Colored Pencil

It's about that time in the list of my hobbies to do a rotation. Colored pencil hasn't really come back for me in about 10 years so I figured I'd put my Prismacolors to use and make sure I don't forget how to draw. I'm still sewing, but it's slow going when I am frantically finishing up a drawing for class all the time. Tomorrow will be Class 4 of 6.

I had good enough sense to do a quick sketch to see where I was at before the lessons started. Unfortunately I don't have any of my extensive work from high school. Most of it is hanging in my old room, but there is a lot of anime fanart stuffed into a closet somewhere in my parents' house.





This is Maija, one of our two kittens we adopted in July. When we got them they were incredibly sick and had to go through several rounds of antibiotics and eye cream. Not eye drops...eye cream. The pictures of them back then are kind of sad because you can see how Maija's eyes were affected by the illness. They are doing great now though, and doing cute (and not so cute...) kitten things. I'll save that for another post.



This fruit exercise was very interesting. Our teacher started off the class by explaining the concept of drawing an "envelope" to contain our subject matter and help us keep the objects with good dimensions. It's basically drawing a polygon around the major points of your composition, then gradually filling in circles or squares for objects and continuing to refine with your 4B pencil and magic rub eraser. This technique was really helpful for me because normally I just start drawing the details. However if you do that, and something is proportionally off, you can't go back and fix it. No matter how well shaded something is, if it looks off, it kills the image.



I am really happy with the way my nautilus turned out for this still life. It was extremely challenging, color-wise, to blend and gently layer the colors I had to get the colors I needed on the paper. I am sorely missing an assortment of beige pencils, and ended up not impressed by the conch. The cowrie shell was more fun, but somehow ended up looking like a rainbow shell from Super Mario. It took great mental effort to push harder with the pencils to get some color on the paper. I don't want to waste my pencils on drapes, but backgrounds are important too. I am terrible at fabric so that just means it's an area I really need to focus on improving.



I've just finished working on this still life for now. The bottle proportions were tough, but I finally got it and celebrated by spending two hours on the bottle's upper label. I also decided to bite the bullet and just get a 12 pack of the Prismacolor Art Stix (woodless colored pencils) to try out. The white was immensely useful when it came to the draping. Let's hope my professor thinks so as well.

If you're interested in seeing the progression of color, and the photographs they were based on, I've created a flickr set here.

New machines

I finally decided to just buy a sewing machine and serger instead of continuing to debate which models I should get for another two years. Here they are!



My first project on the new machines was to hem a pair of PJs I bought for M. I think they were made for a giant, I cut off 9 1/4" of extra fabric.



Originally I was going to try a blind hem, either with the serger or the sewing machine, but I wasn't exactly impressed by either (serger is in yellow thread, sewing machine in black thread). UPDATE (03-24-2010): I played with the sewing machine a little more, I think earlier I was feeding in too much of the fabric fold on the wrong side of the foot divider. I practiced on a scrap of fabric and then I ran the machine on a new pair of dress pants and I was quite pleased with the result.



I pressed the raw edge under so I wouldn't have to deal with pins on this slippery rayon.



I opted to do a running stitch instead, and since I don't have two spools of black I decided to just make two parallel lines.



Happy customer:

letter to Congressman Mack

Dear Congressman Mack:

I am writing you because of the recent survey mailing I received from you regarding health care reform. While I think surveys are an appropriate way to gauge the feeling of the population, I am continually disappointed by the way the surveys have leading questions. This will skew the results of the survey and render it effectively useless. You cannot call yourself a representative of our area if you only listen to the people whose views reinforce your own. You must take all the views that your constituents have into consideration when making decisions that affect each and every one of us.

While I understand your concerns with an increasingly larger role of government, and even agree in some circumstances, it is my firm belief that a country must care for its citizens. That is one of the hallmarks of a healthy society. If we had a government run health care system, you say that we would be giving up our care to a bureaucrat instead of our doctors. I think our current system already has bureaucrats with power over our doctors—they are called for-profit insurance agents, HMOs, and pharmaceutical companies. I would much rather our government, who is democratically elected in the interest of representing their constituents’ interests, be involved in my health care than a person who has no such ties to us and instead is out to make as much money as possible to please stakeholders.

Regards,

ReneVague3

More rails bugs!

Seems like the only time I post is to link to yet another rails problem. Ok so this time, if you have a table with an unconventional primary key, you cannot use .create to make a new object.

http://roninonrails.blogspot.com/2008/06/using-non-standard-primary-keys-with.html

I've resorted to the .new/.save solution, which works.

Fleamasters

I stumbled across an article on weather.com that mentioned attractions in south west Florida and the Fleamasters Fleamarket was listed as one of the big tourist draws. I've never heard of it, but I was sold when I read "fresh produce year-round"--the Cape Coral Farmer's Market is closed for the summer and I was so sad at the thought of not being able to buy delicious peaches and mangoes. Publix is not an option. I love that store but they have the WORST peaches. I am continually disappointed when I buy peaches from them and bite into a hard, mealy, dry, tasteless peach.

When I tried the peach I'd bought from the Farmer's Market it was so juicy I ran back to the sink with sweet peach juice dripping down all over my chin and fingers. It was how I remembered peaches tasting when my family would drive through Georgia and North Carolina on vacation.

I drove towards the fleamarket and saw a gigantic sign by Ortiz avenue advertising a "huge fleamarket" so I thought that was it and turned north. What I found was a small hispanic fleamarket...kind of scary. But excellent selection of hispanic favored produce--peppers, plantains, tomatillos, and the like. I might go back there if I decide I want to make enchiladas verdes soon. I got back in my car and left, determined to get to the *really* huge covered fleamarket.

I found it, parked, and was very excited to see a produce stand with big beautiful displays of peaches, strawberries, grapes, pears, apples, mangoes, corn, zucchini, crookneck squash, peppers, tomatoes, asparagus, watermelon, cantaloupe, butternut squash, bananas, lemons, limes...I haven't tried the peaches yet since they were not quite ready, but if they are anything like the strawberries then they too will be most excellent. Max claims they are the best he's ever had--even better than the ones we bought from Plant City during the Strawberry Festival!

The fleamarket itself is pretty big. It took me two hours to walk through every colored aisle, and some of the rows. Large blocks of vendors are missing in places since it is no longer "season". The middle aisle is pretty much the Junk Food aisle and you can buy funnel cake, Italian icies, sausage, gyros, chilli dogs, fries, homemade potato chips, pretzels, etc. But I did see a place selling salad! A Puerto Rican stall was selling beef  "empanadillas" (which to me just looked like giant empanadas) so I bought two of them. They are probably entirely made of trans fat, but oh well. I didn't see the giant tub of Country Crock on the counter until it was too late.

There were at least 3 or 4 Lucky Bamboo/Money Tree sellers. I bought a replacement for the bamboo cluster I had for just $8. The same guy also had a dollar-store type deal so I picked up a bamboo cutting board for $4. A lady selling gorgeous party dresses caught my eye and a pretty pink shirt from her set me back $17.

Max had asked me to find a black leather phone case that closes magnetically, and of course they had 3 stands selling them so I picked one up for him for $4. I tried looking for a faceplate for my new Samsung Impression but I guess it is a little too new since none of the stalls had anything for me.

I loaded up with tons of produce from a very nice elderly man on the way out. Limes: 5 for $1. I put everything in my cooler and went back to the SECOND building which had larger items--mattresses, appliances, even cars. There were several nurseries represented so I made a note of the bromeliad/orchid lady and was very good, I didn't buy any more plants. But I probably will go back, she had such a diverse selection.

Now that I'm back and cooled off (it's not air conditioned), we are going to grill some chicken along with the fresh corn, zucchini, and squash I bought. Should be tasty.

*& vs *

I was looking at some old C++ code today and found that I was passing a pointer (*) to a function that was accepting it as *& but I didn't remember how or why I did it that way. The whole idea of passing a pointer to a function accepting a * was so that you could change the value of what it pointed to and have it "stick" when you got back to your main.

A quick note: a pointer is a special type of variable that points to an address instead of a regular value.

loopy is a regular variable that points to a value, in this case we set it to 3:

    loopy = 3;

pointerLoopy is a pointer, so it needs to be set to an address. In order to get the address of loopy we use the & operator:

    pointerLoopy = &loopy;

You can't just set a pointer to a regular variable because the types don't match. Trying

    int* pointyLoopy = loopy;

Will get you

    error: invalid conversion from ‘int’ to ‘int*’

I know this sounds confusing so:

//allows you to change the value the pointer points to
//but NOT the pointer itself
//you can't make it point somewhere else
void passerP(int* pointyLoopy)
{
    //dereference the pointer to change the value of loopy
    *pointyLoopy = 5;
    printf("Inside passerP: loopy = %i\n", *pointyLoopy);

    int loopier = 2;
    pointyLoopy = &loopier;
    printf("Inside passerP: pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);
}


//allows you to change what the POINTER is
// and the value it points to
void passerPR(int*& pointyLoopy)
{
    *pointyLoopy = 7;
    printf("Inside passerPR: loopy = %i\n", *pointyLoopy);

    int loopier = 4;
    pointyLoopy = &loopier;
    printf("Inside passerPR: pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);
}

int main (int argc, char const *argv[])
{
    int loopy = 3;
    int* pointyLoopy = &loopy;

    printf("\nloopy = %i\n", loopy);
    printf("pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);
    passerP(pointyLoopy);
    printf("loopy = %i\n", loopy);
    printf("pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);

    printf("\nloopy = %i\n", loopy);
    printf("pointyLoopy = %i\n", pointyLoopy);
    passerPR(pointyLoopy);
    printf("loopy = %i\n", loopy);
    printf("pointyLoopy = %i\n\n", pointyLoopy);
    return 0;
}

This code prints out:

loopy = 3
pointyLoopy = -1073743396
Inside passerP: loopy = 5
Inside passerP: pointyLoopy = -1073743444
loopy = 5
pointyLoopy = -1073743396

loopy = 5
pointyLoopy = -1073743396
Inside passerPR: loopy = 7
Inside passerPR: pointyLoopy = -1073743444
loopy = 7
pointyLoopy = -1073743444

Notice that for the first function, the value of loopy changes, but the address that pointyLoopy pointed to was lost--it stayed as -1073743396 regardless of what we did inside the function passerP. In the second, the value of loopy changes AND the address that pointyLoopy pointed to changed from -1073743396 to -1073743444.

This is useful if you are passing around a pointer that you needed to delete in a function. If you didn't use *& the delete would not stick and the pointer would instead revert to whatever the calling function thought the value was....thus it never really was deleted and you have a memory leak.

Another use would be if you are creating a pointer = NULL in main, and wanted to load it up with something in the function, then use that value in main later on.

However, if you only want to change the value that the pointer points to (e.g. loopy) then you can use * instead of *&.

evil snooze

Last night my phone was nearly dead so I hooked it up to the wall to charge, away from the bed. When the alarm went off this morning I fought the sheets to escape the bed, flopped onto the floor, crawled to cell phone and accidentally shut OFF the alarm without hitting snooze. Because I knew the snooze would not come back on and save me if I fell asleep again, I couldn't fall back asleep so I decided to just get ready. Even if I was tired, there was no way it could possibly be worse than yesterday.

Yesterday morning was terrible. It was my usual "OMG alarm!", snooze, fall asleep, "OMG alarm!" but this time with twitches near convulsions (because I'd already started to dream), simultaneously scaring us both awake, briefly. When I finally did get up 20 minutes later, I was exhausted, and useless for anything the entire day.

With both situations fresh in my mind, I realized I may have discovered the source of my sleeping problems. I don't have any trouble getting or staying asleep, mind you, since I inherited Dad's ability to fall asleep quickly (much to Max's chagrin). I was annoyed, however, that no matter how much I seemed to sleep I was still just as exhausted as my insomniac coworkers. I was angry that I spent so much time in bed with nothing to show for it. Eight or nine hours ought to be enough for anybody. And it is, as long as you don't hit snooze. I figured that the constant wake-sleep was exhausting and set out to look for evidence. I came across this article where a commenter wrote:

Do you know why a snooze button is “trouble”? It is because the way our mind and body works, we are in a hypnotic type state when we first awaken. If you fall back into a sleep state you will actually fall deeper than when you first awakened. Do that a few times, and that is why it gets more and more difficult to get up, the alarm gets reset, and all sorts of contortions have to be done to ultimately get you up. You may think you are helping yourself by “indulging” but it only makes it more difficult. You’ll actually do better for yourself, and feel more awake (as difficult as it may seem), if you get up the first time you hear that sound beckoning you to awaken.

I rest my case. I promise to try to stop using it.