backlogged

yeah yeah.. as you can probably tell by now, i've been backdating new posts in a desperate attempt to get back on track. i'm trying to finish half-completed posts from the stockpile that i have stashed away in the Drafts section of my email account.. at the rate i'm going i'm hoping to be all caught up by mid-july

so how about some teasers as to what to expect in the next couple of weeks..

stay tuned..

yowza!

i happened upon a blog of someone who is definitely one of the best contemporary illustrators around.. and (not) oddly enough, not enough people know about him either!

Rob Ullman (see bio) specializes in creating comics, usually featuring hot gals, sometimes in hockey jerseys.. what's not to like eh?! check out his blog Atom Bomb Bikini.. his book's gonna be out soon, you definitely want to get that!

i leave you with two more pics.. one a beginning sketch and one a final product.. a nod to my beloved Sabres and a toast to the champions Penguins

                       

undo the edumacation

the wonders of the Internet never cease. colleges have been offering distance courses for a while now. even graduate level courses have gone fully online - i can attest to that, i'm about 2/3rds of the way through in a Masters program in Project Management from Boston University. some of the best universities have now gotten together to share for free full course lectures and other class material on the web. and when i say best, i do mean Ivy League level and all, not your Phoenix and DeVries 'Universities'..

in their own words -

Our Mission: Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world class education.

Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education.

As more and more high quality educational content becomes available online for free, we ask ourselves, what are the real barriers to achieving a world class education? At Academic Earth, we are working to identify these barriers and find innovative ways to use technology to increase the ease of learning.

We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.

We invite those who share our passion to explore our website, participate in our online community, and help us continue to find new ways to make learning easier for everyone.

i've been browsing through the site downloading material at will.. not because i enjoy studying and putting my head through the wringer out of sheer, masochistic pleasure, but only becausehere is a chance to learn for free, at my own pace, some of the things that i always wanted to learn about - right now i'm downloading coursework on Introduction to Biomedical Engineering & Introduction to Astrophysics

so go on, find some courses or lectures that interest you and broaden your mind!

the hockey wilderness

for the second year running my beloved Sabres will be roaming the badlands as the elite continue into the spring competing for playoff hockey

they finished off the season on a tear, falling short by a meager two points yet again.. lots of "if only.." and "what could have happened if.." but alas, it'll be in vain

the one thing that did give me immense pleasure was smacking hated rivals and playoff bound Boston Bruins 6-1 in a home game to close out the season

oh well, hope springs eternal.. bring on the next season!

Michael Crichton

this is coming on a year late, but i still wanted to make a note of it. Michael Crichton's passing away did not hit me very hard at first. it was more like a "oh. ok, RIP dude." moment until the other day when i was killing time browsing through the used books section at the Brattle Bookstore when i came upon a couple of Crichton's books. i took a moment to pause and reflect.

i read Andromeda Strain about the same time as the first Jurassic Park movie came out (early '90s), and i remember being quite shocked that Andromeda Strain was actually written in 1969! and as simply as that, i was hooked by the thought that microorganisms could be intelligently trained as described in the book. i was never a huge fan of the Jurassic Park franchise, so i pointedly avoided those. then i discovered that Crichton had written other books too (remember, this was pre-Internet - the only way you knew what a writer's earlier works were was by looking at the reticent page between the title and the dedication pages).. i started haunting my friends' bookshelves looking for the name Crichton to pop up.. Congo, The Terminal Man, Sphere, The Great Train Robbery.. his spectrum fascinated me, he dabbled with time travel, structural technology, biomaterials, science fiction and space adeptly and seamlessly. for a growing teenage mind this was fascinating - skipping across genres is not something i could comprehend that easily. it's like you love vanilla ice cream. you also love chocolate ice cream. and then one day you realize that you could have both! not just one scoop of one on top of the other, but in swirls, like you'd get out of the machine. wow!

Congo was two borders away - so the story resonated easily. The Terminal Man answered a few questions on what we think and how we think. Sphere expounded my uneasiness with water and depths. The Great Train Robbery i have read multiple times, what a fantastic and daring heist! i have recreated and replayed that scene when Pierce waits for the policeman to go to the bathroom to sneak in with the key.. fantastic! what an amazing tool books are, letting you build scenarios in your own head. the movie completely chewed up this scene, turning a delicious juicy pork chop into a dry wedge of petrified cardboard. in fact i only just watched Eaters of the Dead / The 13th Warrior about a month ago and loved that too.

i would go on to say that some of his books molded me in my formative years, giving me insights and opinions that i had not seen or heard yet, filling me with a healthy curiosity for the marvels of science.

i went on to college with my mind made up that engineering was what i wanted to do. then i read Airframe, and that blew my mind away. once again his theme of man-machine interaction gone wrong reared its head. they should have added Crichton as a writer to the Terminator franchise! his next book Timeline was a delightful romp through time, back to the Dark Ages. the time continuum warp is always good fodder for a book.

his next book came when i had just moved to Buffalo, NY and was starting grad school. i was still unsure what i really wanted to do for my graduate thesis at the time. and then two things happened in almost consecutive weeks. i was auditing a class on biomaterials, not sure what it would be about and met a professor unlike any other i had met. Dr. B made sitting in class for three hours a fun experience. getting to play in his lab was another 'high' all on its own. soon after that i read Prey.

Prey equally horrified and fascinated me. it was my first exposure to nanoparticles and the possibilities they presented. i came up with a few ideas, went to see Dr. B and in a few days we had the beginnings of a thesis. i was completely engulfed by swarm theory and i was thrilled to find out how far technology had come.

State of Fear followed, where he addresses the elephant in the room that no one seems to see - global warming and other environmental issues. the last book of his i read was Next, which comes back to an old favorite theme of his - genetics. it delves into the murky world of venture capitalism and patent protection, very contemporary issues again.

i hear Mr.Crichton has one last card up his sleeve, to be played later this year - Pirate Latitudes is a finished manuscript one of his assistants found on his computer after he died. this book follows in the vein of the Great Train Robbery, but looks in depth at one of my favorite themes of all time - pirates! hopefully his treatment of the story will not have received the effluent-wash that the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise tainted everything with - i'd like to see more young Jim Hawkins & crusty Long John Silver in his book and less of bumbling Cap'n Jack Sparrow & now-busty, now-not-so-busty Elizabeth Swann.

thank you Michael Crichton, you changed my life and opened up many doors. rest in peace, and enjoy the company in Valhalla.

10 Years opening for Shinedown

went to watch 10 Years open for Shinedown at the newly opened House of Blues in Boston, opposite the fabled Fenway Park - home of the Boston Red Sox. some band called Halestorm curtain-raised for both, but i'm glad we missed them - i checked out their Myspace page and they sounded way too much like Flyleaf who i detest passionately.

anyways.. i must say i do like how the House of Blues have done up the Boston location.. it looks fantastic, and is very band-oriented & crowd-friendly. three levels, with the main floor being the biggest and pretty good sightlines from almost anywhere on the floor. the lower and upper balconies are smaller but have great views too. lots of bars sprinkled all over the place so that you're never more than a few yards away from an overpriced drink. the sound system is pretty good though, loved the small club feeling you get there, even though i believe it holds close to 5,000 people.

10 Years have developed quite a bit since i last saw them a few years ago. they have definitely improved their stage presence and played a nice, tight set. they could do with a little more crowd interaction, but then again, they have never been a band that needed audience participation to play their music. they focused primarily on their new album 'Division', which has some excellent tracks on it. musically they have developed from their 'Wasteland' years, and you can hear the progression on songs like "Actions & Motives", "Beautiful", "Russian Roulette" & "11:00am (Daydreamer)".

now Shinedown is one of those bands which is basically the lead singer and a procession of people filling in the other positions. fortunately, Shinedown is one of the better bands in that category, and also have had some continuity in the drummer role too. singer Brent Smith is a showman par excellence - his vocal range is stunning and it appears he has been learning about stage presence from one of the greatest showmen of all time, Ozzie Osbourne. he was full of stories and encouraged the crowd to get into it between songs

i prefer Shinedown's older songs to their newer two albums, but since they are promoting the new album 'The Sound Of Madness' one had to plow through some of the mushier stuff - yes i said mushy, since Shinedown does an equal number of ballads, a few of which are tolerable. all in all a good show, and both 10 Years and Shinedown are worth going to see.

had to leave before the end because of the vagaries of the Boston commuter rail system by which the last train home to the suburbs on a Saturday night is at 11:30pm.. go figure?!

to the opera

check off one more from the list of things to do at least once in my life even though i think i'm not really going to enjoy doing it, and add it to the list of things that i didn't think i'd like but surprisingly it was actually quite fun'. culturification can be quite entertaining too, luckily!

we'd gone to the opera a couple of weeks ago.. yes, you read right, the opera. it wasn't one of the classic ones, a la Figaro Figaro Figaro, Fi-Ga-Rooooo.. but still pretty good. this one was called 'Rusalka' by Czech writer Anton Dvorak - for synopsis and a bit of cultural background, hop on over to the Wizard's page..

it wasn't as snooty as i had feared it would be, the upper crust and cognoscenti hobnobbed freely with the rednecks and bourgeois.. enough so that i believe i will be going back again. the balcony provided an awesome view with reasonably priced tickets, though the leg room was more appropriate for a horde of first graders.. luckily no act was longer than an hour, so there was desperately-needed intermissions to stretch the appendages.

through the windowpane

it's been a while since i last wrote some lyrics here from songs that really mean a lot to me.. so here goes.. "windowpane" from opeth. a video of the song here in case you've never heard it..

Blank face in the windowpane
Made clear in seconds of light
Disappears and returns again
Counting hours, Searching the night

Might be waiting for someone
Might be there for us to see
Might be in need of talking
Might be staring directly at me

Inside plays a lullaby
Slurred voice over children cries
On the inside

Haunting loneliness in the eye
Skin covering a secret scar
His hand is waving a goodbye
There's no response or action returned

There is deep prejudice in me
Outshines all reason inside
Given dreams all ridden with pain
And projected unto the last

it's late, i've made my peace with my mind.. now to go soothe the beast in my soul..

which way?

do you..

go home to take a break from work

go to work to take a break from home


do you..

stay longer at home to avoid going to work

stay longer at work to avoid going home


do you..

do home stuff at work to make it tolerable being at work

do work stuff at home to make it tolerable being at home


aren't you glad you don't work from home?!

The brand called 'You'

What have you done today to develop this brand?

If you have not gone through the same developmental cycles with this brand as you would with any other, then why haven't you? Where did you go wrong? What have you done to make it up?