Artist Day at work?!?

I had to miss artist night on Tuesday this week because of various things going on in my life. I'm actually considering putting it on hold for the month of November because there is so much going on. I really enjoy it though, and it does give me a break from my normal routine. I also have some fun artist activities planned. For example, the 8-bit Mike project is coming up, and I am very excited for that.

This week's activity was a little unusual because it was related to work. You see, I used to really enjoy programming and I would stay up late at night to work on various projects. I haven't been able to do that very much lately. I have a lot of interruptions at work and I find that I can't handle the context switches very well. I've found it does take me about half an hour to really get back to something I was working on after an interruption. I would say I get interrupted at least every half hour when I'm at work. Obviously, there is a productivity issue there.

The other interesting thing that's been happening lately is that my eyes get really tired. I think it's from using the 30" cinema display I have at work. But I've found I can't look at computer screens very much after going home after work.

So for artist day this week I did something that should be normal but has not been typical for me in the last few months. On Saturday, I put my headphones on, closed my email and IM programs, and just did some of the programming that I needed to do for work.

I was surprised how much I could get done without all the distractions. It was actually really fun too. It helped me remember what I really like about programming and why I majored in computer science.

There are some artistic aspects to developing software. There is art behind the code itself that is difficult to describe to someone who doesn't program. However, when you see well-written code it can be refreshing - like looking at a piece of art. Also, when you finally run your program and everything works like it should there is a great feeling like you've created something and it is good. I think developing can be beautiful. My employees would attest to this - my favorite question to ask them when they tell me they've completed their projects is "Is it pretty?". I love it when it is.

Artist Night 4a - Emptiness

Artist night 4 was was of the most exciting ones yet. I did absolutely nothing! No, not really, but the goal was to do nothing. This was fairly difficult for me since I normally try to keep myself busy. Here's how nothing went down.

First, I always have a lot of junk floating around in my head. I'm sure everyone does. I learned about mind dumps when I read through "Getting Things Done" a few years ago. I try to do a mind dump every once in a while and I've been surprised at how well they work for clearing all that junk out. Basically, all you do is write all the stuff you have floating around in your head down on paper. As soon as it's on paper, it's out of your mind and you are free to think about other things. My mind dump only took about half an hour.

Next, I put in my noise canceling headphones in. I bought them a while ago to use when I travel on airplanes. They're great for that, but they're also great for just blocking out all the extra noise in my house. So I put those in and then turned on some meditation music. After about five minutes, I found I couldn't handle the meditation music, so I turned that off and just sat in silence.

Then I did absolutely nothing. I just tried to sit there with a clear mind. It was very relaxing, at least at first. For the first half hour or so, my mind was clear and everything was happy. Then ideas started coming back into my head and I decided to explore them rather than force them back into nothingness.

What I found was very interesting. I have some very big anger issues lurking around. I'm not really an angry person at all, these just might be things that I have bottled up and left to rot. I think it would be interesting to try and address these things. I'm still deciding on the best course of action. I believe that anger is helpful. At least, it helps me to know that something isn't right. I don't think it's right release your anger on someone else, but I think it is helpful if it drives you to do something to correct a problem. In the next little while, I'll see if I can come up with a good plan for addressing the issues I've discovered.

Overall, I think it was a spectacular night. I don't often encounter the dark side of Mike (unless it's been a few hours since I've eaten, then I get impatient and grumpy, but I think that's understandable). I wonder if the angry Mike can be creative too, there's an interesting thought. I'll explore that later.

Artist Night 2! The Mall

Artist night this week did not go as planned, but it was still great fun. I had scheduled to go take some pictures outside. I had even timed things just right so I would be outside to catch golden hour. Unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate and it was rainy outside. So Plan B was implemented. However, there was no actual Plan B planned, so it was a spur of the moment plan. I went to the mall to walk around and take some pictures there instead of taking them outside. It didn't turn out too well because some of the stores didn't like people taking pictures inside. And I felt too creepy taking pictures of people without them knowing. It was still an interesting night. I'd count it as a night of exploring the art of marketing.

The most fascinating thing for me at the mall was the weird advertisements that the stores had. Here's an example:

This was at a clothing store. I don't understand how dressing up a male mannequin in three pairs of pants and caution tape would help them sell their clothes. Let's try to sell clothes by having the mannequin do it wrong. I imagine wearing three pairs of pants would be dreadfully uncomfortable. Plus, it's not like you can display all three at the same time, it's only the outer one that people see.

I think the shoe store was pretty silly as well. All the graphics in the store showed the top half of their models. None of them showed shoes at all! How does that help you sell shoes? They should have been pictures of happy people wearing the shoes. Pictures of smiling people can be used for selling just about anything. I took some pictures of that store too, but they turned out too blurry.

The next interesting part for me was to observe the strange things that stores sell. Here's two of my favorite. They're favorites because they're so awful. (Thank you Tai Pan Trading for selling these wonders.)



First, we have a golden head. Not just any head, a slightly misshapen and fairly ugly golden head. You can also get a matching beaten up golden cup to go with it. I can imagine seeing this type of thing at Universal Studios, but not at a home decor store. If you're selling this kinds of stuff, you also need to sell a leather jacket and whip to go with it. I wonder if people actually buy it. I hope not.

Unfortunately, they had things even stranger than the golden head combo. Like this thing. If you've ever wanted a wing on a post, now you know where to get one. Oh, don't worry, they're not likely to run out of them. They have a shelf covered with about 20 of them, so they're not likely to run out by the time you get over there.

Additionally, you can buy an ugly old fashioned wooden wall clock shaped like a boat propeller. There's a whole stack of those as well. They were even on special (imagine that).

The mall wasn't all bad. I found two things that really made me smile. First was this most excellent t-shirt. Hello Kitty as a zombie? how can you get any better than that? I'll tell you, have a couple variations of Hello Kitty as a zombie! If I had a girlfriend, I'd get her one of each. (Two or three of each if she really wanted it.) I'm tempted to get one for myself, just for the heck of it.

Finally, there was the chocolate store. I LOVE chocolate and I hadn't noticed this one before. It's probably been there for years, but as I've said, I don't go to the mall very often. They sell packages of chocolate that you can melt to put in molds. That's going to be my artist night for next week actually. I bought some Halloween themed molds which should arrive sometime soon. I can't wait. It also reminded me of my chocolate making friend who I get to see this weekend. Sweet!

That's it for this week. The mall is definitely an interesting place. If I were more courageous, I'd post some of the more interesting pictures I took. Let's just say people are very interesting. Especially when they don't know people are taking pictures of them...

And just for fun, I found another interesting site when I was checking my spelling of the word 'awful.'

Artist Night - The Return!

It's been a while since I've had an artist night. I have been distracted with other things happening in my life. Lots of traveling, taking tests, applying to schools and such. But now thing's have calmed down some, so I'll get to do fun things again.

Artist night this week was about making video games. I've been wanting to try it for a while, and I got into 3D math and matrices for a while when I was programming with OpenGL. I realized I'd have a whole lot to program if I really wanted to make a game though, so I started looking for game making programs that could handle physics, collision detection, lighting, and all that other good stuff. I came across two that looked promising: Shiva 3D and Unity 3D. Of the two, Unity seemed to be a little more developed and had better documentation, so I gave it a try. I might try out Shiva in the future - it is much cheaper.

The first hour of artist night was spent going through some tutorials and kind of figuring out the program. There's not much to show for that time, it was mostly just playing around.

The second hour, I actually made something. It's definitely not good, but I can't complain for spending less than an hour on it. There's trees and grass that blows in the wind and gravity! If I were to program all that myself, it would take months. I'm happy that I'm not writing it all myself.

One of the features of Unity is that you can compile your game into a web application. I tried it out and it didn't seem to work so well. However, I did build it as a Windows executable which you can download here. Again, don't expect too much, but try not to fall off the edge of the world. Oh, and I promise I didn't add any viruses (or did I?).