Books and related things can help creative people work their way through those times when they suffer from the equivalent of "writer's block". They can also help 'blocked' people discover that they can be creative.
Actually, there is a 'creativity' industry out there where people teach people techniques that enhance creativity.
Check out Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" as a start. The book is a twelve step program to releasing your creativity.
Edward de Bono is another person in the 'creativity' industry, one who has been writing books on the topic for forty or so years.
Of course, a major part of creativity involves imagination, which can be limited by your upbringing. If, when a child, you are told that something you have imagined is 'stupid' because it doesn't exist or it is impractical, you tend to shy away from using your imagination. That is why a lot of 'remedial creativity' exercises attempt to get you to use your imagination again, through what seems to be childish activities.
Doing diagrams and such might be stupid given your style, but there are those of us that think visually. (My initial college training was in architectural design where thinking visually is essential.)
When I'm working on something that is fairly complex, I sometimes resort to various graphic techniques for the really hairy parts. Nothing pretty or usable as documentation though.
I then convert it into pseudo-code as kind of a front end logic check. If the flow still works, I know I'm on he right track.
At this point it is a matter of coding and testing, after adding in all the boiler plate code needed to support the problem solving part.
Of course, there are also times when I go straight to the pseudo-code, skipping the visual design side of things. This happens when pondering the problem comes up with a variety of solutions.
I did my first website back in 1998, working off a Dummies book as I recall. It wasn't too fancy and it didn't have much content, but it gave me enough training to be able to easily succeed in a few HTML classes I took a couple of years later.
My ideal coding/creativity time is early in the morning, from about 2:00 AM to about 5:00 AM, after having slept for a few hours. I sometimes wonder if there is such a thing as 'mental' noise, which is reduced at that time of the day.
The ideal audio environment is one where some instrumental music is playing in the background, loud enough to cover background sounds. New age instrumentals seem to work best, with a mix mellow and upbeat selections.
The ideal visual/tactile environment is one that is relatively uncluttered, to avoid distractions. That includes NOT having anybody around, human or otherwise, even if they stay clear of the area.
I've played CoH for about three and a half years now, mainly in hero mode.
I've found that if you play on the high usage servers, Freedom and Virtue, you get lag at times, especially during special events. But if you steer clear of them, the response is pretty good, even with dialup.
As far as acting like a bad buy in the club, Pocket D, it is meant to be a place where heroes and villains can party and go on joint missions, which can be interesting.
Not being a Player Versus Player type, I don't know much about those zones. If you are high enough level, you can have a good guy vs bad guy conflict.
As far as having problems moving about different zones, a player usually tries getting a travel power that allows them to change elevation, which is usually the biggest barrier. You also have to worry about level differences between you and the foes in the zone. A lowbie can navigate through a high hazard area IF they are careful.
I seem to recall that a certain Senator Proxmire gave his 'Golden Fleece Award' to a group that was researching methane emissions from cattle. At the time he considered it to be 'frivolous' research. (He also supported the dairy industry in his home state of Wisconsin. HE should have been awarded the Platinum Porkbarrel Award'.)
Isn't it odd that said research might help reduce green house emissions.
This would definitely put a crimp in the income that people could earn from things that are easily copied.
Big name authors would have to have a day job to make up for the fact that their works could be distributed for 'free' by the first person that makes a copy of their work.
Small time musicians, those that publish their own work, could have their works 'lifted' by groups with bigger audiences. The other groups, making most of their money by concerts and direct sales, would benefit by having new material that they got for 'free'.
Artists and photographers might have things a little easier IF they sell the services of creating art and photographs as opposed to the end products. They could argue that lack of copyrights means they have to get full value front end.
Unfortunately, while in search of news, the media can trample a person's reputation so that a large percentage of viewers 'know' that a person is 'guilty'. The media seems to forget that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, at least in the United States.
There were times during the OJ Simpson trial in the 90's that I wondered if anybody remembered that fact of law. Guilty or not, he was being 'convicted' by the media. I sometimes wonder if the 'not guilty' verdict was partially a reaction to the media 'conviction', in addition to the other problems with the trial.
Since car color is relatively trivial when it comes to operations, such a ban could be implemented without having much of an impact on other states. They would just avoid shipping dark colored cars not meeting the reflectivity requirements into California.
It is the mechanical systems that are much more expensive to vary by vehicle.
Considering the increase in the number of cars in California, the fact that the smog isn't as bad as it was in the 1960's is a tribute to the smog control practices.
With space technology by Burt Rutan, you don't need a lot of equipment to do a simple Earth to space and back again type flight. You just lease some American technology from a British company.
A good photographer can take better pictures with a marginal camera than a lousy photographer can take with a top of the line camera system. Composition is more important than hardware.
The list describes what I call my Digital Instamatic. It is an 8MP Canon PowerShot SD850 IS that I carry with me more often than the pair of Digital Rebel SLRs I use for more serious photography.
I deal with its limits because it does the job AND it is available. It can get frustrating at times though.
When I want to do serious photography, I get out my tripod and SLRs and shoot in RAW format. I have full control of the results and much better optics, especially for telephoto shots. One of my favorite techniques is to take portrait grade photos from thirty or more feet away.
Thinking about it, I carry more weight/volume in batteries for the digital SLRs than the point and shoot occupies. But I was doing something similar when I swapped out my Instamatic for my first film SLR camera.
If you are a point and shoot photographer who doesn't plan on printing things larger than a 4x6 as it comes out of the camera, 3MP is adequate and 6MP is overkill. One of the biggest problems will be dealing with shutter lag found in point and shoot style digital cameras. Another would be handling different lighting conditions.
If you are a prosumer type who prints larger pictures and may even do some cropping, more megapixels is better to a point. Odds are you have a digital SLR and have gotten rid of the shutter lag problem. One of your biggest problems at this point may be how fast the camera downloads to memory. (I've missed pictures because the camera is busy moving images to the media.)
Pros will want more megapixels to a point, though they might prefer better low light and high speed capabilities over megapixels if they do event photography. Studio photography gives you better control of the conditions and allows you to use large format cameras that give you the high megapixel images.
At some point the megapixel wars will be over because the sensor chips reach a physical limit in terms of being able to handle incoming light.
While I'm pro metric, I wouldn't go so far to say that going metric would prevent aircraft from falling from the sky, or prevent PCs from hanging and it wouldn't have that much of an impact on the global economic crisis. Most of the problems in these areas are due to human error, greed and/or environment.
Now there ARE those instances, like one of the Mars missions, that failed due to metric/imperial conflicts.
Diamond Parking controls a lot of the parking in Spokane, Washington and I have had to deal with ticket problems. In one case I deposited the proper amount while in a parking lot that was almost empty and got ticketed anyway. Thankfully there was a way to contact them at the time and they believed my story since it was my first supposed violation. (I think I found the number in the phone book.)
The biggest problem with the lot was that it didn't have a way to provide evidence that you paid for parking.
Now in a newer, larger lot, there is a machine that allows you to pay for parking with a credit card AND generates a receipt you can post in your car and use for tax purposes.
Talk about coincidence. A number of the staff in my department at work got into a conversation about old games and brought up such classics as Zork and Planetfall. And then, on the bus home, another group started talking about the 'bad' old days.
Could it be that the gaming industry is suffering from remake-itis like Hollywood? Or does improved technology justify remakes?
Try your best to support your team and help them do the best job possible. That includes protecting them from upper management demands that are less than wise.
You know both the business and the technical sides and there is a chance that your programmers may know something about both sides too. Listen to them and they will listen to you.
Whiles Starks refers to the NEA, he could easily be making an assumption that the teacher is a member of the NEA or a union. Just because Starks knows Linux doesn't mean that he knows the ins and outs of any given school district.
In fact, given his phrasing, he seems to think that the National Education Association is a union or a union like organization. (ie 'spouting the union line')
Now unless being a member of the NEA keeps you from holding a teaching job in Texas, there is a possibility that the teacher in question IS a NEA member.
I have my doubts though. The response of the teacher tells me that she may be one of those drones who shouldn't be teaching because she is no longer learning.
Would the media companies provide a refund if I could prove that I didn't use the so called services they offer?
If it were something like providing 'free' bus rides or 'free' access to specialized recreation facilities, then I can get along with paying for services that I may or may not use. Those freebies are aimed at improving the health and well being of a community.
Being forced to 'improve' the bottom line of media companies, or face the threat of lawsuits, seems like extortion.
I provide software and hardware support for a college campus that has a range of operating systems and application packages. I'm running a Mac that I managed to get to boot in OS 10.4, OS 10.5, Win XP and Vista.
It took a bit of finagling to get the quad boot setup to work because the copy of Vista I had didn't want to install after 10.4, 10.5 and XP were in place. I eventually had to pull the drives for 10.4 and XP to get it to work.
It wasn't the most elegant solution but it worked.
Slashdot Mirror
Books and related things can help creative people work their way through those times when they suffer from the equivalent of "writer's block". They can also help 'blocked' people discover that they can be creative.
Actually, there is a 'creativity' industry out there where people teach people techniques that enhance creativity.
Check out Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" as a start. The book is a twelve step program to releasing your creativity.
Edward de Bono is another person in the 'creativity' industry, one who has been writing books on the topic for forty or so years.
Of course, a major part of creativity involves imagination, which can be limited by your upbringing. If, when a child, you are told that something you have imagined is 'stupid' because it doesn't exist or it is impractical, you tend to shy away from using your imagination. That is why a lot of 'remedial creativity' exercises attempt to get you to use your imagination again, through what seems to be childish activities.
Doing diagrams and such might be stupid given your style, but there are those of us that think visually. (My initial college training was in architectural design where thinking visually is essential.)
When I'm working on something that is fairly complex, I sometimes resort to various graphic techniques for the really hairy parts. Nothing pretty or usable as documentation though.
I then convert it into pseudo-code as kind of a front end logic check. If the flow still works, I know I'm on he right track.
At this point it is a matter of coding and testing, after adding in all the boiler plate code needed to support the problem solving part.
Of course, there are also times when I go straight to the pseudo-code, skipping the visual design side of things. This happens when pondering the problem comes up with a variety of solutions.
Very true!
I did my first website back in 1998, working off a Dummies book as I recall. It wasn't too fancy and it didn't have much content, but it gave me enough training to be able to easily succeed in a few HTML classes I took a couple of years later.
The Geocities sites are still up on this side of the Pacific but they aren't accepting new customers.
My ideal coding/creativity time is early in the morning, from about 2:00 AM to about 5:00 AM, after having slept for a few hours. I sometimes wonder if there is such a thing as 'mental' noise, which is reduced at that time of the day.
The ideal audio environment is one where some instrumental music is playing in the background, loud enough to cover background sounds. New age instrumentals seem to work best, with a mix mellow and upbeat selections.
The ideal visual/tactile environment is one that is relatively uncluttered, to avoid distractions. That includes NOT having anybody around, human or otherwise, even if they stay clear of the area.
I've played CoH for about three and a half years now, mainly in hero mode.
I've found that if you play on the high usage servers, Freedom and Virtue, you get lag at times, especially during special events. But if you steer clear of them, the response is pretty good, even with dialup.
As far as acting like a bad buy in the club, Pocket D, it is meant to be a place where heroes and villains can party and go on joint missions, which can be interesting.
Not being a Player Versus Player type, I don't know much about those zones. If you are high enough level, you can have a good guy vs bad guy conflict.
As far as having problems moving about different zones, a player usually tries getting a travel power that allows them to change elevation, which is usually the biggest barrier. You also have to worry about level differences between you and the foes in the zone. A lowbie can navigate through a high hazard area IF they are careful.
I seem to recall that a certain Senator Proxmire gave his 'Golden Fleece Award' to a group that was researching methane emissions from cattle. At the time he considered it to be 'frivolous' research. (He also supported the dairy industry in his home state of Wisconsin. HE should have been awarded the Platinum Porkbarrel Award'.)
Isn't it odd that said research might help reduce green house emissions.
This would definitely put a crimp in the income that people could earn from things that are easily copied.
Big name authors would have to have a day job to make up for the fact that their works could be distributed for 'free' by the first person that makes a copy of their work.
Small time musicians, those that publish their own work, could have their works 'lifted' by groups with bigger audiences. The other groups, making most of their money by concerts and direct sales, would benefit by having new material that they got for 'free'.
Artists and photographers might have things a little easier IF they sell the services of creating art and photographs as opposed to the end products. They could argue that lack of copyrights means they have to get full value front end.
Unfortunately, while in search of news, the media can trample a person's reputation so that a large percentage of viewers 'know' that a person is 'guilty'. The media seems to forget that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, at least in the United States.
There were times during the OJ Simpson trial in the 90's that I wondered if anybody remembered that fact of law. Guilty or not, he was being 'convicted' by the media. I sometimes wonder if the 'not guilty' verdict was partially a reaction to the media 'conviction', in addition to the other problems with the trial.
Since car color is relatively trivial when it comes to operations, such a ban could be implemented without having much of an impact on other states. They would just avoid shipping dark colored cars not meeting the reflectivity requirements into California.
It is the mechanical systems that are much more expensive to vary by vehicle.
Considering the increase in the number of cars in California, the fact that the smog isn't as bad as it was in the 1960's is a tribute to the smog control practices.
With space technology by Burt Rutan, you don't need a lot of equipment to do a simple Earth to space and back again type flight. You just lease some American technology from a British company.
Good points.
A good photographer can take better pictures with a marginal camera than a lousy photographer can take with a top of the line camera system. Composition is more important than hardware.
The list describes what I call my Digital Instamatic. It is an 8MP Canon PowerShot SD850 IS that I carry with me more often than the pair of Digital Rebel SLRs I use for more serious photography.
I deal with its limits because it does the job AND it is available. It can get frustrating at times though.
When I want to do serious photography, I get out my tripod and SLRs and shoot in RAW format. I have full control of the results and much better optics, especially for telephoto shots. One of my favorite techniques is to take portrait grade photos from thirty or more feet away.
Thinking about it, I carry more weight/volume in batteries for the digital SLRs than the point and shoot occupies. But I was doing something similar when I swapped out my Instamatic for my first film SLR camera.
If you are a point and shoot photographer who doesn't plan on printing things larger than a 4x6 as it comes out of the camera, 3MP is adequate and 6MP is overkill. One of the biggest problems will be dealing with shutter lag found in point and shoot style digital cameras. Another would be handling different lighting conditions.
If you are a prosumer type who prints larger pictures and may even do some cropping, more megapixels is better to a point. Odds are you have a digital SLR and have gotten rid of the shutter lag problem. One of your biggest problems at this point may be how fast the camera downloads to memory. (I've missed pictures because the camera is busy moving images to the media.)
Pros will want more megapixels to a point, though they might prefer better low light and high speed capabilities over megapixels if they do event photography. Studio photography gives you better control of the conditions and allows you to use large format cameras that give you the high megapixel images.
At some point the megapixel wars will be over because the sensor chips reach a physical limit in terms of being able to handle incoming light.
While I'm pro metric, I wouldn't go so far to say that going metric would prevent aircraft from falling from the sky, or prevent PCs from hanging and it wouldn't have that much of an impact on the global economic crisis. Most of the problems in these areas are due to human error, greed and/or environment.
Now there ARE those instances, like one of the Mars missions, that failed due to metric/imperial conflicts.
Diamond Parking controls a lot of the parking in Spokane, Washington and I have had to deal with ticket problems. In one case I deposited the proper amount while in a parking lot that was almost empty and got ticketed anyway. Thankfully there was a way to contact them at the time and they believed my story since it was my first supposed violation. (I think I found the number in the phone book.)
The biggest problem with the lot was that it didn't have a way to provide evidence that you paid for parking.
Now in a newer, larger lot, there is a machine that allows you to pay for parking with a credit card AND generates a receipt you can post in your car and use for tax purposes.
Is Canada included in that?
Talk about coincidence. A number of the staff in my department at work got into a conversation about old games and brought up such classics as Zork and Planetfall. And then, on the bus home, another group started talking about the 'bad' old days.
Could it be that the gaming industry is suffering from remake-itis like Hollywood? Or does improved technology justify remakes?
I find it encouraging that both parties involved, the teacher and the *nix guru, have talked to each other and seem to be getting along.
Perhaps this event will be talked about among educators that are stuck in a Windows mindset.
You needed to know how to use a slip stick, aka slide rule.
I definitely second this one.
Try your best to support your team and help them do the best job possible. That includes protecting them from upper management demands that are less than wise.
You know both the business and the technical sides and there is a chance that your programmers may know something about both sides too. Listen to them and they will listen to you.
Whiles Starks refers to the NEA, he could easily be making an assumption that the teacher is a member of the NEA or a union. Just because Starks knows Linux doesn't mean that he knows the ins and outs of any given school district.
In fact, given his phrasing, he seems to think that the National Education Association is a union or a union like organization. (ie 'spouting the union line')
Now unless being a member of the NEA keeps you from holding a teaching job in Texas, there is a possibility that the teacher in question IS a NEA member.
I have my doubts though. The response of the teacher tells me that she may be one of those drones who shouldn't be teaching because she is no longer learning.
Either that or it is all a hoax.
Would the media companies provide a refund if I could prove that I didn't use the so called services they offer?
If it were something like providing 'free' bus rides or 'free' access to specialized recreation facilities, then I can get along with paying for services that I may or may not use. Those freebies are aimed at improving the health and well being of a community.
Being forced to 'improve' the bottom line of media companies, or face the threat of lawsuits, seems like extortion.
I provide software and hardware support for a college campus that has a range of operating systems and application packages. I'm running a Mac that I managed to get to boot in OS 10.4, OS 10.5, Win XP and Vista.
It took a bit of finagling to get the quad boot setup to work because the copy of Vista I had didn't want to install after 10.4, 10.5 and XP were in place. I eventually had to pull the drives for 10.4 and XP to get it to work.
It wasn't the most elegant solution but it worked.