it. Two, I may relocate and find a more permanent home, but still in the Lower Mainland/Fraser Valley. Three, more income.

I hate looking back over the last twelve months during new years becuase it doesn’t make sense to me to do that. I mean why? What is so different from this month to the next, or this year to the next becuase looking back like this sort of puts a faults sense of preceptive on it. I like to look at things by the season. For example, I like to compare summers and winters to each other. I also like it when I can say that last winter was brutal compared to the one before it. It is ridiculous to say that the last major snowstorm last year, but really it was the year before becuase winter started in 2008, December 21, but we think the storm was in 2009–wrong!

But who am I to kid around. It is a really good excuse to have a long weekend! I love long weekends. Who doesn’t love them?

So here we are, another long weekend, another year end, and tomorrow when I wake up, another year to remeber everytime when I write the date on my invoives.

Posted in Diatribe, Events, General, Humour, Photographs | No Comments »

Now We Are Getting A Little Nippy Out

December 26th, 2009 Thomasso

OK, maybe not as cold as what those poor saps in Alberta are getting, but for us “less seasoned” people, any time the mercury sinks below the freezing mark, we whine about it. So I am throwing this lovely photo I took today to mark the kind of day it was – nice and sunny with a touch of frost. You can not ask for a better winter’s day than this, eh?

The weird thing about the weather today has being how close it reaches the two to three degree Celsius mark, then drops to minus two or three, but never a huge difference.

Book Review – The Gift I read! Two Thumbs Up!

A very good friend of mine, Diane from DianeOutLoud.ca, gave me a book for the holidays called, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…, Understanding Philosophy through Jokes.  In my undergraduate days, though technically I am still one today, I had done five Philosophy classes in the past. So reading this book was a very good refresher. But the book’s best quality are the hundreds of jokes that the authors tell to illustrate their point to reinforce the point of Philosophy in all of its complexities.

In my first year university, my very first Philosophy class, I had the privilege of being taught by one my favourite professors, Dr. Wayne Fenske, who is a seasoned veteran in the art of Philosophy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia. He used his own version of humour and satire for getting his point across about all aspects of Philosophy, and reading this book brought back lots of very good memories of those first classes. There is no doubt a point in which you need a little joke to get you through a day when teaching some very heavy mental subject material like Ethics and Logic.

Perhaps the best moment I had was when Dr. Fenske was lecturing on Metaphilosophy, and he used his Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation to make the point that asks “are we the same person from one moment of time to the next.” I still snicker out loud when I think of that day. He did the Arnold routine for twenty minutes, answering all the questions with the thick Austrian ascent, and calling anyone who did not get it, a “little girly man.” Sometimes he drives the point home by throwing a piece of chock at the back of the classroom to wake everyone up. Some would call the chock throwing a violent act, but he does use it as a means to teach his point to the class. However, when I looked him up on “Rate Your Professor,” he does have some bad reviews, which I thought were a little unfair, but then I realised that the complainers were the ones failing his course in the first place.

I thank you Diane for the lovely gift. I read it on Christmas day, and it was a good read becuase it made me laugh over and over and over. It brought back a lot of fond memories too, and I got to refamiliarize myself on some of my past classes of Philosophy too!

Posted in Criminology, Diatribe, General, Humour, Photographs, University classes | 1 Comment »

It is Those Little Mistakes That Look So Cool

December 25th, 2009 Thomasso

It is those little mistakes that look so cool becuase they look so neat, as they catch my eye in the file browser. I was digging through my archive files preparing for an upgrade when I stumbled upon a whole bunch of files that were about to be deleted from off of my hard drive. Most of them were old documents from classes gone by; stuff like rough drafts and working text files from project, assignments and research data from as far back as four years ago that are of no use to me any more. Most of the images were not marked, probably from being transferred from defunct/expired Microsoft programs that have long since outlive their usefulness, to shots from the old digital camera that worked only half the time. It was fun to travel down memory lane–but the files had to go as they took up a lot of space.

Both of these images are very recent, about a couple of weeks ago. I never really had the time to go through the whole batch, but these two looked interesting, so I kept them. The first one is from a train accident where a vehicle tried to cross over the tracks during the morning rush-hour, tying to beat the train before it blocks the road for twenty minutes. The driver was not hurt, but his pick-up truck was damaged badly.

I like the dark blue effect from the rain, and how the shutter speed on the camera was too slow for the dim light that was available for the camera settings I had. I was stopped on the road waiting for the police to move the vehicle from off the road when I took this. I had front row seats for this one.

This second image was a failed attempt at creating a 3 dimensional box using the sketching tool on a program called InkScape. I’ve talked about this program a couple of days ago here on the blog. It did not pass my approval, but I some how managed to keep it, probably becuase I invested so much time into it.

So we are just 4 days into the winter season and it is still looking like fall outside. I phoned my baby sister who lives up around Prince Rupert, and she told me that they are getting plus 15C weather with high clouds and some sunny periods! Hey, that is my weather they are getting! I want it back. Lucky people. Perhaps we will get our turn at the weather system that is brining them that unseasonally warm temperatures.

Wow, it is only Friday! Woo-Hoo! I love long weekends.

Posted in Diatribe, Family, General, Photographs | No Comments »

All Through The House, It’s So Cold

December 24th, 2009 Thomasso

Yikes, could it snow tomorrow?

This is great, two long weekends in a row! Nice.

Happy Holidays Everyone!

Posted in Events, General, Holiday, Photographs | 2 Comments »

OK, One More Day Till the First of Two Long Weekends

December 23rd, 2009 Thomasso

Oh yes! I can hardly wait. Another long weekend is just hours away. We are now into winter, my marks are starting come in from my profs, and things are looking good for the last eight days of 2009.

I got the first mark back from my fall classes on Monday. I was hoping that I would have them all by now, but I know one prof received the majority of all our course work just two weeks until the end of the semester, so I think he is still up to his neck in papers to mark. I am really hoping to have all of them by tomorrow.

My first mark is an Astrophysics course, and I am proud to say that I beat my expectations and received a mark of “A-”! This means that I am hovering around 75 to 80 percent range which is 10 percent higher than my pre-expectation was in the course. This also increased my GPA by 6/100 of a point, just 4/100 of a point form hitting honers material!  I need a GPA of 3.5 to make the honours roll.

I have being heavily focusing on my work. I have logged in extra hours over the last two weeks trying to get place set-up for the transition into the new system that we have coming up. I am really excited about the new changes, and more so becuase I get to spearhead them. I guess change is good when you have a stake in it.

So, one more work day left, then three days of solitude. I love solitude right now. Solitude is good, wonderful, nice. I am oh so looking forward to it.

Solitude.

Posted in Criminology, Diatribe, General, Photographs, University classes | No Comments »

A Friend in Need is a Friend indeed, Even in Open Source

December 20th, 2009 Thomasso

There is nothing more enjoyable than watching someone’s face light up as they are learning something, or experiencing something new for the very first time that is positive and meaningful. Take for example learning a new program or method of doing a particular task that they never knew existed before, and it cuts down a hour long job down to but a couple of seconds. Welcome to the world of vector graphics, and the wonderful free open source program called Inkscape.

Sure, I’ve talked about it here several times before, but today a good friend of mine had his first experience with it, so this marks sort of a milestone in his development of working in the free world, and a opportunity to show it off again here in the blog. Inkscape is a vector graphics program that creates a wide verity of applications that are very easy to use and work with. Heck, my friend’s artistic cravings started racing as soon as I did the first demo with it, so it proves that this powerful, yet versatile little program is the “cat’s meow”! Plus, for open source software, it has very exceptional documentation too!

My friend was trying to develop a logo for his business. He knew what he wanted, but was unable to lay it out on the monitor and transform it into a image to be printed onto a piece of paper for his business cards. He tried using some fonts, called Ding-bats, but these were very limited to work with, and tweaking them up to what he wanted was next to impossible. But he tried, and he was getting very frustrated with the limited tools he had to work with.

Along comes good old Thomasso for a visit for Root Beer and cookies, and to do some routine computer service work on his machines. I suggested that he try a vector graphic,  i.e, Inkscape, instead of messing around with images and fonts, when he showed me his endeavours, and at least this way he could produce a first rate image that would be professional looking.

This took me five minutes to sketch up on my machine here at home.

I bet he is pounding away on his computer as we speak, clicking his heart away creating images for his little business, trying to come up with something like this. All this while he should be spending time with his daughter who is having her birthday today as well. His daughter is having her twentieth birthday, so she can tune him up if he spends too much time on the computer rather than eating birthday cake. heh heh heh.

What does this logo mean? It is supposed to represent the two seasons that his business works in. He is a heating and air conditioning specialist. So hot and cold are his speciality–broken furnace–he’s your man. I wish I could advertise, but I have nothing to give out becuase his business is brand new and is not officially up and running yet?

Posted in General, Photographs | 2 Comments »

To Cast the Net Beyond the Fringe and Say the Hell With it!

December 19th, 2009 Thomasso

I got mad at my ISP last night. Every time I tried to upload a movie file to my website, it either timed out, or it took two hours to go through the upload process. I gave up. I heard that the University Library was open until 10:30pm week days, and 10:00pm during the weekends, so I hopped in the truck and drove to the Surrey campus. The Langley campus was closed.

In the mean time I was having troubles with some other web sites also – so naturally I assumed that it was the fault of my ISP. When I tried to download a web page, it would time-out. It was not a good night to go surfing on the net.

When I got to the University Library, the first thing I did was fired up my lap top and connected through Wi-Fi. Once connected, things seemed a little faster, but when I tried to connect to my web site, the same things happened–hardly any connectivity. This told me that it was not my IPS, but my web provider!

Some other students in the computer lab old me that most of the kids are off from school as of Friday, and that it might be possible that most of them are on-line textting each other, clogging up the net. I thought about that, and figured that this might be the cause. The only thing that didn’t add up was I only had a few web sites that I went to which were slow or not working, so I doubted that it could be the on-line kids? I managed to up load everything I needed to, and then I went home.

This morning I checked to see if the connection rate was still slow, or shut down, and when I logged on, there was a notice posted on the server page. It said that they had service interruptions over the last 24 hours, and that now every was back to normal. I then went to the server’s blog and read that they had some vandalism on their server-farm, and that someone tried to take some equipment. They said that their local law enforcement officials caught the person and they noted that none of the equipment was taken. Cost in damages, however, was about $5,000.00 US.

I started thinking about this today, about how fragile our network really is. I remembered in my class on terrorism from last summer, studying about how important our information network is in today’s world, and asking the question would we be crippled from having no network? Although it would not indirectly harm us if the entire Intranet collapsed becuase of terrorists, but it would certainly hurt us over a longer period. By collapse, I mean no web browsing, email and VIOP, possibly cell-phone and land-line phone service too. I know most Banking and some forms of commerce would stop, but most businesses would manage to keep on operating.

On a humorous note, I wondered how many people would go through Intranet withdraw, if the idea of Internet Addiction really exists? Would I be one of those people? After all, I do spend a hideous amount of time sitting in front my keyboard and monitor, and hlaf that time connected to the internet. I treat emails like they were phone calls for goodness sakes. Does this mean I’m sick–I have an addiction that affects my social life, if their is such a thing as a social life?

Nope-things are all good. I have network connection and life goes on. My ISP are doing their job and I can sympathise with my web provider about their misfortune. Once again I am happy.

Posted in Blog Problems, General, Humour, Photographs, Social Justice | No Comments »