I am in IT, so there is always something to be done. Web sites have to be built, servers can be maintained, phones can be optimized, computers can be prepared for issuance to individuals. Even when I’m not working per se – I’m still working – reading tech journals, manuals, white papers and their ilk, and if not that, then I’m working on completely unrelated things, such as websites for friends and family or basic design work or photography, with the occasional hour or two of painting, when I’m not completely exhausted.

It used to be, I’d get done at work, and then I’d go home and play games – often with others – and I defined that as social interaction. You who haven’t actually seen me in quite a long time would be surprised to know that I spend a grand total of about one and a half hours a week playing video games now. This is a far cry from the three to four hours a day that I used to devote to that stuff. The only reason I play at all anymore is because I have a sort of “game night” with a bunch of guys from church where we deviate from our Christian values for a while to talk smack, insult, and fill each other with lead. I’ve even noticed that my time in those game nights is becoming shorter and shorter, much to the Scott’s chagrin.

Unfortunately, I have not replaced this wasted time with something amazingly constructive – I’ve replaced it with work. And it continues to get worse.

Yes, I have a massive website to finish building – essentially iTunes in web form – and that is important – but what will I do once it’s complete? It is simply the current “event” that I am using to fill the hours between office and sleep – something else equally hazardous will simply fill that void once it’s complete. One can go to sleep at 2AM and wake at 7:30 for only so long before it begins to have a permanent toll on them – and already I can feel the fact that I become irritable easily, and about ten years grouchier than my current age at ever-increasing times.

I’ve got no reason to do otherwise – the easy route is for me to plop into a chair for an additional 6 hours and mindlessly plug away at some task or another after I get home – I am away from the distracting chats and emails of requests to fix things or solve problems, it requires no immediate effort on my part, and initially it seems like it’s a good thing – I’m being constructive, right?

Unfortunately, it begins to have it’s toll. What once took a few hours to accomplish can now take half as long again due to fatigue and exhaustion. What I used to be able to do in half a day begins to take 3/4 of one, and all those extra hours that I end up putting in only have a marginal increase in my production, but a massive increase in my snarky-ness, and I end up sliding down a never ending slope of making it worse – and at some point I’m going to reach the limits of physical exhaustion.

I’ve broken free once before – about two months ago, I gave up everything electronic for a week If i wasn’t at work and that was a truly insightful (and spiritual) experience – I was more productive both during the day and at night – before I went to bed at a very early 10:30. But it is so easy for me to fall back into the habit of late nights.

It’s no wonder that people from long ago were the more skilled artists and amazing inventors – they didn’t have the distractions that plague us in the “developed world” today. Before the lightbulb, people went to bed, on average, at 8PM, ready to rise with the sun the next day for a full day’s work. What’s simply amazing is that I can block all of the irrelevant web (which I do, most of the time) and when the fatigue sets in i can be enthralled by an application’s preference pane for a mind-numbing 15 minutes. I still get in about 10-12 hours worth of work in a day, but it takes me 14 hours to do it, and I’d rather do 8 hours of work in a day – from start to finish – and be done. I get tired at 10:30 to 10:45 every night, but I know that if i can power through it, I’ll have my “second wind” in about fifteen minutes, and then I can keep coding until 2AM.

My weekends are full of sleeping – unless I have something I have to do on a Saturday, I won’t get up before three. Every other week, I spend the majority of that weekend volunteering at church – Perimeter – in the tech booth, running the video switcher, and the fact that I have to be at the church at 8 on Sunday doesn’t help the fatigue either.

My point is this: I’m setting myself up to burn out and crash hard – I’ve little social interaction and that is confined mostly to iChat with people that I see way to little of in person – and I’m getting no stress relief except for my fairly regular trips to the gym. It’s just “easier” in my mind to just work, and what started out as a bit of fun – code – turns in to an all out destructive addiction, and leads down a path of anti-social behavior. While Walden made a point to hermit himself away in order to gain insight (and perhaps, to go a little crazy), I am hermiting myself away simply out of a failure to do otherwise. I pray for a wife, and that God would provide me the necessary insight and scenario in order to fulfill that dream – but I now realize that I should be more focused on that which is preventing me from ever being in a situation where I could make inroads in that direction – women do not just fall out of the sky, and I’ve gotten myself so fatigued that I cannot even begin to notice when a woman were interested in me, let alone interact with one at a level to notice said interest. It’s a vicious cycle, and one that needs to stop.

So, tonight, I’m going to make a point to go to bed once I get tired. Yes, this may have an adverse effect on my ability to perform at work for a day or two, but I’ve got labor day weekend to recover from this, and I think, in the span of no more than a week, I’ll be doubling my output dung the now ’shorter’ workday. So here’s to early to bed, early to rise. It would appear that there is some truth to that old statement – surely, it will at least, help me to be healthy, and perhaps even wise. 10:30 it is. Well, unless I have a lot of work to do, then perhaps 11:30. But no later than 12. Or 1.

There’s always work to be done. I just need to make sure I don’t do that work when I’m not at work, or at the very least, minimize it’s impact and time usage significantly. I’m not living missionally at the moment – yes my work is faith based, there’s no doubt about that, but when said work is all that I do, it is in no way Kingdom focused.

There is always work to be done.

~/A\V/[Dev]

They appear below

Please, if you have any comments or criticisms, let me know below!  I REALLY hate the orange thing. It’s sloppy, and messy, but it’s a recovery from something else that I totally borked, so i guess I should be happy that I recovered the canvas at all…

Cheers

~/A\V/

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS!
The contents of this post contains details relative to the plotline and story arc of the TV Show Stargate SG-1.  If you have not seen this TV show and these episodes, and intend to see them, you should probably not continue past this point.
You have been warned.

Stargate SG-1, Season 8, “Moebius”, Pts. 1 and 2.

The whole of the two episodes is a gigantic contradiction.  IF, by way of traveling back in time, getting their ship discovered by the Jaffa in ancient Egypt, and burying the ZPM and a video tape describing their plight in a tomb in Giza, SG-1 managed to re-write history from that point up to the current day, including having the original Stargate being removed from the planet by Ra, leading to the SGC having never been created in the first place, and therefore, preventing the creation of the team SG-1, then by doing so, that would have also caused the events that they had themselves done to not exist.  Meaning that the alternate timeline in which Drs. Jackson and Carter are civilians who are then tasked with figuring out why, exactly, they are on said tape could not possibly have occurred, rendering those events also null.

All this to say, if, by altering history, SG-1 managed to prevent the formation of the SGC and thus their subsequent time-traveling mishaps then they would never have gone to the Giza area/time in the first place, meaning that the current timeline, with the nerdy and self-esteem lacking Carter and the just plain odd Jackson would be the ONLY timeline, albeit sans videotape, ZPM, ancient “gate-ship” and suddenly-discovered Stargate.  In other words – this plot line makes about as much sense as does the fact that the scientists in the original feature film magically figured out everything scientific (wormholes, computer control systems, interface) relating to the Stargate before knowing what it actually was.  Not to mention that when the new-timeline Jack, Sam, and Teal’C go back to ancient Giza a second time, the whole thing just completely unravels.

In the end, by re-creating the timeline, they cause themselves to cease existing in their current time (3000 B.C.), meaning that the future events cannot happen, meaning that they could never have gone back in time in the first place, meaning that they could not have caused the alternate timeline to occur.  By re-writing time, they essentially delete all events relating to it.  I, for one, believe that this would cause time to continue from the origination point as if they had never actually left their time in the first place, floating above earth in their green ship, assuming, of course, that the universe has a “graceful restart,” a la Apache (the webserver).  Otherwise, i think the universe would just eat itself.

Granted, the show manages to explain it all away, in a rather winding method (hence the name Moebius I assume) but the underlying event of the burial of the video tape in the tomb should not have happened.

This sort of paradox pretty much guarantees that time-travel cannot possibly be possible.

Don’t mess with time.  It makes my head hurt.

ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, GRAFFITI STYLE, 1 EACH

Here’s the piece’s explanation:

ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, GRAFFITI STYLE, COUNT 1 EACH is based, mostly i think, on my Military history – I have a weird happy place when I think of the drab, bland, unfeeling and generic manner in which the military expresses what something is.

I thought to myself one day, what if art were approached in the same manner? Where the artist expresses himself in a way that doesn’t expose any immediate emotion, but at the same time, you feel as if the work itself has a purpose, much as the object in the box that the military has designated “MISSILE, GROUND TO AIR, STINGER TYPE, ONE EACH” contains within it something far more powerful and inherently useful than it’s utilitarian description would have one believe?

Perhaps I’m grasping at straws, perhaps not. Either way, I feel as if this actually means something, at least to me, despite all outward appearances.

Not actually painted on a wall, because I find computers far less illegal to tag.

I’ve got quite a few theological articles, Photoshop techniques, PHP nifties, Flash hacks, and CSS tricks to share, and once I’ve finished with AS2.0 (the site I’m currently building for work), I will be thrilled to share what I have learned during that process.  All the new material I’ve been developing is outlined in one of my Moleskines (no IP, of course, don’t be ridiculous 8]  ), as are the theological passages in another Moleskine.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some PHP to get back to…

Actually, I should probably go to sleep… =/

With all the apps that I have downloaded for the iPad and iPhone, there are very, very few that truly stand out in being able to do exactly what I need, with no fuss, no errors, and no trouble.  iSSH(iTunes Link, Universal Application, $9.99) is one of those applications.  With an extremely simple, yet intuitive interface, it allows you to access a server via SSH (or even VNC over SSH!) while on the go or when you need to restart a service or even the whole box and you aren’t near a computer or (heaven forbid) a dedicated internet connection and using a 3G connection.

The Login Screen to the iSSH application

iSSH, in all respects, is a very basic app. It’s not flashy, it’s not glamorous, and it’s certainly not about to blow you away with amazing graphics – but, then again, it wouldn’t do it’s job very well if it were overloaded with all of the new shiny-buttony things that developers seem to think will make their app amazing these days.  Sporting the ability to store multiple connection profiles organized either singly or within folders, and allowing you to log into a server with one tap, it gets you to where you need to be rapidly and without hesitation – there is no noticeable lag when using the app (except for the delay when connecting to the server, of course).  Each connection includes a convenient indicator light to let you know it’s online status, and has the option of storing the username and password combination in it’s configuration as well, which, in most cases would be incredibly insecure.  iSSH, however, provides the ability to lock the entire application out with a four digit passcode, which might not seem like much, but if your iPad is protected by a passcode (with a 10-try lockout, no less) it would be rather difficult for any would-be ‘hacker’ to gain access to the server information in any respect.

As would be the case with any SSH utility, the real test comes once you’ve logged into the server, and are actually working with the system.  This is where iSSH really stands out – it’s fluid, responsive, includes “extra” keys (CTRL, ALT, etc) in addition to the iPad/iPhone keyboard, and has a very intuitive pie-wheel style interface for commands such as arrow keys and page up/page down.  The entire iPad screen is used for the Terminal screen, the iPad keyboard comes up over the interface with a selectable level of opacity, allowing the text to flow under the keyboard.  This was, honestly, annoying at first. Once I remembered that I do indeed know where the keys are on a keyboard, I was able to comfortably reduce the opacity to almost nothing, giving the application a truly Star Trek interface feel – where you interact seamlessly with a device.

I don’t really use the VNC feature much, preferring a Command Line Interface (CLI) to a graphical one, but I did give it a test drive to see how it works, and it seems to be pretty much fully functional.  It’s honestly not something that I would ever use, so trying to review it properly would be fruitless.

I’ve found that I am more and more frequently carrying only the iPad and leaving my laptop sitting on my desk at work when I need to provide support to others and attend meetings, and this application has certainly helped me with that ability immensely.  Instead of having to lug around a computer in order to fix a problem that might arise, I can do it effortlessly with iSSH.  And that, alone, makes it worth it’s $10 price tag.

~/AV/

If you’re using a public internet connection – be smart about it!  No amount of security in an application can prevent a man-in-the-middle attack – so know your internets well!

Additional Screenshots:

The iSSH Configuration Screen

The iSSH Server Selection Screen.

iSSH, Logged in, running Top (keyboard opacity set at ~50% for the purpose of visibility here)

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, on with this, the first review!

Ever since I got my hands on an iPad, I’ve been hunting for the perfect handwritten note taking application.  There are many to choose from, and the screenshots in the appstore always seem to make them look just about perfect for the task at hand – but once you have your shiny new app installed, you often quickly realize that you downloaded something that is complete garbage and a waste of your time – or worse – your hard earned coin.  The reviews in the store can be skewed, seeded, or even non-existent for newer apps, making that purchase an even harder decision.

This is not the case with Penultimate (iTunes Link).  This application, while it has a long way to go until it reaches “penultimate” status (you gotta admit it’s a really good name), is definitely on it’s way to being quite a useful tool for quickly jotting down notes and sketching quick, low detail diagrams for various different purposes.  There are a few limitations to the interface and utility of the application, unfortunately, but these are by no means a game-changer – it does exactly what it’s advertised to do, and I’ve found no better substitute for it yet.

All in all, the interface of Penultimate is very intuitive, with simple controls and easily accessible buttons. Unlike much of it’s competition, it actually has an undo/redo combination which is actually a whole lot easier to utilize than trying to switch to the eraser tool and attempting to carefully erase a mistake – but if you happen to realize the mistake some time later – the eraser in this app is very responsive and accurate, fixing mistakes is a breeze.  The developer seems to have a very good understanding of the API that drives the iPad’s touch screen responsiveness, and tracking your finger or other instrument (like a Pogo Sketch) is smooth and very elegant.  The “ink” that you lay down is that from a faux gel pen, and writing faster leaves that telltale gel “skitter” across the page, adding an extra, and unexpected, sense of realism. There are three paper types to choose from – lines, grid, and plain – allowing you to work on a surface that is more comfortable for you.  You are able to store multiple named notebooks – each with an apparently unlimited number of pages – meaning that you can have some organization to your mad scribbling.

That said – there are a few areas that could use improvement.  There is only one color of ink – black – and while that’s not really a huge snag – this is a note taking application, and not a sketchpad after all – it would be nice to be able to switch to red or blue ink for the purpose of emphasizing a particular point or section.  There is also only one pen size, and again – while this is not necessary to make this a complete application – the larger ink size, while ideal for writing with a finger, seems to take up just too much room when using a more accurate stylus-type instrument on the iPad, leading to note pages that have far less information on them than they could have, resulting in more pages to flip through later while flipping through the notebook.

Overall, however, Penultimate shines as a note taking app, and, not only was it the first application that I downloaded for the iPad, it’s also been the best in it’s class – I have still not found anything that will do what it does better – and with a few features that I would love to see added, while it may not be penultimate yet – it certainly is out of all the other notes offerings on the app store.  I have a feeling that, no matter what I try next, I will never find something quite as simple to use, intuitive, and fast as this app is.

~/AV/

Additional Screenshots:

Penultimate in Portrait Mode

Penultimate in Landscape Mode

This is actually quite easy with a method called parent, utilizing the hierarchy of your MovieClips to access variables from any number of levels away from your current execution realm.

To access a variable – let’s call it myVariable – from one level up in your tree, use this:

trace( MovieClip( parent ).myVariable );

Similarly, to access a variable two or more MovieClips up in the tree, nest the parent calls accordingly.

trace( MovieClip( parent.parent ).myVariable );

You can do this ad-infinitum to the root of the whole project if you so desire, but in this case, again, I’d recommend that you read the article mentioned above.

To access other MovieClips, the process is very much the same, except instead of a variable name, you would use a MovieClip’s Instance Name followed by the property you wanted to adjust, as such:

MovieClip( parent ).myMovieClip.visible = true;

-or-

MovieClip( parent.parent.parent ).myMovieClip.gotoAndStop( 1 );

etc.

Hope this helps someone,

Cheers,

~/A\V/

If you need to work with a variable from the Main Timeline (formerly _root in AS2) in another MovieClip in the same project, you can do this by using the “root as MovieClip” property.  This allows you to load elements from what was _root into your current working MC. (If you only need to go one or two levels up, read this article)

Quick and dirty, in your new MC, you can test this functionality with the following:

trace((root as MovieClip).myVariable);

Replace “myVariable” with the variable you wish to access from the Main Timeline, of course.

Digging a little deeper, we can assign this variable to a more… suitably accessible medium by using the following (assuming that the variable type is String for this example, use the typecast that you need in a situation):

var myNewVariable:String = (root as MovieClip).myVariable;

Again, replace “myVariable” (and variations therein) with your own names.

Hope that this helps someone!

Cheers,

~/A\V/

My iPhone goes everywhere with me.  It’s my connection to the world of the internet, the millions of people, places, news sources, cool new things, and every other little distraction in my life.  XKCD, Wikipedia (that one’s a doozy), failblog, Facebook and twitter – which i update sporadically, admittedly, but they are massively distracting nonetheless – the ability to know what’s going on in friends’ lives in 140 character snippets is surprisingly attractive.

I lose touch.  The distractions are a growing cancer on my soul – pulling my focus to the world and it’s interactions, and away from where it should be – on God.  Now that’s not to say that I am against the world, and the things it has to offer – I believe that much is good, so long as it is taken in moderation, but the old adage stands true – “too much of a good thing…”  Let’s just say that with the more toys we have, the more likely we are to worship them, and the knowledge, entertainment, distraction, or whatever other aspect that they bring to our lives instead of our Father.

That said, I’m going to try an experiment.  Something that I have never done before, something that isn’t a new idea, at all, but new to me.  I’m going to see how much I am missing due to these parasites stealing my attention from where it belongs.  I am going to sever myself from my interface with the world, at least when I am not at work.  Starting tomorrow, Wednesday, February the 17th, 2010 at 0900hrs, and ending Wednesday, February the 24th, 2010 at 0900hrs I will no longer be involving myself with communications devices and methods outside of my normal work hours – and will be using said devices only for work during those same hours.

I will be disabling email from reaching my phone – at all – for the next week, and will be using parental controls to block access to the web and the apps on my phone.  My phone will be, for the first time in 2 years, just a phone (albeit with a very expensive dataplan).  Twitteriffic will be disabled, and Facebook will be unavailable.  If anyone needs to reach me after 6PM, it would be in your best interest to call me, as I will not be checking mails.  My xBox will be dismantled, the harddrive stored in a separate location, so that i cannot get my instant fix of Netflix.  I do have a computer set up at home with the basics – Cyberduck, Textwrangler, and Safari, so that, in the event an emergency does crop up I will be able to do something about it.

I will have my camera and my voice recorder, and I will still have a phone with which I could attempt to become a lot more social again.  I won’t be getting “news” from people’s status updates, and if i want to know what’s going on with them, I’m going to have to make an effort.

So, here’s to a week of living distraction free, with the time to focus on the things that truly matter in life.  I pray that it leads me in the right direction, and that I realize what all is going on around me, that I have allowed to pass me by for so long, and that I am properly putting myself into a position to become stronger in my walk with Christ.

And if anyone wants to grab a beer, hang out, or just talk, I’m definitely up for it =]

~/A\V/

Postscript: There will be one final twitter/FB post announcing this to everyone, so that they know that I’m not actively ignoring them, around 0830hrs tomorrow morning.