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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

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 | Comments Off

Overcoming Fear and Seeing the True Universe for the Very the First Time.

December 18th, 2009 Thomasso

It was sixteen weeks ago that I took up the challenge of doing a hard-based third year science course, the last of my science requirement in my degree program, and back then I had no idea what I was getting myself into when I embarked on Astro Physics. The fourteen week long course took me on some very wild rides as I fumbled with my scientific calculator, and gawked at the streams of formulas with enough Greek letters to make a bowl of soup with, and it made me ponder the true extent of our universe.

Last night I wrote my final for that class. At the end of the 3 hour exam, which I managed to complete before the required time period was up, I got my list of overall marks from the professor. I was elated with joy when she said that my final mark may hinged between a B or an A, depending on the outcome of my final exam. (I was happy that it was not the difference between a C or a B.) I remembered how hard the mid-term was. I squeaked in a borderline B+/A- in the mid-term, after putting a lot of hours repetitiously memorising the 150 pages of texts for that exam. The big blow to the chest was that the final exam was accumulative, meaning that it covered everything from day one till the final moment of the last class. I had to work harder for it!

I remember sitting in the class, dumbfounded, when we were given our Math labs. Physics has a dual whammy with it, in that it deals with theory and Math all in one, and they are inter twined. You can not happily wonder through the course with just the theory and not take in any of the Math components–you would never be able to answer any of the questions, or get full marks for them. So seeing numbers, huge numbers, written in scientific notation like this, scared the pants off me. But once I figured out to enter them into the calculator, and properly understand them, then the wheels started to turn for me.

I was hard on myself. I only saw the people in the class that were getting all of the questions. I did not see that the class mean was only 67 percent, or that a quarter of the class was very close to fail mark of 60 percent, depending on what benchmark you use from what degree program you are in. I made sure that I allowed myself several hours per week going over the notes, textbook and labs.  Disappointment came from the labs becuase of the level of Math that was involved. One lab, I got 7 out of 30 marks becuase of not moving the decimal point far enough to the right when converting measurements when calculating Mass into Solar Units. In another lab I was given only fifty percent becuase my line on the graph was “sketched in” as opposed to a nice thin line drawn in. My graph making skills lacked in the Physics department. On top of that, I saw one student hand in a computer generated graph, and the prof accepted it–”hey I could have done that!”

Oh, I guess I should explain what the four numbers mean eh? Well, the first two are part of the world of Physics known as Physical Constants, the first is the speed of light measured in metres per second, and the next one is the mass, in kilograms, of a electron. The next two are are Astronomical Constants, AU, or Astronomical Unit which equals the distance form the Earth to the Sun in kilometres, and last one is the mass of the Earth in kilograms.

Posted in Astronomy, Criminology, Events, Homework and deadlines, Photographs, University classes | Comments Off