At long last, the intolerable burden of the first half of this week has been alleviated… after the grievous government test and speech presentation of today, only a single assessment remains as the rubble of what was once an adamant bulwark between this work-week and this weekend. Aside from tedious classes, today was, in essence, a repeat of yesterday. I am proud to announce that now, thanks to the lack of homework encroaching upon my sleep time, it is leisure that replaces my terribly needed rest.

The pinnacle of this week’s workload, the 6 hour speech (as I shall henceforward regard it due to the amount of time I laboured over it), has finally been abrogated… though upon seeing popular reaction, I’ve concluded I may have gone just a little overboard with the verbosity & high-minded pretension… Now that the assignment is over and done with, here is the epitome of my school-related stress.

In a world of seemingly fluid intuition with regards to technology, one might assume mainstream internet services would, naturally, be intuitive… yet this seemingly logical train of thought is antithetical to the near hour friends & I spent attempting to troubleshoot the numerous failures Skype seemed to be plagued with… However, these failures were ironed out after incessant resets & painful guesswork.

Today’s project 365 image is actually the base from which I derived yesterday’s; the only difference being yesterday’s was mapped to a spherical final transform, whereas this was left extruding into the 3rd dimension. I have yet to discover the secret to adjusting the “focal point” used to calculate depth blur (as can be deduced by the lack of focus on the front-most spheres in the dominant orb of today’s image)… but the blur of the intuitively calibratable PostFalloff2 plugin, regardless of blur type, didn’t quite create the “depth of field” look I was striving to achieve.

School has successfully escaped the anti-stress penitentiary it was condemned to earlier this year… with five tests, two quizzes, two essay/speech presentations, and  the Montgomery County cross country championship on Saturday, I’m thinking this week would be considerably more enjoyable in hindsight than fore…

My shockproof & waterproof sports-watch, allegedly capable of surviving mountain climbing expeditions, has entirely stopped functioning… after breaking on a door handle. While rushing out of the house yesterday, it got caught on the screen door handle… I, unaware of the fact, pulled my arm forward, yanking the watch strap out of place and leaving internal cracks in the screen… but the time still displayed fine… but halfway through lunch today, all function aside from responsive beeping ceased… It was designed to be almost indestructible… and therefore impossible to fix should one of the few fatal issues arise…

On the plus side, my phone, missing after its slipping out of my pocket at the homecoming dance, had been returned to security, and was, though long dead after being left on since Saturday night, in the security office & functional (after reactivation)… and filled with spam-mail.

Due to the excommunication my lack of a phone left me with, I was unaware that my friends, who apparently fruitlessly tried to contact me, were doing stuff today… so instead, after work this morning, I accompanied my parents along to various farms as part of the Family Festival @ the Farm, which warranted boundless car-time to sleep, compensating for the weekday-esque 6 hours I had after homecoming last night.

The next thrilling instalment in the proof of how the universe is out to get me: the irrevocably epic “lightning jack” cheese of South Mountain Creamery is made with rennet, and therefore not vegetarian… However, not all hope was lost, as there was still Michelle’s Granola offering a feasible replacement.

For some odd reason, when importing photos from the SD card to my computer, Bridge will arbitrarily drop files, leaving me with un-imported photos… they’re still on the card itself, and can be transferred to the computer via a second import… but it’s annoying that not all of the files are transferred on the first attempt.

Delightfully contrary to my fears, my revisions to & completion of my speech for English only took about an hour to complete… an indescribable relief after the five hours of work I slaved to it from Thursday night to Friday morning.

Throughout the day, my computer has inexplicably disconnected itself from my home wi-fi, despite the Network & Sharing Centre claiming to have had uninterrupted connection. After three reboots throughout the day, the problem appears to be solved… and for the sake of the universe, unwanting to be destroyed in an explosion of ionized rage, it had better stay that way.

This afternoon, my recharging session was ended when my dad woke me up at 11:40… meaning I got  a goo 10 hours of sleep after the previous night’s 4. However that in no way means I was happy about getting up… if left to my own devices, the day would have begun in the evening. 

Today was split between two utterly antithetical things; from early afternoon to late, I was at Brookside Gardens &  Meadowside Nature Centre (the latter being more preferred)… tonight, I was at the homecoming dance before the indescribably chill after-party of chatting & watching the grandiose new episode of My Little Pony, FiM, which remains the greatest TV show ever created.

 As was aforementioned, I spent the early afternoon at Brookside gardens, which was unfortunately unrepresentative of the season. I prefer fall to spring, and fall colour to spring flowers… and though there were certainly many trees to be beheld at Brookside, it, being a garden, felt too man-made.

Meadowside, on the other hand, is a nature centre juxtaposed by a forest, and therefore more enjoyable for my photographic tastes. However, that photography was any less frustrating…

I was burdened again by the flaws of my Canon 18-135mm lens; namely its inability to render images with fine details at wide angles (meaning trees become a blur of unclear edges and chromatic aberration) & the displeasing highlight tones (both of these problems may be emphasized by the relatively cheap UV filter protecting the lens).

Luckily, as Photoshop proved as helpful as it did last week; restoring clarity to washed out details & warming images the camera took at frigid colour temperatures (the white balance was probably thrown off by yellow/orange leaves).

At 6-ish, I left for dinner at Plaza Azteca with friends I was going to homecoming with. I, thinking too far in advance, went with my mildly uncomfortable dress-shirt & tie (the tie, being a blend of muted red, purple, and green was close to tie-dye as I could get)… along with friends clad in casual clothing who were getting dressed after dinner.

The dance itself, was fun, despite its being devoid of food & drinks save bottled water (obviously the fault of a paranoid administration…)… My phone, wishing to join the excitement, twice attempted to escape to the dance floor… the second attempt was successful, ergo I now have no phone… though if anyone turned it in to security, I can retrieve it on Monday. 

Aside from that (which was more of a downer to my parents than me), the dance was fun, despite my inherent inability to dance… but when everyone you know is doing “awkward white-guy dancing” (as we described it), it doesn’t really matter.

At the present, I am barely sustaining consciousness after a solid day unbroken by a single instance of sleep… the English speech I was plagued by last night took until early this morning to finish, allowing me a mere 4 hours of sleep… and yet, aside from the occasions during which I was under the spell of lethargy tedious academics cast, I managed to maintain my characteristic hyperactivity… and I’m still awaiting the delivery of my award.

The school schedule was a little hectic to accommodate the afternoon pep-rally which, at several points throughout the day, seemed threatened by the constant downpour.  However, as deliberations regarding the forcibly indoor rally’s conduction. the rain ceased, leaving a drenched field but clear sky (figuratively… the sky remained overcast until early evening).

Tonight segued homecoming week to weekend with an intense football game. The first quarter, establishing Churchill as the frontrunners, was followed by an uneventful second quarter. Come half-time, Churchill had nearly twice the score of our adversaries, Walter Johnson. During the third quarter, I don’t recall the score changing, but neither I nor any of the people I was with were paying attention much attention to the game by that point… until most of them left for a mediocre burger joint (ironically named Burger Joint), leaving only the people who cared about the outcome of the game.

With three minutes left, a touchdown threatened to usurp the victory we had but a few plays ago been so sure we had. After multiple incomplete passes and a fumble, the clock glared down at the stadium with less than a minute to go, juxtaposed by the abominable score denoting the single point between us and victory. The next play brought about the characteristic mayhem seen time and again in sports movies. With twenty seconds on the clock, a successful pass was thrown, leaving the players at around the 20 yard line, motivating the spectators out of their seats to deluge the side of the field. With little hope of making a touchdown, the team opted for a field goal… and with 6 seconds left on the clock, we secured our 2-point victory; and with that, the audience exploded.

Because I was at the game until it was relatively late, I had little time to render, let alone create something for project 365… and so today’s image is just a modification of unrendered parameters I had on my HD.

The , majority of my time today was usurped by homework, as I had figured since I realized the magnitude of the English speech I have to have completed for tomorrow… and writing it, I feel like a lace-maker… I could spend a few minutes weaving it together and have a banal yard of weak lace… or I could spend hours on a small portion of intricate beauty… unfortunately, I was not given the option to succumb to my frustration and just burn it all…

After working on the speech for about 4 hours, I’m declaring it finished. I initially wrote it based on the teacher’s initial instruction that it be presentable in 3 mintues or less… before I remembered she decided to take 30 seconds out of that, leaving no time to tell a descriptive story… thus I was stuck finishing it, typing, trimming, practising, refining… until 1:35 a.m… and I, poised for four and a half hours of sleep, am so glad I live in a country with such a wonderful education system. *COUGHCOUGHSARCASMGOUGH*

Either existing to befuddle the already skewed perception of this week (with an altered schedule due to Homecoming), or perhaps for the sole purpose of humbling students that no academics are as tedious as standardized tests, most of school today was spent on the PSAT’s… but rather than granting underclassmen the same extra sleep that seniors have, we were subjected to a meaningless test; a fake ACT for the freshman, an insignificant PSAT for the sophomores… an insignificant PSAT which, like all standardized exams, left me with the impression that my IQ had dropped significantly.

The math questions, reminiscent of the painfully easy Algebra I HSA, succeeded in boosting my self confidance in math… though my incompetence regarding some questions (due to my forgetting a few scarcely used but fundamental formulas) was sure to humble me.

Meanwhile the reading & writing was exactly like a typical county English exam without the intolerable essay… and an all honesty, there were a few words I had never seen before (but it’s never too late to learn epic words like “recalcitrant.”)

Following the test & the subsequent 3 shortened classes was an anti-drug speech by an alleged “comedian…” and it was painfully obvious why he was doing “comedy” at a high school… due to the lack of a single purposefully humorous occurrence during the entire presentation… and in the end, it just seemed like an advertising pitch for his book on how to “get high” without drugs… A much needed advertising pitch, as no one save micromanaging, narrow minded parents would ever purchase such a waste of paper.

Cross country practice today was a hard workout on the exposed track; thus we were subjected to the chilling downpour… while running, the rain was a refreshing coolant, posing no threat of annoyance save the occasional fleeting cornea sting accompanied by a momentary visual obscuration… but upon metabolic normalization, the rain instantaneously jumped to the top of the national threat meter as the brutal administer of human refrigeration.

After the 8 and a half hour block of meaninglessness, I was left climbing my way out of quicksand. Never wanting to have my time usurped by homework, I procrastinated this entire week… thus I was left with an immeasurable workload to finish tonight & tomorrow… a Chinese essay due Friday on top of a quiz tomorrow… a heap of NSL work preceding a reading quiz tomorrow… the completion of a project for Biology… and perhaps worse than all else, despite its comparative un-time consuming-ness, an part of an English speech.

Experimentation in Apophysis today was mostly with FallOff; a selective blur plugin by the genius Xyrus02. While the specific variation I used was technically a different plugin included in the Aposhack plugin pack (specifically: PostFalloff2), they have the same effect. When applied as a post-variation to the final transform, this plugin applies a global blur, either linear or radial, from a point determined by user-defined coordinates.TI’de have to say the hardest part was figuring out how to position the centre of the blur correctly (accomplished by the adjustment of the “post_falloff2_{x,y,z}0″ variable).

After a near solid week of fractal re-renders, I’ve decided, after constant software malpeformance, my computer will embark on a week long vacation to a remote tropic at which CPU intensive graphics will be no more than an unpleasant reminiscence. Unfortunately, I cannot accompany my fortuitous machine, as I’m stuck here for this work-intensive week… The predominant problem has been Apophysis’s inability to save renders correctly; either falsely claiming a lack of disk space or arbitrarily saving the render as the wrong file type… but, not too surprisingly, everything works perfectly immediately following a system reboot.

Yesterday, I noted the rare occurrence of my agreeing with a grade I received on an English essay… but English class, sure to return to its characteristic horrendousness, obliterated whatever potential enjoyability a recently assigned essay could possibly have. The initial prompt made it seem as though we simply had to write an embellished recollection in the style of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine… but today, radar scans revealed the previously concealed deadly submerged portion of the iceberg… it turns out this story has to be incorporated into a speech about the importance of… remembering memories. Way to make the only seemingly enjoyable assignment of the high-school English curriculum to date into quotidian crap.

I was left today with two options with regards to how to handle homework… school tomorrow is inevitably going to be a painful waste of 8 and a half hours. After a fake PSAT, there are three shortened classes before some sort of school-wide assembly… someone guessed it was on abstaining from drugs, to which a teacher facetiously responded “yeah, because that’ll totally help at this school.”

A recent shocking development that must surely be responsible for several subsequent national disasters worldwide surfaced today. I received a grade on an English essay I agree entirely with. While I tend to understand my English teachers’ marking my grade down based on the atrocity of my analytical writing, the significance of this specific grade that this is the first English grade of the year, or so it seems, that I feel I deserve the grade I received.

It seems as though the school has realized the truth in the anti-human ideologies of Hobbes… to raise money for charity, a “penny war” is being waged between grades. It operates around the principle that people will be more inclined act in order to make their compatriots lose rather than make themselves win. Each penny a grade collects is worth single point… each coin of greater value than a penny is a deduction of however many points the coin is worth in cents… so a grade needs to collect 25 pennies should a student of another grade add a single quarter to the initial grade’s acquisition.

Rather than deeming whichever grade that raises the most money the winner, which would motivate students to donate the most money via the collection for their own grade, the school has cleverly set the competition up to encourage students to bring in money to make their peers fail. Of course, the end result is money for charity either way, but it’s just amusing that a school, constantly preaching the glorified positives of the world, extorts the negativity of human nature.

I decided to meticulously teach myself the utmost basics of Apophysis scripting (the predominant reason I couldn’t learn more is due to complexity of the math involved with actual scripting) through painful trial and error (“errors” caused entirely by user confusion, which the counterintuition of transformation translation was responsible for most of). Today’s project 365 image, after I finished the script & tweaked the output, took two hours to make, despite the render time being sub-45 minutes… Apophysis persists at rendering BMP images, which are essentially nothing more than a rather grotesque blob of unusable pixels…

To finalize the actualization of the fall, we drove around on the Coutryside Artisans’ Tour. Two or three times annually, my family embarks on this meandering road-trip through the Maryland countryside to see the latest & greatest creations by local artists… to me, it’s a glorified view of the independent residential artist; a house in the golden-grass countryside of flowing hills & colourful trees with not a care save creating art on a timely basis… and though this mental apotheosis may be rather distant from the truth, it always leaves me wanting to sell prints of my photos… until I get home and realize I’d either have to sell myself to a tyrannical web-agent or devote boundless time I simply don’t have…

To kick of our gallivanting tour, we stopped at Art of Fire; a glass-blowing studio, producing everything from glass vases to glass glowers, full to the brim with trinkets & stray cats (which I always spend just as much time playing with as I do browsing the studio’s wares). The best part of visiting the studio is the charisma of the artisans. They’re always in the back of the shop, working on something, explaining what they’re doing & why… and of course, the imperative bowl of candy & pitcher of water is never amiss for the hungry spectator.

After getting lost a number of times, we successfully stumbled upon Niswander Ceramics, whose wares I’m the name explains. I spent most of the time there trying to rescue a bee that trapped itself inside the shop/gallery… an ordeal that could have been over in a matter of seconds, if only the bee were a bit more cooperative.

Making sure to stop by a farm (because it’s never an artisans tour without some sort of woolly quadruped), we went to A Paca Fun Farm, where the occasionally social alpacas were keeping their distance from us, save for a few curious about how my hand smelled… but none were willing to be petted.

The last two places we always stop are always Dancing Leaf Farm and the juxtaposing Sugarloaf Studio. We always arrive during the awkward time where it feels like the sun should begin to set any second, but if we actually waited for the “magic hour,” we’d have to kill quite a bit of time.

The project 365 photo was semi-staged, as the sheep at Dancing Leaf Farm were accidentally herded by myself, attempting to creep up & photograph them, into the perfect spot where I could capture them with Sugarloaf poking through the trees in the background… although the sheep weren’t exactly delighted about this “accidental herding.”

Never amiss from any heated building, it seems the stinkbug population is defying my preemptive prediction of decline… Earlier in the season, I noticed the lack of stinkbugs… and so I figured maybe they wouldn’t return to coat every structure in the suburban & rural portions of the state… but as the temperatures drop, more and more of the insects seem to be bedazzling walls & doorframes, both inside & out.

After returning home, I was greeted by the unpleasant surprise Apophysis seems to be continually giving me… Though I’m sure to set a file type & destination for each image, renders keep being non-transparent .BMP’s (as opposed to PNG’s), or Apophysis will, upon completing a multi-hour render, claim that the disk is full, and the file cannot be saved (despite the 220GB I have free on my main hard drive plus over 450 on the secondary)…

Today marked the conclusion of my forced photography-hiatus to recover from the depleted state of un-enthusiasm project 365 compelled me to. In essence, it was rehabilitation from the interdictive state of mind one is put in after excessive exposure to a single thing; as even the most exquisite food becomes unpalatable if eaten on a daily basis. Project 365, when I only allowed myself to use photographs, threw a burdensome load of photography onto my plate, and thus 200 days later, my appetite had understandably waned.

In short, I awoke this weekend morning very impatient to get out somewhere and photograph.

We went to Scott’s Run; a nature preserve a short drive from home. The temperature, levelling out after daily undulation throughout the past weeks,spent today at the high end of what I consider perfect temperatures (12-20). The sky was cloudless, despite the insinuated stratus clouds of the first photograph of the post (the sky looks grey because it was toned down from overexposure in Photoshop).

The cloudlessness worked against my photographic fervor, as the lens I used throughout the day (Canon 18-135) captures images with very mediocre highlights that need correction in post-processing (especially in the dynamic light of a forest, where the details are in extremely dark light and the sky can be numerous stops brighter).

I spent most of the time attempting slow-shutter shots of the waterfall to the left. I stabilized with nothing more than my arms and tree trunks & rocks, shooting at 1/3 of a second to 1/20 of a second (probably could have managed slower speeds without noticeable camera-shake, but I’d have to dial the aperture down past f/11, which starts to enter diffraction territory (super-small apertures mean there’s only a tiny hole through which light enters the camera, leaving countless light rays that don’t pass through the hole that instead bounce off the diaphragm, making the image fuzzy).

Forced with the dilemma of which of the infinitesimal angles to shoot the waterfall from, I spent a great deal of time parkour-climbing over rocks… and I would like to congratulate both my camera and lens for surviving a few knocks during climbs requiring both hands, leaving none to protect the camera… and I’m far from dexterous enough to keep it in one place using only my spine (although I managed to do a half decent job).

Looking at only the preview JPEG the camera offered, my efforts seemed futile… and when I first imported the raw photos onto my computer (first batch of photos I’ve imported on my new computer! The transfer was considerably slower than it was on my old laptop…), they seemed mediocre… but that only took a few tone & white balance adjustments to mend (mostly white balance, as the chartreuse leaves left the temperature as cold as my presently un-slippered feet (at last, a place to use the word “chartreuse!”)).

As if in response to yesterday’s post, the National Geographic issue that arrived today contained an article psychoanalysing the teenage mindset by “competent” neurological scientists… and the insightful conclusion they reached was really nothing more complex than “teenagers are impulsive…” because without quantifiable research, no one would have ever known. I applaud these great neurologists on their earthshatteringly revolutionary discovery.

Contrary to every other school year, the current math curriculum is somewhat enjoyable. I learned & accepted last year that everything taught after Algebra is inapplicable to the lives of those not planning a career in engineering of science… which should leave higher math classes as electives… and there are definitely certain types of math I’m dying to learn (fractal geometry), but everything else is as painful as English.

On that subject, the lowlight of my day was English, as the county received assessment was administered today… I’m unsure how its creator has not received the Nobel Prize for their invention of a temporal manipulation device… Nothing makes time pass slower than an English exam.

The new season of Sanctuary began today, picking up last season’s melodramatic arch… and I must say; I enjoyed the show much more when it consisted of single or dual episode plots consisting of no more drama than the prevention of a single catastrophe… all the recent episodes have been the prevention of the end of society as we know it… and whenever a show starts to over-dramatize things, everything starts to become insignificant (much like on Dr. Who, how the Doctor dies every two episodes and the entire universe/space-time continuum/reality is on the brink of collapse at least once a season…)

I have at last elicited a combination of operations that brings down my computer’s speed to that of my old laptop… Rendering a high-oversample image in Apophysis while rendering a 3D fractal of any size in Mandelbulb 3D slows computer performance such that loading a new page in Chrome can take as much as 60 seconds (note that I say a “new page,” as going to a different URL within the same website loads normally)… which is still veritably quick.

Oh, how I do love my brain. I constantly refer to it as a separate entity from myself, as I refuse to be held responsible for the asininity of my autonomic actions; a psychological conundrum epitomized when I awoke this morning… all five times. After managing to finish everything before 11:30 last night, I was fantastically proud of my getting to bed prior to this morning (by which I mean midnight last night)… but then at 3:30, my brain decided it was time for school, despite my clock’s conspicuous bulletin of glowing red letters.

After returning to sleep, I was inexplicably awoken again at 4… and then 5… and finally, when 6 rolled around, the legitimate “wake up” alarm managed to circumvent my mental registry of importances… which later lead me to the conclusion that perhaps what awoke me so frequently was the watch’s accidentally enabled hourly beep, and thus the alarm seemed no more than another insignificant sound… although further inspection revealed the aforementioned beep was, in fact, turned off… leaving the blame for this gross offence against my conscious (which is, as I see it, an entirely different entity than the unredeemable beast that plagues me so) upon my brain.

Over breakfast, I read a lovely Local Living article on the value in spying on your children…

Speaking as a child, and therefore more fit to hold an opinion on the matter than an esoteric collective ignorance (*ehem* parents)… this article was utter crap. I would rather know that my parents trust me enough to not resort to scrutinizing my every action than be subjected the transgression of my privacy “for my own safety.”

Speaking as a believer of Darwinist principles, I can be no less than appalled at this unnatural transgression of natural selection. If your child receives an invitation to a secluded location from an netizen of questionable identity, and they obtain the means by which to travel to said location (because if a parent is still spying on a child after they can drive, they make the switch from “obsessive” and “micromanaging” to being “creepy” and a “stalker”), it should be the responsibility of the child to resolve whatever predicament they force themself into.

If your child is discussing illegal behaviour, do you have the right to spy on them? Last I checked, the police need a warrant or permission to search, and thus parental snooping is no less than a violation the 4th Ammendment’s protection against unreasonable searches.

Lastly, as a victim of relentless Facebook stalking (by various relatives who know all too well who they are) to the degree that I find said relatives commenting on threads posted by friends of mine that I am utterly excluded from… Kids hate their parents invading their privacy. Parents always try to reinforce the painfully cliché adage; do unto others as you would have done to you… and yet, if parents were to, for a moment, stop and rationalize how they would feel if someone were to invade their privacy with equal oppressiveness, no such despotic parenting tactics would be even considered.

My most fun & stress free class is continuing to ironically be the most frustrating… Every other class I do poorly in, my grade suffers a few points. In painting, when I do poorly (not necessarily receive a low grade; it’s predominantly while I’m working that the following occurs), my brain catapults me into a cave of depression, where I, upon crashing against the floor of the cave, vow that I will make time to draw, and I will-…and just like that, placing a landmine on the tracks of my train of thought, the bell rings, knocking down the walls of the cave that moments ago seemed inexterpable. And so by the time I have the opportunity to draw, my brain has drastically switched moods, leaving me with no desire to practice a task that brings nothing but frustration.

Meanwhile, in the most thrilling development in bureaucratic inadequacy, in seems as though the school thinks I was absent in one of my classes… while this is assuredly the fault of one of my teachers, it would be nice of the attendance office to perhaps mention which class I was reportedly absent from, so that I may confront the teacher (or whoever) to resolve the issue? But no, that would make too much sense! To instigate a policy of efficiency would be diametric to the standardized disarray that seems to be MCPS policy.

XC practice today was a 35 minute run out with a set start & finish at the school, but no set course to get from start to finish… so we ran a loop through along roads & through a local trail… and despite my incessant toe-stubbing on rocks & tree roots, this was definitely one of the more fun runs of the year, if for any reason, because it was trail running. Tracks & streets are considerably less enjoyable than trail running, not to mention inexplicably more tiring.

By the end of math, my first class of the day, and therefore the one in which I am still recuperating from the lack of sleep I must have gotten the previous night (which is an inevitability, as thus is a plague afflicting me on all weekdays), I had vowed that at 11 p.m, I would drop whatever I was doing and go to bed… I spent most of math struggling to stay awake (afterwards, I returned to my casual hyperactivity) after the lovely sub-5 hours of sleep I had last night due to a journalling assignment for painting… in a cruel twist of un-humorous irony, the same assignment, forgotten by my indescribably helpful brain until after 10 p.m, kept me up past my preset goal…Today’s XC meet trimmed my PR down 20 seconds to 21:36… although upon finishing, victorious exuberance was the last thing in my system… an incalculable fraction of a second before I made the last step into the victory chute, an opposing runner surpassed me… but that was the least of my immediate worries. Having thoughtlessly eaten a Nutri-Grain bar 25 odd minutes before the race, the final 200 metres brought nothing but an agonizing stomach cramp… and as I abruptly stopped in the victory chute, the nutrigrain bar, dissatisfied with  the turbulence it was subjected to in my stomach, decided to leap out and escape to the trampled grass below.

The meet got me out of an NSL test, handing me a double edge sword with the sharp side pointed towards myself. I do have the extra time between now & the make-up test to study, but I have the same amount of time to forget the fine details of the unit amongst new information.

In an unprecedented twist of events, our most recent English assignment, seems as though it’s going to be fun. The vague rubric seems to allow a great deal of creativity, and so it is essentially the brief chronicling of an event that reveals something about the student… and with any luck, my teacher will grade the assignment as loosely as this prompt would suggest it is to be graded… because if all I did was list what happened, while I would explicitly state my purpose for the obtuse readers, it would be no more than a bland retelling. Of course, I find regarding the assignment as a call for such grading to be impossible, as more than half the words in Dandelion Wine are no more than embellishment.

Today’s project 365 image is a quick, atypical spherical-bubble fractal. When I first created the image, I just tweaked arbitrary parameters, hoping to stumble upon a starting point for a potential image… it’s sort of like getting an idea for a sculpture by randomly smacking portions of a block until it forms the rough shape of something that can be refined into a complete sculpture.

En route to my house from an XC spaghetti dinner (team carb-loading before the day of a meet), my dad was telling me that he had seen a juvenile stag just beyond a hill we were driving over… and we get to the trough of the wave shape formed by the hill we just completed & the following slope… and out of the aphotic roadside abyss, a blur leapt in front of the car before my dad noticed it, let alone before he could slam on the brakes… turns out it was a deer.

After the momentary befuddlement of being in an automotive collision, I found myself rapidly flying through the painfuly cliché stages of grief; beginning with  denial… maybe we just-… except that thought was instantaneously cut off by the logical part of my brain progressing to anger… which also lasted no time at all, as my brain found it impossible to rationalize why it should be angry… not having anything to bargain, that step of the process was entirely omitted, and thus the model progressed to depression… which also lasted only a few moments, before my brain ultimately returned to bafflement.

English today was the most fun of the year… we spent the entire class discussing school supplies and Halloween costumes… because conjuring arbitrary memories somehow enriches Dandelion Wine, which is a collection of doctored memoirs…

Meanwhile painting has become depressing… we started painting today; going over the basic techniques of creating an image… and I think I am the only person in the class who can’t do something as simple as shading an apple… just add some green to the darker side of the apple and blend it… the latter being inconceivably easier said than done…

As I mentioned earlier, I spent a couple hours at an XC pre-meet spaghetti dinner… mostly chugging chocolate milk, losing miserably at air hockey, and playing pinball on a machine that makes it near impossible to tell how well you’re doing, as literally every tap of a bumper added another 6 digit number to the seemingly made up score.

Unfortunately, my going seems to be leading me into yet another painful night of no sleep… I have two days worth of homework I have to squeeze in before tomorrow, as the XC meet will leave me little time to do anything… on top of every tonight’s homework, I have to do the homework I won’t have time to do tomorrow…

My brother’s birthday last week took me away from my Sunday job; assistant teaching. Today, I was catapulted back with a very busy yet surprisingly un-hectic day. Today was a “centres day,” meaning I was left in charge of a class of 20 2nd graders, rotating from teacher-operated activity to activity. The last centres day, which was last year (and therefore with a different class), mostly everyone was, with an unfortunate degree of literalism, off the walls. Contrarily, the class today (which was an entirely different group of students) was remarkably well behaved, and therefore manageable.

Oh yes, and if you’re wondering what the title means; it’s an acronym for “too tired to title this post.”

My mom has had some sort of swollen-eyelid-infection-type-thing (because I’m sure to use only medical terminology of paramount verbosity… and scientific accuracy), which seemed to have worsened today, and so she wasn’t feeling up to doing anything… which was alight with me, as I was allowed an extra hour or so of sleep driving to a place we decided not to go to, and then sleeping at home when I was still tired from the excruciatingly uncomfortable car-sleep… Meaning that today was, following in the trend of many of the other days this week, relatively laid back… albeit downright unexciting.

After a two hour right of passage consummating my transition from a decrepit machine to a functional computer, my old laptop is now freshly restored to factory defaults… so that it may collect dust with the utmost efficiency. Brilliant me forgot about the expeditious transfer speeds an ethernet cable can accomplish, and so I transferred all 175GB of files from my old laptop’s hard drive to the new via the breakneck speeds humanity’s most state of the art invention can accomplish; the lovely sub 50MB/sec USB 2.0.

While ensuring all files from my old laptop were backed up on the external, a process I illogically predicted to take a mere half hour, I created today’s project 365 image; a fractal wallpaper. I discovered Metaphysis, an alleged “high speed” fractal-flame render engine, but I didn’t have the time to download it & try it out… maybe next weekend.

I’ve seen numerous corroborating reports saying Arrested Development is returning for a 4th season as a prelude to an upcoming movie… and for a moment, the sound of a choir of angels harmonizing could be heard in the passing breeze…

The weather today stood as an epitome of seasonal temperature change. After a roller coaster of hots & cools (although predominantly undulation between hot & warm with a sprinkling of dead-centre temperate), the thermometer spent the day at about 10 degrees… However, that’s probably, in large part, because it was rainy… by which I mean not for a second did the rain cease. The sun spent every waking moment vacationing behind the interminable layer of clouds… not that I’m complaining. I had no plans to be subjugated, as I opted not to accompany my parents on a second trip to the Maryland Ren Faire.

I awoke this morning to my parents leaving for the faire at around 10-ish… I got out of bed after an hour of semi-comatosity to the remembrance that there were almost certainly more productive things I could be doing than failing to fall back asleep… so I got out of bed and made the laborious five foot trek across my room to my computer.

In need of inspiration for a new Vue creation, I browsed some tutorials at Geekatplay Studio’s website… and ended up spending the morning learning the basics of animation in Vue… although I can’t really do much with this new knowledge, as the trial version limits animation to 5 seconds. I probably could have learned it in an hour, but I spent probably half that trying to figure out where the “lock camera height” button was…

On the subject of Vue; I’m not too certain exactly what I did, but Vue seems to be running considerably faster than it was yesterday. Though the predominant cause of slowness seemed to be ecosystems (populations of many plants/rocks), every individual operation I did yesterday condemned Vue to a purgatory of slowness. Today, terrain/atmosphere adjustments & object/camera movements worked at a very usable speed. I’m not sure if a system reboot initialized the new Nvidia drivers which were more compatible with Vue, or some registry fixing by CCleaner (after the removal of eradication of Dell’s boundless bloat-ware) fixed some issues, or if it was an in-Vue cache reset.

After lunch & homework, I went outside to walk my neighbour’s dogs… and locked myself out of the house, in the rain… so after walking the dogs & playing numerous rounds of “ninja” with a friend of mine, we went to a different friend’s house, ordered pizza, and watched some of the multitudinous stupid videos on the internet… because we’re productive people like that.

The number one obstacle I’ve run into using Vue has been a limitation nonexistent in the full software… the trial limits render sizes to a maximum of 640 pixels long… which is very unfortunate, as I would have liked to re-render today’s project 365 image at a higher quality at wallpaper resolution. The image itself was mostly an experiment with displacement (getting the arch to look like it’s made out of rocks as opposed to simply being an arch with a “textured wrapping paper”) plus a lot of atmosphere tweaks. While the clouds & lighting were based off of presets,  they weren’t finalized until countless sun positioning & ambient lighting changes.

Since the school-workload is still reduced from Rosh Hashana, today felt equally carefree as the half day on Wednesday. The difference being that since today begins a weekend followed by a day on which schools are forbidden from administering tests (also due to Rosh Hashana), I literally had no work to worry about today… no classes had significant assessments… and even XC practice was relaxingly easy, as the coach is with a large portion of the team at a meet in North Carolina, meaning that those few people who showed up to today’s unofficial practice determined how far we ran.

I was forced to watch Top Gun by my cat, who pinned me to the couch long after the movie had ceased being entertaining… My cat, who lay across my keyboard & trackpad, bit my hand if I tried to shift her… leaving me to suffer through the entire movie. While it began rather entertaining, the poorly written romance in the middle overpowered the not-so-compelling other aspects of the movie, reducing the whole thing to a mushy blob of boredom.

Since I had a good amount of free time today, I did a lot of experimenting in Vue… and the more I use it, the more frustrating it becomes. Not only is my ignorance with regards to how to create scenes painful, but the software itself is horrendously cumbersome. While my computer, despite Vue’s rendering, crashing, or constant lagging, maintains an speedy operational pace, Vue itself tends to crash… and constantly lag. I’m not sure if its an issue with memory limitations Vue has (as I clearly have excess memory that isn’t being used), if it’s incompatibility with my mobile graphics card… or if it’s just the software itself.

I awoke this morning to my watches alarm. I had set it last night so that I would be able to get up and resume the Vue render I had started before my electricity was knocked out in a storm… and then promptly return to sleep… and I did precisely that. at 8:30, I woke up, de-hibernated my computer, got a drink, and having accomplished all I needed to for the day, I went back to bed until 11:30. The finished render, which would have been yesterday’s project 365 image: on Flickr and deviantART.

There need to be more weeks like this; three and a half days of school, three and a half days of weekend. I’m probably going to end up having to stay awake finishing homework I forwent doing until now in order to make today an entirely zero-work day, but the latter part of that statement should exonerate the former. Most importantly: I managed to catch up on a considerable amount of sleep (although I was still tired the large part of the morning, primarily because my spine was achy due to my agonizingly uncomfortable matress).

On top of that, I spent quite a while learning more techniques in Vue, though I was severely limited by software glitches… while my computer never once lagged, and no matter how high the quality of a given render I was doing in Vue was, everything ran smoothly in other programs… However, Vue seems to crash (when I say crash, I mean force-close) whenever I increase the terrain resolution too much (which is understandable), whenever I try to increase the preview quality of ecosystems beyond “billboard…” and there were a few other crashes.

In celebration of Rosh Hashana, I took part in the ongoing family tradition of lunch at the Pancake House after services… despite the fact that I didn’t go to services… but if I were to believe in a God (I’m agnostic; I’m not saying there is or isn’t one), I’d rather believe in one/many who would let me enjoy myself, sleeping & learning Vue, than one (or many) that would require I sit through hours of boredom.

Initially, after creating today’s project 365 image in Apophysis, I rendered it at twice the quality you see in the final image… Initially, I forgot to set the render destination, and so the image was rendered into a folder that requires administrative approval to be modified… meaning I spent 2 and a half hours rendering through a paper shredder… and was left with nothing… so at 10:00, I had to redo the render at half the quality… although there isn’t really a huge difference.

Due to my regretful lack of electricity, I am unable to finish rendering what was supposed to be today’s project 365 image. I would be able to log onto ky mom’s phone’s 3G to WiFi hotspot to upload the.image, but Vue estimates another 3 hours for this stage if the render… With 100% CPU usage, I have about 90 minutes of battery left…

Since Rosh Hashana is tomorrow, school was shortened today, ending at 11:00… But I had to stay for XC practice, and so I didn’t end up home until almost 2:30. With no homework due until Friday, I had ample time to play around with my new computer… And I had planned to detail my first impressions in this post… But I’m forced onto my phone, currently struggling along with only 20% battery left, and therefore not in the mood for large amounts of typing. Also, in the event of a nightime outage, I only have so long before I start falling asleep, regardless of the time.

The worst offence the outage is guilty of is preventing the recovery of my achey ankle. It’s a little sore after the XC meet yesterday, practice today, and a kit of running while dog walking (plus walking home from school), but I’m unable to get an ice-packfrom  the freezer lest the disgustingly warm air (or so it feels in my abysmally stuffy house) melt everything… So I can’t ice my ankle.

After endless indecision over model choice & frugality-driven procrastination, I finally ordered myself a new XPS-17 during Dell’s sale last week. Since the dawn of time, I’ve relentlessly complained about the innumerable shortcomings of my previous laptop; the Inspiron 1545… and in all honesty, much of the trouble I experienced was due to my attempting to accomplish feats requiring computational power the Inspiron simply didn’t have. I’ll go into more detail about the computer tomorrow, as it’s too late for me to even consider sacrificing sleep time to review a laptop I’ve had for under 6 hours.

Individual tasks aren’t as exponentially faster as I had hoped, but there’s definitely a noticeable difference in speed. In addition to the decrease in render times (which is unfortunately not as significant as I had hoped), I’m actually able to do other things with no decrease in computing speed (perhaps the biggest plus, aside from the sheer awesomeness of the high-res 17 inch screen). The only major complication I ran into was a misconceived lagging… Vue was rendering and I tried to move the mouse (using the USB mouse, not the built in trackpad), but the cursor kept lagging… I eventually discovered the computer was still working fine; the mouse’s batteries died.

I couldn’t possibly chronicle today’s XC meet without referencing MoCoRunning’s article. The article begins with a brief description of the pinnacle of our home course; “the wall.” This gargantuan  hill is infamous among all who have run the course for its inherent ability to mercilessly kill anyone who dares attempt to scale it… That being said, the majority of the course is on moderately steep up & downhills & filled with rocks & tree roots.

I’m not entirely sure what my time in the race was, but I’m fairly certain it was a new personal record. At the very end, a group of runners from one of the other schools started sprinting, making it to just a few feet behind me… so I sprinted as fast as I could, just managing to finish ahead of all of them… and barely managing to survive. Upon coming to a complete stop, I pretty much died until remedied by a Cliff bar. It was only after I caught my breath that I remembered to stop my watch, at which point the chronometer read “22:40…” so I’m guestimating that my time was around 21:30-ish.

Throughout most of school today, I was high on my own lack of energy. While this fortuitous exuberance was likely from the ancillary car-ride sleep from last night, I like to think that I’ve acclimatised to unhealthy amounts of sleep deprivation & can now go through the day energized in spite of it.

A couple days ago, I tried out the PLE of Vue 9.5… and I was utterly unimpressed by its many shortcomings… but I downloaded the trial of the more basic version… and I’ve come to the conclusion that all of the troubles I experienced sprang from one of two sources; computer failure and, the number one reason for complaints: user error.

However, I words fail to describe just how much I loathe Terragen right now. 90 minutes into the render of an awesome scene, I was reorganizing the node network when Terragen crashes, destroying the render and corrupting the project… leaving me with no image… no project to restart the render… and four metric tons of solid animosity… and in the end, all I accomplished was the creation of yet another encroachment into my much-needed sleep-time.

In celebration of my brother’s birthday, tomorrow, we all went to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire today. Were I writing this immediately after leaving the fair, it would be a chronicle of positivity… but now, left at 12:30 a.m with half a math practice test to finish, it’s rather difficult to consider the trip as anything more than one of many gargantuan blocks of spent time adding to the quota of detriments eating away at my sleep time.

Photo on the right of Miguel of DonJuan & Miguel striking an incredibly intimidating pose.

I always fall asleep during extended car-rides… and I always proceed to spend the rest of the day feeling even more tired than prior to my so-called rest… which is unfortunate, given that I spent the majority of both car-trips today, going to & from the fair, asleep… which should amount to something like 3 hours of sleep… and yet presently, I feel like I haven’t slept in a week.

The predominant reason we decided to go this weekend was for DonJuan & Miguel, whose show, despite us having seen it enough times to know the punchline of every joke five sentences before they say it, is hilarious.

The second reason, which is generally the first reason to go to any renn faire: food. The Pennsylvania renn faire has typical staples of renn faire food (by which I mean ____ on a stick) and, while there seemed to be significantly fewer food stores than that were at the Maryland renn faire, all was redeemed by the preeminent beacon of culinary epicness; the chocolate fountain…

Ordinarily on Sundays, I’m an assistant teacher, but since we were celebrating my brother’s birthday, my parents forcibly gave me the day off… although upon entering the faire, I became employed for roughly 5 minutes as a butter-churner. There was a fenced enclosure with goats and sheep beside a farm-produce store my parents wanted to check out… and while there, I was asked to shake a jar of un-churned butter… five minutes later, I was done & rewarded with honey-sticks (which, though holding a nearly insignificant monetary value, were definitely adequate compensation for physical labour given their deliciousness)… and 12 hours later, my arms are still a little ache-y from all the shaking.

After a horrendously long week of school, I was freed from the oppressive chains of work… which will inevitably just leave me with a school-day’s worth of work to do tomorrow, but… Oh well.

The majority of my morning was lost to sleep. Ordinarily (or rather, according to how I felt over the summer), I would regard this as a waste of time… but a break in the seemingly endless sleep cycle of 6 hours a night is nothing less than sheer epicness.

I went to Great Falls after lunch today and, for the first time in quite a while, gave my neglected macro lens some use. It was slightly overcast, so shadows were soft, but I had to keep the ISO between 400-800, meaning, with significant exposure & contrast adjustment, all my photos at a slightly noticeable amount of noise (although clearly not too noticeable. 

Tonight, my computer fell on an unrelenting spiral into the abyss of failure. The power cord has been fraying for quite some time just next to where it connects to the laptop. Recently, it’s been flaky actually getting power to the laptop; a problem I assumed was because of the fraying… but today, the LED on the transformer died, signalling the cord’s inability to get power from the outlet… meaning the cord is completely dead… However, this didn’t explain why, with 16% battery left, my laptop decided to shut off, killing every open program & igniting an explosion of frustration.

My applause to the Doctor Who production team on the first enjoyable episode of the season. By eliminating the worst developed duo of characters in screenwriting history (who were characterized only by their undeniable lack of character), the characters have instantaneously become exponentially better.