Two Fridays ago, I went with (e:paul) down to the central library. Our original intent was to check out the 3d printer, but taking a class is required and we hadn't signed up. So (e:paul) got a library card and we're going to do that another time.

I hadn't been to the library outside of the auditorium since I was starting to pick up PHP 3 years ago.

They have a high-end maker bot 3d printer, and a second smaller one. You only have to pay for materials.
They also have a 3d scanner in between the two. I'm interested to try that out.



After that we checked out the science book exhibit on the second floor. There were exhibits about Galelio, Bernouli etc - light on information, and though the books were obviously old there was no indication about where or when they're from (if they were originals they should have said it).

What's with this crazy creature on a this map? Breasty mer-bird?


Also an artifact of time - payphones. The second last one I can think of in Buffalo besides the one on Elmwood and Summer.


The most interesting part was the Grovesnor room. It has almost any Buffalo related book that was ever written - including books like "Parolees and pensioners in the first ward, report 1912". The room probably contains the most arcane info about Buffalo anywhere, that almost noone left living knows. I wonder how many of these have been scanned, if any.

There were books on being carless in Buffalo, written in the 1960s!

And all the original bike culture in Buffalo.

And an encyclopaedic book written about the NFTA and all it's predecessors, with every line and model of the rolling stock cataloged in depth.


A whole bookshelf dedicated to Timothy McVeigh. Creepy.

And a workbook about immigrants in Buffalo, where one of the activities is "Draw and color pictures of Buffalo immigrants in native costumes"

In one of the sections there were annual reports from Roswell Park. At one point there was a semi-famous BMT doctor there named Geoffry Herzig. Not related to my grandpa as far as I know (this one is from Cincinatti) bu he resembles him a lot.

instagrams of (e:paul)

As seen in the Grovesnor room in the Buffalo and Erie County central library. While (e:paul) was geeking out over Roswell Park and 50 years of annual reports, I found this picture.

I mean I get that they needed to conduct the research but what a crazy photo to use for PR.

The mice are trapped with corks in glass tubes, with burning cigarettes attached. They were setting out to research the correlation between smoking and cancer. There even was a tobacco farm in Orchard Park and West Seneca where they grew different types to compare against commercial tobacco.

I wish I could actually could find this study to find out how many cigarettes they made these mice smoke.

I made two more things in 3D with blender. The first one I was experimenting with particle effects and wood textures, plus some simple animation. I had to downsize to a tiny gif and it's still 632k. I think (e:paul) or I should add HTML5 video - I hate uploading to youtube for short clips.



The next render I followed this blender expert's tutorial on youtube.

I'm pretty happy with the doughnuts even those the doughnut mesh is weird.


I freaking love 3D modeling so far, especially compared to most art forms I've tried. It seems way more intuitive to deal with something that that has depth and perspective built in vs for me trying to learn and translate a 2D projection of what I want.

Plus Blender is pretty awesome software and entirely open source. It went open after a crowd funding campaign bought the source from a failed Dutch ompany, all the the way back in 2002.
(software)

On my machine rendering is pretty slow and limited to the CPU. But Terry's computer is blazing fast and I haven't even gotten CUDA GPU rendering set up yet. Once I do, each of the GPUs 2580 cores can be set to rendering instead of the i7s 4 cores.

We went with (e:yesthatcasey) and David down to Byrnecliff in Warsaw. I loved being able to go down ridiculously fast on the Corkscrew trail. At one point I had to slide over and fall because I was out of control.

Afterwards we went to go eat mexican food at this restaurant called Arriba Tortilla in East Aurora. I thought there was no way they could make regular tex-mex expensive but they found a way by making portions huge but ridiculously overpriced.

Serious props to my brother, who organized a drive to furnish an apartment for a Syrian refugee family. He managed to furnish the entire apartment with donated furniture, a full kitchen, bedrooms, pantry, living room and electronics.

The furniture and rest of the donated stuff was nice quality and even matched. I know it seems silly but I have to think moving into a complete apartment like that has to make it slightly easier to adjust to a new county thousands of miles away from home.