I've written off the possibility of doing anything useful this afternoon. I've been 100% on this one project that was due Thursday and so, since everyone was strictly ordered to get out my grille this week, I have no other work lined up. The server was down all Wednesday, so the sysadmin moved the site over to another host, which in turn went down all Thursday morning. This is the project which had to be done using a PHP/Linux solution rather than the standard homebrew .net thing they usually use, due to the specifications of the client's sysadmin. They chose Drupal, which strikes terror into the hearts of men much braver than I, and the whole project turned into six weeks of trying to get it to not suck so hard. This is the same sysadmin who, at 3pm today, told us he was quitting effective next Friday.

When the going gets tough, the tough get naked. But since I'm a digital person I'll just link you to this video of the Austrian rugby team instead. They had much larger problems than I, having just found themselves on the spiky end of a 48-point shutout by Lithuania. So here they are in Vilnius city center:

[flv]0508/AustrianRugby0516.flv[/flv]

(e:chico,44363) contends that the TiTS lineup sucks this year, so I guess I won't feel bad about not wanting to stuff myself into Lafayette Sq with a hojillion other people. Indigenous, the opener on 4 Sept, is an exceptional blues band, so give them a listen [46.9MB, AAC]. We once roadtripped to Erie PA to see them play at some crappy dive bar, and it was well worth the drive.

Here's another math design I did a little while ago in Photoshop, just a real classy muted houndstooth. It blew my mind when I discovered that houndstooth wasn't a doodle, but rather a plaid made up of diagonal stripes that coincidentally made a doodle at the intersections [which is also why it's slightly asymmetric]. Stare into the plaid...



This is my current desktop pattern. Not because I especially like the pattern, but because I hate desktop patterns and this one's easier to ignore than it is to pay attention to. I first tried the traditional black & white houndstooth for about four seconds before my eyeballs popped out of my head.

- Z

My job is programming. My hobby is also programming. This means that my hobby really isn't much of an escape. I also enjoy creating art, but my capabilities at illustration are uniquely terrible. [When trying to explain a ratchet-type jar opener of my mother's I ended up with a drawing of mating brontosaurs.] So lately I've been unwinding by creating [bad] mathematical illustrations in Illustrator. Usually I'll spend a couple hours working on an illustration and, when I see how it's going to turn out, not-save the file, because who cares? But my latest invention deserves more. It deserves to be on the Internet.

I decided to use my powers for evil this time. I have scientifically produced the ugliest web page backgrounds possible. And then I created an animated one, which is just totally unnecessary. Now that I've done it, I think the only place it would belong is MySpace.



CSS:
background: #00f url('f00.png') repeat-x;

Math:
Each image is a gradient from one fully-saturated 'web-safe' color to another fully-saturated 'web-safe' color, 120 degrees clockwise around the color wheel [ie, rotate the RGB hex digits to the left]. It is represented with a 0.72lpi halftone screen [ie, each dot area is 100px across]. For each image, there is also a third complimentary color 120 degrees counterclockwise from the primary color [ie, rotate the RGB hex digits to the right], which can be used in the foreground design. The animated version starts at red/blue and proceeds counterclockwise around the color wheel. They are intended to be tiled horizontally, and take up 600px of vertical space.

- Z

next episode: gaydar, which was really sort of a rubbish post about finding gay bars with extraordinary accuracy but not being able to realize it despite the leopard print wallpaper and portraits of drag queens on the walls
and after that: getting drunk with a Scotsman who was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party of England, and who also worked on the ill-fated Kerry campaign but was somewhat apologetic about it, who was really quite fascinating but you sort of had to be there.

- Z

My extremely short attention span had long since turned away from splashing around in the sewers (e:zobar,44012). Damn you, Internet!!

I read your message about Scajaquada Creek and wanted to send a quick message. My husband and I explored a good 1.5 miles through the tunnel today. It is pretty interesting in there. My email is [removed] if you are interested in talking about our adventure.

Oh weird. Did you get pictures? Which side did you enter from? And how deep is the water in the tunnel? [If I go, do I wear hip-waders or shit-kickers?]

I haven't gotten out there yet but my curiosity is weirdly piqued. I'm amazed at how little information is available about the creek, especially considering its location, the huge scope of the tunnel project, and that the whole thing is just a disaster of environmental management.

We actually do a sport called geocaching and we placed a cache in the tunnel. We went in through Forest Lawn. On Friday we hiked about 1 mile and then went back Sunday and went about 1.5 miles.

When first heading out Friday we assumed rubber boats that went to about our knees would be good. We were wrong and I got soaked. Basically when first entering the tunnel, it is mostly shallow...ankle deep. Back in about 2 or 3 hundred feet is a big grate that lloks like it used to be used to filter out large objects. You have to walk around that and right after that the water gets up to knee deep. We wanted to explore so badly that we ran back out and got hip waders. The water only satsy knee deep for about 50 or 60 feet and then from there on out it is 1/2 inch deep to ankle deep at most.

There are several off shoots of drainage tunnels and easily hours of exploration. The smell is manageable and really the water doesn't seem all that bad. I loved it. There are a few man-holes that allow some light, but for the most part it is really dark. My pictures are far from good. I can send you a few when I get home from work.

Biggest thing, obviously don't go alone. It is a little slippery and there are a few places where you could trip and really get hurt. Anything else I can answer let me know.

If you do go and want any company, let me know. If you go in about a mile, you'll find our geocache out in the open.

Huh, thanks for the info. If I get together a spelunking expedition I'll keep you posted.

Some more scraps of information that I've collected: the tunnel used to be an outlet for Buffalo and Cheektowaga storm drains; Buffalo has since diverted them but Cheektowaga hasn't. And as I was driving down the street one day it occurred to me that when the creek crosses Main St, it flows under the street and over the subway. Krazy.

- Z

I am once again sitting in my hotel room and writing on the interblogs while I wait for (e:dragonlady7) to get back from practice with the London Rollergirls. I've just been on a very, very long walk on my own so I'm enjoying some tea and Jaffa cakes while my feet go on strike for a little bit.

[Regent's Park, by the way, is enormous. It is so large that if Regent's Park were a meatball, Queen Mary's Garden would be a complete hard-boiled-egg park inside of it, an entire snack in its own right but in this case used merely as a filling. ]

London is a very expensive place, so we are staying at a sort-of discount hotel. It's nothing as terrible as the Blue Dolphin - the room is clean, the proprietors are friendly, and we have our own bathroom. They're not charging L150/night largely due to our location [a half-mile from the tube], the size of our room [large enough to fit a queen-size bed with enough room left over for a teapot], and the fact that our gigantic ground-floor window brings us all the light and traffic noise of midday conveniently throughout the night. Still, it's much better than it could be, and far better than I was expecting.

Our first night we got in at 12:30, stinking like travel, only to discover we'd been shorted some [ok, all] towels. B used her t-shirt; I used the bathmat. The next morning, there was some discussion: does L70 a night even get us towels?

And then there was the slight problem that B broke our bed doing nothing acrobatic I promise. There is a little ledge that runs around the inside of the bed frame, which holds up a piece of plywood, which holds up the mattress [which, for all intents and purposes, is yet another piece of plywood]. The ledge at the foot of the bed broke off, so that if you sat at the foot and put just the right amount of weight in just the right place, the head of the mattress would flip up [I told you it was firm].

Which brings us to the proprietors. They remind me in many ways of a few Upstanding Businessmen I knew in New Jersey - polite enough, but with the kind of thick, indistinguishable accent that says 'please don't fuck with me because you can't even imagine what we're fronting here.' And here we were, complaining about towels that were Mysteriously Missing and the bed we totally busted.

When we brought the manager over to our room, we found that in our absence the maid had given us towels [probably reporting us to the klepto police] and removed the broken bed piece [probably reporting us to the sex maniac police]. Despite thinking we're total dipwads, the manager sent some people in to fix the bed, and everything's all smoothed over.

At least I thought it was. When I came back from my walk I swear I heard him mutter under his breath: 'I hate you.'

next episode: gaydar

- Z