Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

Pen practice

It's like a dark, uh, splotchy thing.

Tweaking my pen settings. Dialed it in so that little-to-no pressure starts at 1-2%, and I can still run the gamut of values without pressing super hard to get full opacity. This abstract thing grew out of repeated pen tests as I was messing with the settings, and, well, I kinda like it. Also moderately happy with the pen response now, for  a change.

But I am reminded that my decade-old tablet still performs better than this out of the box, and that takes the shine right off everything.

Intuos4, still a jerk

You’d think I’d exhaust all the possible complaints I could have with a piece of hardware I purchased almost a year ago, but no. Still angry. Recently I pulled up the driver diagnostic window while the pen was just touching the surface and noticed this:

You damned numbers.

31%? I am using 1/3 of the available pressure just by resting the pen on the surface?

Now to be fair, I just reset it to the defaults, and the grip pen is not light by any stretch of the imagination; an HB pencil this is not. But seriously? Thirty one percent of the pressure can be registered by the weight of the pen alone?

Maybe this makes sense in some technical way. Maybe I am just leaping at every chance to complain about my disappointing piece of $400 hardware.

My feeling, though, is that this is far too high for when you’re not actively applying pressure. Think of it this way: The Intuos4 can register 2048 levels of pressure. That means that at the default setting, the pen registers level 635 when you’re not even pressing down. Were I a scientist, I would say something scientific about the data at this point, like, “dang”.

Can this be combated with the pen settings? Probably. In fact, I think that’s my new “settings goal” for the tablet. Maybe I can finally dial it in to something I don’t want to bludgeon with an ox shank.

Whoops. Heh.

Yesterday was supposed to be my last official daily for my PDOG exercise, but I kinda blew it. Also note that this requires you to define “kinda” as “totally” for the duration of this paragraph.

I won’t bore you with the details*. I’ll post the final PDOG entry tonight after work, then I’ll throw a collage of the whole 28-day run together so we can see if I actually improved at all.

^{*I like to save up my boring and then really go to town every few weeks.}

It seemed so real

I had a dream where I was part of a special forces team with Kari Byron and Grant Imahara from MythBusters. We were sent to the pyramid level from Goldeneye on the N64, and when we got there, it was full of couches, which we hid behind (we were special forces, you see).

Saddam Hussein was there and he, too, was hiding behind a couch, which leads me to believe he also had special forces training. Like all good, deceased dictators, he chased us with a rocket launcher. He didn’t shoot it at us; he just chased us with it, cootie-style.

Then Kari started shaking, and pink GoGurt started pouring out of her joints, and her arms fell off. That was when I realized she was a robot all along. I can only assume this was Grant’s doing.

“Downtown” from Little Shop of Horrors started to play then, and it is still on repeat in my head.

I didn’t exactly wake up screaming, but if I ever had any plans to try GoGurt, they are dashed to the ground.

Fixes, May 2010 Edition

A happy accident today at work made me realize the problem with my RSS feed. It was a one-line fix in my php. Now the 6 of you can open my feed in FF and IE! Yay!

Also note that this is probably the only time I will ever say “IE” and “yay” back to back.

This weekend I got rid of some redundant links and fixed the old redirects on my splash page (which I’m thinking of killing off entirely), and I’m going to try to get a working sitemap so I can expand my readership* to 7 or 8 people.

Somewhere in there I’m also going to become a better artist, get all the Achievements in Condemned: Criminal Origins, and graciously decline Michelle Yeoh’s heartfelt marriage proposal.

I mean, I’m flattered, but come on, Michelle. You know I’m a happily married man… you foxy, butt-kicking mama, you.

^{*I will totally settle for lookership, by the way. Don’t feel obligated to actually read.}