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%title 2010-03-31 16:52:37
%date About
:blog:fossil:diary:
This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

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%title 2010-03-31 18:02:01
%date The New Drab Blag
:blog:fossil:diary:
Alrighty.  I used LiveJournal for quite a while and some of their current changes combined with the changes I've gone through in the way I think about blogging have prompted me to switch to a more personal system such as this.  WordPress was just the ticket, and since it was free and I can set it up the way I want, it all works out for the best.  I'll try to link my posts over to my old LJ blog as well, just so that they get read by the masses over there, but I'm thinking that all of my writing will take place here, for the most part!

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%title 2010-03-31 21:04:58
%date Recital
:blog:fossil:diary:
On Friday, March 26th at 4:30PM in the Organ Recital Hall at the UCA, I had my senior recital.  The recital is a for-credit class that is technically geared towards performance majors, but they're required of composition, education, and bachelor of the arts majors as well.  Usually, grading is pretty straight-forward.  Your applied teacher sits in the audience and watches you along with everything else, grading your performance of music that you have learned under their tutelage over the last however many semesters.  Grades are as you would expect them - technicality, stage presence, song interpretation, working with the accompanist, and so on.
Composition is a little different, however.  With composition, your work on the pieces has already been graded by the applied professor, for the most part, you aren't even performing the pieces.  The point of the recital shifts away from proving you can sing or play to proving you can pull together music and get it performed somehow.  Your job changes from learning music and reciting it on stage to writing music, finding performers, organizing rehearsals, then organizing the recital and possibly conducting or performing the pieces, though the focus on that latter part is minimal.
<!--more-->My own senior recital was in the works since about August 2009, when I started thinking about pulling music together.  Soon after that, it was decided by all involved that I would share the recital slot with another composer, Joe Hills, who needed to do his junior recital, meaning that he should have about half the music that I would.  This worked out for the best due to the fact that I had about 20 minutes of music ready to be handed to performers (ready as in completed and approved by my professor) and Joe had about 10 minutes.  With applause and set-changes, this would easily fill our hour-long recital slot.  My set of songs worked out as follows:
<ul>
<li><strong>Mirrors</strong> - ~3:35 - flute, bass clarinet, percussion (vibes, crotales), piano, violin, cello, bass</li>
<li><strong>Concerto for Saxophone Quartet (1st mvt.)</strong> - ~3:17 - saxophone quartet, piano</li>
<li><strong>I often wondered</strong> - ~1:04 - choir (SATB)</li>
<li><strong>Duet for horn and bass</strong> - ~14:45 - horn in F, contrabass, percussion (multi)</li>
<li><strong>Daglarim</strong> - ~1:30 - string quartet</li>
</ul>
All of the times were pulled off of the MIDI renderings from Sibelius and I supposed that tempos would likely vary quite a bit more in the performance, particularly since Sibelius' tempo changes (<em>rit.</em> and <em>accel.</em>) were a little mechanical sounding and the real chances would be more organic.  <em>Mirrors</em>, <em>I often wondered</em>, and <em>Concerto for Saxophone Quartet</em> had all been completed earlier, but the <em>Duet</em> had just been commissioned in August of 2009 and I was continuously working with the performers, David Saccardi and John Gough, to finish their three movement piece.  This was exciting early on as my first commission, but steadily turned into more and more drudgery as I tried out new ideas only to have them turned down by the performers, eventually coming up with a piece that neither they nor I was entirely happy with.  <em>Daglarim</em> was a rearrangement of an earlier piece for a small mixed ensemble, and came together as a surprise in early 2010 when a violist approached me about performing on my recital.  I had imagined that that would've been one of the harder instruments to find a performer for, but it all worked out for the best.
Up until this point, everything had been working out smoothly.  I scheduled the recital date for March 26th with Dr. Moody, made sure that Joe knew how much of the time he had to fill, and pulled together (mostly) my list of pieces for the performance.  By November of 2009, I had talked to Elvin Holderfield (later, The Elvin Holderfield) about playing in both the saxophone quartet and <em>Mirrors</em>, and he was working it out with his accompaniment professor so that he could get class credit for it. Joe and I took pictures and made posters to hang for the event.  I talked the student sax quartet into playing the concerto with Elvin, and handed them music.  Hearing this, Joe also chose to have a sax quartet piece on the recital so that we could use some of the same performers, and we even managed to have a run-through rehearsal with them in December before the semester ended.  David Saccardi agreed to play bass on Mirrors, even.  I figured that things would be fairly smooth from then on, and so it's no surprise that that's when things went downhill.
With winter break taking up an entire month, I let things slide on my end.  I started practicing conducting <em>Mirrors</em>, but that was about the extent of work I put into the recital; perhaps I sent updated parts to John and David for <em>Duet</em>.  When the semester started up again, I started contacting applied instrument teachers to get their opinions on the best students to ask about performing on the recital.  There was a month and a half until my recital when I finally wound up with an instrument with each part.  I was rehearsing with the choir after their class time, but that was about the only rehearsals I had for two weeks.. then three weeks.  I started to worry about the fact that I had asked all these performers to volunteer and had yet to even meet several of them face-to-face.  My emails to the performers got firmer and firmer as I struggled to pull things together.
A rehearsal for <em>Mirrors</em> which was supposed to involve everyone but the violin and cello wound up consisting of me, Elvin, and the flautist, Amy Coup.  Three of the four members of the string quartet were in a chamber ensemble together and wound up practicing without the second violin on two occasions, but I had supposed that was about it.  The saxophone quartet, also a class, practiced Joe's and my piece on a few of their rehearsals, but with a concert two weeks before the recital, most of their attention was focused on that music.  Two and a half weeks before my recital, I <em>finally</em> landed a percussionist for <em>Mirrors </em>and <em>Duet</em>, but never actually met him.  The week before my recital was spring break, and I had almost no contact with any of my performers at all, not for lack of trying.  The Sunday after break, six days before the recital, the percussionist quit, but thankfully found himself a replacement, the excellent Nick Rose, but David also informed me that he wouldn't be able to make any<em> Mirrors</em> rehearsals at all.  The first rehearsal was shaky, but my spirits were lifted when the entire string quartet met up for rehearsal of <em>Daglarim</em> as well, where I finally met the second violinist.
By this time, with five days until the concert, the figures looked like this:
<ul>
<li><strong>Mirrors</strong> - rehearsals: 1 (one performer quit, one performer replaced)</li>
<li><strong>Concerto for Saxophone Quartet (1st mvt)</strong> - rehearsals: 4, all sans piano</li>
<li><strong>I often Wondered</strong> - rehearsals: 6</li>
<li><strong>Duet for Horn and Bass</strong> - rehearsals: 0 (one performer replaced)</li>
<li><strong>Daglarim</strong> - rehearsals: 1</li>
<li>Me: down $375 for the camcorder, $40 for buying performers food, and a whole lot of sanity</li>
</ul>
As it turned out, <em>Duet</em> wouldn't rehearse until Thursday the 25th, when David and John met Nick, the percussion accompaniment, for the first time.  Mirrors would have no more rehearsals and would run through the piece the whole way through for the first time with David on bass (having decided he would play after all) during the fifteen minutes before the recital started.  The sax quartet would meet with Elvin for the first time during the hour before the rehearsal, and <em>Duet</em> would have its first complete rehearsal at the same time.
The troubles wouldn't stop with the performers, though.  The stage crew, figuring this would be a performance recital rather than the complicated mess it was destined to be, provided only one stage hand, whose job it was simply to hold the door open to backstage while performers, meaning that the performers and I had to perform all of the set changes by ourselves.  Finally, due to scheduling conflicts, a few performers were in class until 4:30 or even 5:00 and so the program had to be changed last-minute.
I'll admit, despite all of the troubles and all of my kvetching, that the performance did turn out okay.  The only major glitches were the sax quartet leaving the stage right before their second piece, the last minute program reorganization, and Joe forgetting to come on stage to turn pages for Elvin on <em>Concerto</em>.  A few of the pieces were received better than others, due simply to their being more tonal than others and thus more appealing to the audience that showed up.  There were several rough spots in the songs, as was to be expected, but I still got two audio recordings and a video recording (to be posted in a future post) of real performers playing my music, which is always a thrill.
I guess that all told, all intended lessons were duly learned.  I figured out how hard it was to get performers to play my music with no leverage to wield against their apathy, nothing to hold over their heads in order to get them to play well, practice plenty, and perform as desired.  I saw how little new music means to so many people.  I learned what it means to conduct those who don't care or are too busy to care, and how it feels to have your hard work put through the mangler of public performance.  I also learned how impressive a feat it is to actually create something new, and I learned how much my work means to me.  I saw what its like when something hitherto existing only on paper becomes a reality.  I figured out how big of a part of my life music really is.  I can wish all I want to have had a better recital and a better experience, but I'm sure that in the end, I've come out better for it.

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%title 2010-04-16 12:08:13
%date The Importance of Processes
:blog:fossil:diary:
In my post-recital... ennui?  Freedom?  Afterglow?  Well, anyhow, after my recital, I've found that it's rather difficult to get back into writing music after spending so long away from it simply trying to get the recital up and running with as few hitches as possible (as has already been previously beaten to death here), and even though its been two weeks, I've only written about five bars of music.
Part of the problem has been that I was fairly demoralized after the recital.  After seeing how difficult it was to pull together the performers and get them learning the music as best as possible in even so long a time, I felt that perhaps I was doing something wrong with my music, writing it in such a way as to make it difficult for the performers to learn, read from, or perform.  It was hard for me to go back to writing music that I felt would cause more of the same reactions that I got to my music on my senior recital.
Beyond that, though, I felt that I had lost the sense of process that I had used to write music in the past, a process that served me through several years.  Several of my pieces are based off one process or another.  For example, each of the <a href="http://drab-makyo.com/work/character-dances/">Character Dances</a> was based off one aspect of a relationship between me and another.  <a href="http://drab-makyo.com/score/character-dances-2-tw/">TW</a> was based off the idea of constancy against flightiness.  The left hand of the piano only plays two notes for the entire piece, while the right hand skitters around it indicating a change too quick to handle.
<!--more-->
Most composers use some form of process in their music, even back through history.  After all, a form such as sonata-allegro is a form a process, giving the composer a framework in which to write their music.  My processes have been at once more general and more specific than this; more general because the processes I pick do not necessarily dictate the outcome of the piece, and more specific because I'm working at a finer grain of the music: while I may pick a general concept such as transitioning between one tonal area and another as a slow process, taken strictly, this dictates that the piece will take so many bars to play out and that certain clashing tonalities will occur when the changes is in progress.
What I'm missing now isn't necessarily the processes - I've got several lined up to work on in the near future - but the ability to work with musical processes for some reason.  I'm doing fine in programming.  <a href="http://badger.mjs-svc.com">Badger!</a> was the result of coming up with a web app given a certain set of parameters that would limit my programming choices, limit the amount of freedom I had to come up with a product rather than increase it.  Rather than work on a project with an unlimited scope, I limited myself to a certain amount of functionality which led to a more productive development cycle (I'm sure there's a name for this type of development, but I'll be damned if I can remember it right now).
This limiting of freedoms works for me in music as well as programming (though not, of course, politically), and so the strict processes help me get more music done rather than less.  Perhaps what I need to do is just sit down at the computer and keyboard and just write some stupid little songs.  The last time I did that, I wound up having one of the most productive semesters yet.  Maybe part of the problem is that I focused so much on a couple of big projects for so long - Thousand Leaves, the recital, etc. - that it's hard for me to just sit down and write without involving hours or weeks of planning.  Maybe I should take the same approach, though, and reduce the amount of freedoms I have - come up with a process for sitting down and writing music - make myself write for an hour or so a day without distractions.  I have at least one friend who schedules his free time like this, perhaps its time for me to take a cue from him and just sit myself down at the computer, same time every day, and write some music.

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%title 2010-04-19 11:48:06
%date Senior Recital Audio Recordings
:blog:fossil:diary:
The audio recordings of my senior recital have been posted - video will be coming soon.  I'm feeling okay about the recordings - not great, and not bad.  Overall, they are too slow, not up to the tempi I would like.  Also, there are a few problems with the performances of each piece, but not so much as to ruin them.  They are all posted here, after the cut, but they may be found at <a href="http://drab-makyo.com/collection/senior-recital/">http://drab-makyo.com/collection/senior-recital/</a>.
<!--more-->
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://media.drab-makyo.com/js/swfobject.js'></script>
<div id='mediaspace'>This text will be replaced</div>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var so = new SWFObject('http://media.drab-makyo.com/player.swf','ply','470','204','9','#ffffff');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');
so.addParam('wmode','opaque');
so.addVariable('playlistfile','http://drab-makyo.com/collection/senior-recital/%3Fasx%3dtrue');
so.addVariable('playlist','bottom');
so.addVariable('repeat','list');
so.write('mediaspace');
</script>

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%title 2010-05-14 20:16:54
%date The Manifesto Project launched
:blog:fossil:diary:
The Manifesto Project, my most recent service project, just launched over at <a href="http://manifesto.mjs-svc.com" target="_blank">http://manifesto.mjs-svc.com</a> The goal of the project is to provide a place for people to write down their ideas on their own beliefs and faiths in order to sort their ideas out into words. The idea stemmed from my own problems in articulating what I believed, and I found that the more I wrote, the easier it was for me to define my thoughts.
<!--more-->Some of my friends on LJ probably remember when I started a <a href="http://manifesto-proj.livejournal.com" target="_blank">community</a> over there for this, but now I've made it an application of its own, with much of the features that I would want in such an application, and many more to come.   Go ahead and try it out and write for yourself!

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%title 2010-06-10 13:28:16
%date I'm.. such a dork
:blog:fossil:diary:
Not only did I give my dog a Twitter account, but I made him a website.  Oy vey :D
You can follow Zephyr on Twitter as <a href="http://twitter.com/zephyr_sc">@zephyr_sc</a> or on his webpage, <a href="http://zephyr-sc.com">http://zephyr-sc.com</a>.

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%title 2010-06-19 00:12:43
%date Atlassian, GO!
:blog:fossil:diary:
My experience with software developing in any sort of managed (read: rational) way is actually rather limited.  I didn't <em>really</em> know what Agile was until a few days ago, I've only been using RCSes for the last few years, I sold or gave away all of my O'Reilly books, and I always seem to be a little behind the times.  Now that I've been getting more and more into programming, though, I've decided that managed programming environments are most definitely a good thing, even as a solo developer.  I read up on Agile, switched from Subversion to Git in several cases, and I've been trying to keep a little more current, finally caving and adopting an IDE (NetBeans) and some project management software.
<!--more-->I've been playing with several different systems for a few months, now, ever since I started working on my first really sizable Java project.  My first experiments with integral products were with online systems.  I worked with Kenai until Oracle took it down, and found the fact that I could have everything I really needed tied in with my project, even if it was a little slow.  When Kenai left, I switched to Google Code, which I still use in some respects.  Google Code has a significantly better interface, more consistent speeds, and of course I can commit all of my Django projects there as well.
Atlassian, however has topped all of those.  I recently followed a friend into the <a href="http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ATLAS/Here+Be+Dragons">Dragons</a> challenge and, as a result, wound up with a set of their products installed with evaluation licenses on my server.  I found it comforting in a funny sort of way that they were perfectly willing to admit that they knew that their products could be a bitch to install (my words, there), and that if you could get their software up and talking properly, they'd send you a T-shirt.  Of course, it was also just about the best way to learn the software possible, since the set-up had you create a project that was tied into each of the applications.
I started with Crowd, a SSO source for all of their projects, meaning that one sign-on would be valid for all products, even though they had different URLs (different ports).  Armed with some prior knowledge, painfully earned, about <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=560142">a problem with Java on Debian</a>, I got that up and running fairly painlessly.  Actually, the entire process was rather painless, adding on JIRA (issue tracking) with GreenHopper (Agile), Confluence (Wiki, documentation), FishEye/Crucible (source management), and Bamboo (continuous integration/builds) with no really big problems, other than some mess with Maven and Ant in Bamboo.  The hardest part, I think, was just keeping in mind all of the changes that had to be made to all of the various configuration files, though by the end, I was only glancing at the changes required to get applications talking with Crowd, I had done it so many times.
I'm really impressed with the quality and inventiveness of the products.  Although Google Code and Trac, which I'll get to in a bit, offered much the same in terms of features, both seemed rather difficult or slow to use in comparison.  Usually, JavaScript used in order to make a page flashy or animated is irritating at best, but when it's used to increase the usability and functionality of the website, it really adds a lot.  Due to the comparatively static nature of Trac and GC, Atlassian's products come off as much more intuitive and comfortable to use.  Now that I have six open projects and two implementations to keep track of, the last thing I really want is to feel like the management software is just getting in the way.
As noted, I have also started using Trac, for a different reason.  I'm using Atlassian for all of my projects, which are open source and thus get me the software for free (once I apply).  However, at one of my workplaces, I helped to implement a similar system for use with a single project, but multiple users.  While I think the Atlassian software would be great, the project isn't open source, and I don't think the team would've been willing to spring for the cost of all of the software I just set up, no matter how awesome it is.  The next best (free) thing by a long shot is Trac, which was a breeze to set up by comparison, and has much of the same functionality of JIRA, Confluence, and FishEye/Crucible, but without any of the bells and whistles.  But hey, I'm learning how to do some of the stuff that Atlassian does with JavaScript, so perhaps I can contribute to Trac, since it's open source.  Best of both worlds, then (and it's certainly better than using a word document to track issues and changes).

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%title 2010-07-25 20:09:29
%date On Grails
:blog:fossil:diary:
Working on a rather large project in grails, I've come to realize two things: there is some absolutely amazing software frameworks out there, and some people who write documentation appear to be 3-year-old kids who speak English as a second language.  The embarrassing part about that is that, since the project is open-source, I could contribute to the documentation very easily, fixing problems that I see and adding where I see fit.  However, the problem is so large and daunting (and the project I'm working on way more interesting), so instead, I wind up just living with it and searching El Goog over and over again for the same things.
I'm going to try to change this as best I can, and I'm going to start by collecting a few nifty tips and tricks I've pulled out of thin air here, and hopefully pull them all together into one place soon enough.
<!--more-->
<h2>Permissions</h2>
The current project is using the grails Acegi plugin to manage users and security.  The plugin was recently deprecated, but it appears to have been done so before the replacement was completed, so I'm using it for the time being.  The idea of roles is pretty standard, but I wanted some finer-grained control over permissions to specific views, especially pertaining to objects that have lists of users associated with them.  After fiddling around with specifics in the controllers, I abstracted it into a service that I can use everywhere:
<pre lang="enc__groovy">grails-app/services/package/PermissionsService.groovy
class PermissionsService {
static transactional = true
def authenticateService
def groups = [
userCanRead: { group -&gt;
if (group.exclusive) {
if (authenticateService.principal().domainClass in group.members
|| authenticateService.principal().domainClass.id == group.admin.id
|| authenticateService.ifAnyGranted("ROLE_ADMIN")) {
return true
}
} else {
return true
}
},
// ...
]
}</pre>
As you can see, the service contains a list of permissions - closures that do a few tests and return true or false - organized into lists in order to separate them into logical groups (in this case, the groups list pertains to the groups domain class, controller, and views). Each closure expects one argument - the object to test the permissions of. This comes in handy for the corresponding TagLib:
<pre lang="enc__groovy">grails-app/taglib/package/PermissionsTagLib.groovy
class PermissionsTagLib {
static namespace = "my"
def permissionsService
def withPermission = { attrs, body -&gt;
if (permissionsService."${attrs['class']}"."${attrs['permission']}"(attrs['arg'])) {
out &lt;&lt; body()
}
}
}</pre>
The tag-lib allows us to write logical tags that will only output data if the user passes the test, i.e:
<pre lang="enc__html">In a view...
&lt;my:withPermission class="groups" permission="userCanPost" arg="${group}"&gt;
Post new topic
&lt;/my:withPermission&gt;</pre>
After all, it is nice to ask permission...
<h2>Comma-separated tags</h2>
Just a little snippet, but I'm using comma-separated tags for tagging some domains, and I wasn't really keen on some of the solutions I saw out there, so I scribbled out a 'one-liner' for tagging stuff:
<pre lang="enc__groovy">grails-app/services/package/TagService.groovy
tags.split(/(?!(?&lt;=\\)),/)
.collect { it.trim().replaceAll(/\\,/, ",") }
.each {
if (it.size() &gt; 0) {
obj.tags.each { otag -&gt;
if (it.tag == it) {
// skip if we already have it tagged
return
}
}
def t
if (Tag.countByTag(it) &gt; 0) {
t = Tag.findByTag(it)
} else {
t = new Tag(tag: it).save()
}
obj.addToTags(t).save(flush: true)
}
}
// ...</pre>
This way, we can even have commas in tags, via: "foo, bar\, baz" (tags: ["foo", "bar, baz"])
<h2>Tips</h2>
<ul>
<li>Codecs are static (I forgot.  You ever forget?  Happened to me).  I wasted a crapload of time on a problem in there before I switched to a tag-lib, <em>et voila</em>, everything's fixed</li>
<li>Constraints are also static, so if you want to constrain yourself to a list of strings, but want to be able to change the strings, store an integer and use that as an index to an array of strings stored in Config.  For bonus points, store a portion of a property key so you can internationalize, and use the portion of the key as the default value.</li>
<li>If you want to always ensure that a condition is met when querying, stick the query in a service and pass the service a closure of your criteria:</li>
</ul>
<pre lang="groovy">In your service...
// ...
def ListWithRating (Closure c) {
Obj.withCriteria {
and {
c.delegate = delegate
c()
le('rating', maxRating)
}
}
}</pre>
<pre lang="groovy">In your controller...
// ...
def criteria = {
eq('type', params.type)
}
listService.listWithRating(criteria)</pre>
<ul>
<li>If you want to associate something with anything (i.e.: a comment with any other domain), store the domain's class name (with <code>obj.class.toString().split(/\\./)[-1]</code>) with the comment, along with the object's id, then get it back the same way.  You can check that the object exists with dynamic class-loading:</li>
</ul>
<pre lang="groovy">
def object = Class.forName("package.${objectType}", true, Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader())
.get(objectId)</pre>
That's about all for now, but I'm sure as the project progresses, I'll come up with more and I'll either post about them or collect them somewhere.

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%title 2010-07-25 20:18:21
%date On Grails
:blog:fossil:diary:
Working on a rather large project in grails, I've come to realize two things: there is some absolutely amazing software frameworks out there, and some people who write documentation appear to be 3-year-old kids who speak English as a second language.  The embarrassing part about that is that, since the project is open-source, I could contribute to the documentation very easily, fixing problems that I see and adding where I see fit.  However, the problem is so large and daunting (and the project I'm working on way more interesting), so instead, I wind up just living with it and searching El Goog over and over again for the same things.
I'm going to try to change this as best I can, and I'm going to start by collecting a few nifty tips and tricks I've pulled out of thin air here, and hopefully pull them all together into one place soon enough.
<!--more-->
<h2>Permissions</h2>
The current project is using the grails Acegi plugin to manage users and security.  The plugin was recently deprecated, but it appears to have been done so before the replacement was completed, so I'm using it for the time being.  The idea of roles is pretty standard, but I wanted some finer-grained control over permissions to specific views, especially pertaining to objects that have lists of users associated with them.  After fiddling around with specifics in the controllers, I abstracted it into a service that I can use everywhere:
<pre lang="enc__groovy">grails-app/services/package/PermissionsService.groovy
class PermissionsService {
static transactional = true
def authenticateService
def groups = [
userCanRead: { group -&gt;
if (group.exclusive) {
if (authenticateService.principal().domainClass in group.members
|| authenticateService.principal().domainClass.id == group.admin.id
|| authenticateService.ifAnyGranted("ROLE_ADMIN")) {
return true
}
} else {
return true
}
},
// ...
]
}</pre>
As you can see, the service contains a list of permissions - closures that do a few tests and return true or false - organized into lists in order to separate them into logical groups (in this case, the groups list pertains to the groups domain class, controller, and views). Each closure expects one argument - the object to test the permissions of. This comes in handy for the corresponding TagLib:
<pre lang="enc__groovy">grails-app/taglib/package/PermissionsTagLib.groovy
class PermissionsTagLib {
static namespace = "my"
def permissionsService
def withPermission = { attrs, body -&gt;
if (permissionsService."${attrs['class']}"."${attrs['permission']}"(attrs['arg'])) {
out &lt;&lt; body()
}
}
}</pre>
The tag-lib allows us to write logical tags that will only output data if the user passes the test, i.e:
<pre lang="enc__html">In a view...
&lt;my:withPermission class="groups" permission="userCanPost" arg="${group}"&gt;
Post new topic
&lt;/my:withPermission&gt;</pre>
After all, it is nice to ask permission...
<h2>Comma-separated tags</h2>
Just a little snippet, but I'm using comma-separated tags for tagging some domains, and I wasn't really keen on some of the solutions I saw out there, so I scribbled out a 'one-liner' for tagging stuff:
<pre lang="enc__groovy">grails-app/services/package/TagService.groovy
tags.split(/(?!(?&lt;=\\)),/) .collect { it.trim().replaceAll(/\\,/, ",") } .each { if (it.size() &gt; 0) {
obj.tags.each { otag -&gt;
if (it.tag == it) {
// skip if we already have it tagged
return
}
}
def t
if (Tag.countByTag(it) &gt; 0) {
t = Tag.findByTag(it)
} else {
t = new Tag(tag: it).save()
}
obj.addToTags(t).save(flush: true)
}
}
// ...</pre>
This way, we can even have commas in tags, via: "foo, bar\, baz" (tags: ["foo", "bar, baz"])
<h2>Tips</h2>
<ul>
<li>Codecs are static (I forgot.  You ever forget?  Happened to me).  I wasted a crapload of time on a problem in there before I switched to a tag-lib, <em>et voila</em>, everything's fixed</li>
<li>Constraints are also static, so if you want to constrain yourself to a list of strings, but want to be able to change the strings, store an integer and use that as an index to an array of strings stored in Config.  For bonus points, store a portion of a property key so you can internationalize, and use the portion of the key as the default value.</li>
<li>If you want to always ensure that a condition is met when querying, stick the query in a service and pass the service a closure of your criteria:</li>
</ul>
<pre lang="groovy">In your service...
// ...
def ListWithRating (Closure c) {
Obj.withCriteria {
and {
c.delegate = delegate
c()
le('rating', maxRating)
}
}
}</pre>
<pre lang="groovy">In your controller...
// ...
def criteria = {
eq('type', params.type)
}
listService.listWithRating(criteria)</pre>
<ul>
<li>If you want to associate something with anything (i.e.: a comment with any other domain), store the domain's class name (with <code>obj.class.toString().split(/\\./)[-1]</code>) with the comment, along with the object's id, then get it back the same way.  You can check that the object exists with dynamic class-loading:</li>
</ul>
<pre lang="groovy">def object = Class.forName("package.${objectType}", true, Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader())
.get(objectId)</pre>
That's about all for now, but I'm sure as the project progresses, I'll come up with more and I'll either post about them or collect them somewhere.

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%title 2010-09-07 23:07:13
%date The Outlaw Plant
:blog:fossil:diary:
NPR's Planet Money podcast recently aired a program on the deficit and what average Americans think would be the best way to fix it by cutting only one thing. I don't think that cutting just one thing would ever fix a problem so huge, but crowd-sourcing such an idea is not a new concept. Whitehouse.gov itself used this at one point, allowing users to ask the newly elected Obama a question in an open forum, even using the users to help police the question boards through a flagging procedure. The neat part about crowd-sourcing with limitations is that not only does it keep discussions rather more on track than an open forum, but it takes a small (minuscule in the grand scheme of things) step towards direct democracy which may or may not be a good thing, I really don't know, but it sometimes feels like this could make things a little better.
One of the overwhelming questions on the whitehouse.gov forum was about legalization of marijuana. This issue has come up in my life three times now - the first was when I read Carl Sagan's Contact way back when which featured a little vignette about marijuana being legalized and "this [being] deducted from your share in paradise"; the second was when I was on a bit of a spirituality/drugs/poetry kick and wound up reading Dale Pendell's Pharamko/Poeia; and the third was when I recently finished with Michael Lewis' The Big Short and got set off onto a financial kick. Since I finished The Big Short today and thus am still on said kick, I've been peeking into the issue of the financial implications of legalizing marijuana, but I'm having quite a hard time finding the information I need in the morass of data out there, little of which is readily available or easily searched.
<!--more-->
Ignoring the question of how to even begin to do such a thing for now, what would the financial effects of legalizing marijuana be? The question from the whitehouse.gov boards, as boiled down by CNN, amounted to "would legalizing marijuana be a good way to jump-start the economy?" Obama answered with a firm 'no' and moved on, but say that this did happen. Say that we decided to legalize marijuana in a similar way to alcohol and cigarettes.
It would certainly be more difficult than simply saying: "a pack of 10 joints is 30 bucks, with a 50% sin tax", because, as with all studies about illicit behavior, it is difficult to judge the honesty of the subjects. How many people, given the chance to legally partake, would? How many of those wouldn't normally do so with the drug's current legal status, and how many do anyway? With a new market there is bound to be some back and forth as buyers and sellers both test the waters of legality, and there's likely to be a number of people try it and don't like it or sell it and get in trouble. Perhaps the market would expand quickly at first, retract somewhat as the law and the actors respond, then settle into a comfortable equilibrium.
Next comes the issue of sourcing. As much of America's cannabis comes from Mexico, and that which does come from within the States is grown illicitly (and thus, not controlled), what would happen when, with pot legalized and likely strictly controlled, growers suddenly start to spring up all over the place as medical marijuana dispensaries have over the past few years? With the product dispensed from licensed outlets to people of age, lets say 21, what sort of impact would be felt not only from taxes on those sales, but also on income from liquor establishments and cigarette sales? Perhaps those latter two wouldn't move quite that much - cigarettes are addictive whether or not pot is legalized and alcohol is a veritable past-time here in America - but they would still likely be influenced by the new "competitor".
Not to mention the effects on the outcome of the War on Drugs' efforts. If marijuana is suddenly legalized (a situation I deem unlikely), how much money would the DEA no longer have to spend? On the other hand, how much money would the BATFE (now the BATFEM, which tickles me) have to start spending to crack down on illegal grow operations? How much money would be saved by cops no longer having to spend such a large amount of time hunting down users, but how much of that money would be redirected into hunting down offenders of the new regulations - those that provide marijuana to minors, those that drive intoxicated or are intoxicated in public? Of course, one mustn't forget that many of America's incarcerated are there because of their association with the plant. The net financial change in these sectors would probably be smaller than many seem to be assuming, but perhaps it would be less expensive to have pot legal than illegal.
In an aspect related to the previous two, if one is to believe conspiracy theorists, many of those behind the original criminalization of marijuana were in some industry threatened by the drug's existence. If this is the case, what will the paper and textiles industry think when hemp is a viable alternative? If the original laws really were institutionalized racism, classism, or religious bigotry, as mentioned passingly by Pendell, would any of this change with the legalization? A social question, I know, but social questions are often integrated with finances. With many of those roles now cemented in society, I think that little will change here. Perhaps a sudden influx of hemp related products, but again, settling into equilibrium as time goes on.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that I do disagree with the legal status of marijuana, and I definitely disagree with the vehemency that many of its opponents focus their efforts on it. I've tried it, and if it were legalized, I'd probably partake. However, I am honestly fascinated with the question of what would happen if it were legalized, particularly in the realm of finances, more so than I am in the hows and whys of legalization. Sure, I've thought of how such a thing would be accomplished - perhaps it'll continue on its path as a states-rights issue, maybe not; and what of all those that are already incarcerated? - but more interesting to me than that is the fact that so many Americans think that this would be a quick fix, a jump-start, or even a simple increase in tax revenue for the government. The issue certainly seems more complex than that. The amount of infrastructural changes required to accomplish the task looks to be much more complicated than an additional tax law, what with the War on Drugs being now decades old.
I know that I've asked more questions than answered: I'm fine with that. Perhaps some of these will be sorted out with more research, but more likely is that much of this is speculation. Should marijuana be legalized, each of these questions or even whole topics could easily go one way or the other. It could be that a whole new regulatory body may have to come into existence just for this issue due to just how long marijuana has been illegal and just how strongly many people feel about it. For myself, I plan on watching and waiting, eager to see what will happen with the topic as time goes on.

23
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%title 2010-09-07 23:10:02
%date The Outlaw Plant
:blog:fossil:diary:
NPR's Planet Money podcast recently aired a program on the deficit and what average Americans think would be the best way to fix it by cutting only one thing. I don't think that cutting just one thing would ever fix a problem so huge, but crowd-sourcing such an idea is not a new concept. Whitehouse.gov itself used this at one point, allowing users to ask the newly elected Obama a question in an open forum, even using the users to help police the question boards through a flagging procedure. The neat part about crowd-sourcing with limitations is that not only does it keep discussions rather more on track than an open forum, but it takes a small (minuscule in the grand scheme of things) step towards direct democracy which may or may not be a good thing, I really don't know, but it sometimes feels like this could make things a little better.
One of the overwhelming questions on the whitehouse.gov forum was about legalization of marijuana. This issue has come up in my life three times now - the first was when I read Carl Sagan's Contact way back when which featured a little vignette about marijuana being legalized and "this [being] deducted from your share in paradise"; the second was when I was on a bit of a spirituality/drugs/poetry kick and wound up reading Dale Pendell's Pharamko/Poeia; and the third was when I recently finished with Michael Lewis' The Big Short and got set off onto a financial kick. Since I finished The Big Short today and thus am still on said kick, I've been peeking into the issue of the financial implications of legalizing marijuana, but I'm having quite a hard time finding the information I need in the morass of data out there, little of which is readily available or easily searched.
<!--more-->
Ignoring the question of how to even begin to do such a thing for now, what would the financial effects of legalizing marijuana be? The question from the whitehouse.gov boards, as boiled down by CNN, amounted to "would legalizing marijuana be a good way to jump-start the economy?" Obama answered with a firm 'no' and moved on, but say that this did happen. Say that we decided to legalize marijuana in a similar way to alcohol and cigarettes.
It would certainly be more difficult than simply saying: "a pack of 10 joints is 30 bucks, with a 50% sin tax", because, as with all studies about illicit behavior, it is difficult to judge the honesty of the subjects. How many people, given the chance to legally partake, would? How many of those wouldn't normally do so with the drug's current legal status, and how many do anyway? With a new market there is bound to be some back and forth as buyers and sellers both test the waters of legality, and there's likely to be a number of people try it and don't like it or sell it and get in trouble. Perhaps the market would expand quickly at first, retract somewhat as the law and the actors respond, then settle into a comfortable equilibrium.
Next comes the issue of sourcing. As much of America's cannabis comes from Mexico, and that which does come from within the States is grown illicitly (and thus, not controlled), what would happen when, with pot legalized and likely strictly controlled, growers suddenly start to spring up all over the place as medical marijuana dispensaries have over the past few years? With the product dispensed from licensed outlets to people of age, lets say 21, what sort of impact would be felt not only from taxes on those sales, but also on income from liquor establishments and cigarette sales? Perhaps those latter two wouldn't move quite that much - cigarettes are addictive whether or not pot is legalized and alcohol is a veritable past-time here in America - but they would still likely be influenced by the new "competitor".
Not to mention the effects on the outcome of the War on Drugs' efforts. If marijuana is suddenly legalized (a situation I deem unlikely), how much money would the DEA no longer have to spend? On the other hand, how much money would the BATFE (now the BATFEM, which tickles me) have to start spending to crack down on illegal grow operations? How much money would be saved by cops no longer having to spend such a large amount of time hunting down users, but how much of that money would be redirected into hunting down offenders of the new regulations - those that provide marijuana to minors, those that drive intoxicated or are intoxicated in public? Of course, one mustn't forget that many of America's incarcerated are there because of their association with the plant. The net financial change in these sectors would probably be smaller than many seem to be assuming, but perhaps it would be less expensive to have pot legal than illegal.
In an aspect related to the previous two, if one is to believe conspiracy theorists, many of those behind the original criminalization of marijuana were in some industry threatened by the drug's existence. If this is the case, what will the paper and textiles industry think when hemp is a viable alternative? If the original laws really were institutionalized racism, classism, or religious bigotry, as mentioned passingly by Pendell, would any of this change with the legalization? A social question, I know, but social questions are often integrated with finances. With many of those roles now cemented in society, I think that little will change here. Perhaps a sudden influx of hemp related products, but again, settling into equilibrium as time goes on.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to say that I do disagree with the legal status of marijuana, and I definitely disagree with the vehemency that many of its opponents focus their efforts on it. I've tried it, and if it were legalized, I'd probably partake. However, I am honestly fascinated with the question of what would happen if it were legalized, particularly in the realm of finances, more so than I am in the hows and whys of legalization. Sure, I've thought of how such a thing would be accomplished - perhaps it'll continue on its path as a states-rights issue, maybe not; and what of all those that are already incarcerated? - but more interesting to me than that is the fact that so many Americans think that this would be a quick fix, a jump-start, or even a simple increase in tax revenue for the government. The issue certainly seems more complex than that. The amount of infrastructural changes required to accomplish the task looks to be much more complicated than an additional tax law, what with the War on Drugs being now decades old.
I know that I've asked more questions than answered: I'm fine with that. Perhaps some of these will be sorted out with more research, but more likely is that much of this is speculation. Should marijuana be legalized, each of these questions or even whole topics could easily go one way or the other. It could be that a whole new regulatory body may have to come into existence just for this issue due to just how long marijuana has been illegal and just how strongly many people feel about it. For myself, I plan on watching and waiting, eager to see what will happen with the topic as time goes on.

5
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%title 2010-09-08 20:13:41
%date Oops...
:blog:fossil:diary:
Turns out, due to a mistake with iTunes and the podcast, Planet Money DID do a podcast on the finances of marijuana. Check it out here - though it asks much of the same questions I asked: <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/01/podcast_an_economist_gets_ston.html">http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/01/podcast_an_economist_gets_ston.html</a>

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%title 2010-10-01 01:28:59
%date Res est
:blog:fossil:diary:
I've been listening to podcasts, watching videos, and reading articles over the past two or three years that relate to the financial melt-down as well as politics and gender issues.  These things really do interest me quite a bit, as I've always wondered how something as abstract as government really works, ever since Dr. Carter's history class in high school. I mean, it always looked so good on paper that it boggled the mind to think that that was how things really worked in the world.  Of course, now I'm much older - I've been out of high school (and away from Dr. Carter) for seven years or so and I've come to realize that the idealized form of direct democracy they teach in elementary and middle school, and the idealized form of representative democracy they teach in high school barely begin to scratch the surface.
Lets go ahead and combine this with the fact that it seems as though Planet Money, one of the financial podcasts that I follow, was created solely to explain the financial crisis to people in clear terms, seemingly a spin-off of This American Life after that show aired a few episodes regarding not only the financial issues, but issues of health care and housing.  We can also add in the additional reading and discussing that has been going on between a few friends and I about the problems involved in religion, and a few <em>other</em> friends and I about the problems involved in gender.
Finally, combine these with a few books I've been reading about disparate subjects but which all involve this concept of non-spatial, non-temporal ideas and we get the hole I've dug myself in now.
<!--more-->This thread, at least in the form it stands now, was started by a book I've read and re-read (and talked about<em> </em><em>ad nauseum </em>at outings with friends), <em>Anathem</em>, by Neal Stephenson.  Stephenson is (in)famous for his habit of infodumping - that is, writing a story to espouse an idea, generally by wandering off topic (or having characters do the same) to the point he was trying to make about that topic.  Thankfully, he's also a skilled writer, and so pulls this off well.  Again, thankfully, he doesn't restrict himself to one idea per book, and so novels such as <em>Anathem</em> turn out to be wonderfully complex; even though they tend to be wordy about one subject for a few pages, they move onto another subject down the road without coming off as inconsistent.  The book aside, the pertinent idea that struck me was that of how we think of ideas that aren't based in space or time.
Granted, one can claim that politics are based in space due to socio-political borders and in time due to the ever-changing political atmosphere, not to mention the fact that laws are enacted in time, but what does that really mean?  It seems to me as though the laws we follow are abstract concepts based on... what?  Morals?  Morals are even more vague than laws, because one can definitely say that a law applies to all citizens within a set of geographical borders, but that muddies things even further due to the fact that geographical borders are constructs of differences of opinion, armament, or physical features of the land.
Politics isn't even just a set of laws that apply to citizens, though.  Politics boils down to a complex amalgam of ideas that strive to cross all aspects of life and (assuming that they're well written/well intentioned/intended to be either/even written as anything but an afterthought) attempt to make it easier for disparate personalities and social groups to coexist.  Theoretically.  This is not even taking into account international relations, as politics have enough trouble dealing with interstate and interpersonal politics.  Policy is so large that it becomes worrisome that most people can boil their political stance down to an idea that can be stated in three or four words on a three inch by ten inch bumper sticker, or worse, a single person's name - and not even<em> that</em> person's name, someone else's.
Finances are much the same way.  I recently finished Michael Lewis' <em>The Big Short</em>, which was an excellent book and did well to explain the beginnings of the financial crisis in a character-driven fashion.  All well and good, but having finished the book, I'm left with this elegant, simple, and distressing picture of how sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations of the same, and credit default swaps betting against those CDOs work, I still can't hold the entire picture of the crisis in my mind, never mind the entire picture of how finances work in so-called normal situations.  I've got a pretty good idea of how the stock market works, and I think that I understand how mutual funds work, and options... well, I can kind of understand the concept.  Bonds are beyond me.  I know that they can be divided up into tranches, tranches can be organized and sold based on what three ratings agencies say, and ratings agencies work with models which, from a programmer's point of view sound woefully inadequate but are nonetheless likely more complicated than I could guess.
As for religion, I've been confronted on a daily basis for the past week with a street preacher on campus that pulls together an enormous and volatile crowd around him with an ease that only strikes me as disturbing.  The problem, as I initially saw it, was that he was preaching a subset of the Bible - specifically the subset that he was likely inculcated with (I realize that is a loaded word, but I'll defend it in a second).  The crowd seems to be composed of three groups: those who agree with his ideas, those who oppose them, and those who are attracted to the conflict between the first two groups, listed in order from smallest to largest.  It is a college campus, after all.  When I listened to what he said - much ado about guys wearing pink shirts subverting gender roles and aligning themselves with the devil, a good portion about how physical scientists are distracted from the pursuit of Truth by their pursuit of science, how working toward a material, non-material but still non-spiritual, or just plain non-Christian way of life would certainly lead to hellfire - all I could think of was that quip about how many Christians are like those who scroll to the bottom of software license agreements just to click "I agree".
Then I thought about how I had been raised.  Both  my mother and father were atheists (mom militantly so, dad more dismissively so), and so it's no surprise that I think of preachers such as Brother Tom in terms of being "inculcated with an idea" or "dismissive of such large segments of the population" or just plain "nutjobs".  I was raised by people who brought me up to be skeptical of the type of person that Brother Tom personifies.  I read the bible, find all the standard contradictions, find all of my favorite phrases so dismissed by these people (or worse from my point of view, rebutted with phrases from later on in the book taken out of context: Ecc. 9:10, which draws the reply of Rom. 12:11).
In short, with politics, finances, and religion - just to name a few - I find myself often in situations where I will never convince the other party of the validity of my position, but they will likely never convince me of the validity of theirs.  It seems to boil down to the fact that we're dealing with these non-spatio-temporal ideas which, by virtue of their not being based in space or time, have no objective measurement.  In the book<em> Anathem</em>, the sconics assert that there's no constructive way to think about non-spatio-temporal ideas: we can't perceive them in any rational fashion, so we can't think of them in any rational fashion.
Only we can, of course.  I was talking with a friend of mine tonight of search algorithms, of how it might be possible to think of latent semantic indexing (how Google and Shazam work) as a configuration space problem.  He seemed to agree only after much discussion and even then only with much in the way of clarification.  The root of the problem in this discussion is that I simply don't understand the math used to describe LSI, but I do understand the concepts behind configuration spaces.  It is easier for me to hold in my mind the concept of a configuration space based on corpus of <em>n</em> documents than it is for me to work through the steps involved in some equation that I don't even know how to type here.
As another example: the performance of music involves time and space, music itself is something that requires space and takes place over a period of time, but on the other hand, one can think of a score or a MIDI file as a vector representation of that rasterized idea that we call "music".  MIDI deals with time in an abstract way, sure, and one can even play with panning, but one can also disregard both aspects and read the entire MIDI sequence at once to come up with an overall picture of the music, which we know as a score.  This is something I'm well acquainted with, considering how long I've been working with it.
In the end, this is the conclusion I come down to.  What I can do is think of something in the terms in which I understand it - it may only boil down to a bumper-sticker's worth of information, but I can think about that much.  What I cannot, or rather<em> should</em> not do is use that understanding as the basis for talking.  I should not try to convince someone of my views on the financial world based only on a few podcasts and a book.  I definitely should not start an argument with Brother Tom based on my imperfect understanding of faith, much less the Bible.  Finally, I most certainly should not talk about advanced models of data with Joe while drunk!
What I mean to say is that we can only really speak about those concepts which we can hold entirely in our minds.  We so rarely do, and that's part of being human, but I think it's a wonderful goal to be able to speak only what you know.  Knowing, of course, may take the form of religious faith or of utter conviction without a substantial amount of proof, but speaking with knowing to back yourself up would make you strong indeed.
It confuses me that so many liberal, light, or lazy Christians talk so loudly about their faith.  It seems to me as firm agnostic that one couldn't go a minute without thinking about, talking about, or living under the shadow of God if one were Christian.  It seems strange to me that someone deeply embedded in the financial world would have room in their mind to consider the socio-political effects of gay marriage, or the legalization of marijuana.  It surprises me that someone focused solely on politics, able to hold such a complex system in their mind, would be able to begin to judge music and call some good or bad.
"It is a thing"
That's my response.
Someone can ask me about my views on politics and all I can even begin to say is that "it is a thing".  If they want to argue a point which I understand - gay rights, music education, possibly sub-prime mortgage bonds - then I'll be able to give them the attention that they want.  However, if they want to talk about markets and futures, social security and international affairs, the concept of the trinity as three individuals in one God, then all I will be able to say is "it is a thing".  Yes, these concepts exist, and it is very likely possible that someone could hold their entirety in their mind, but that someone is definitely not me.
Gender stereotypes as unwittingly perpetrated by the targeted gender? Sure, I've got a vague idea of what I think, but it is a thing.  I can't hold that complex a topic in mind without losing track of how many times I have to breathe per second without losing track of the concept of MIDI as a vector format for music.  How the New Testament relates to the Old - does it supersede or do they coexist, or does it depend on chapter and verse?  Well, alright, I suppose it depends on your view of how the Bible was intended to be read, but that really just makes it a thing.  I can't comprehend the entirety of the book at once, so I have to deal with it in smaller units.  I may, <em>may </em>be able to hold Ecclesiastes in mind, but probably not Ecclesiastes and Romans, never mind the concept of Paul.
I know that most people don't work that way.  I know that most people are able to hold enough of a topic in mind to form an opinion and state it loudly and firmly in the face of an opponent with utter conviction, but I don't think that's quite the best way to do it.  Of course it's possible, and of course their's a possibility that it will get you somewhere.  Maybe you'll change the other person's mind.  More than likely, though, your speaking without a more complete knowledge will hinder your cause and lead to more exasperation than anything.
What I am not saying is that one should embrace apathy about the subjects that one doesn't know anything about, or that one should focus on such a tiny point that one loses the bigger picture.  It is a burden of responsibility in order to care about something because then you must learn everything that you can about it.  And after you learn everything about the subject and feel comfortable talking about it, you must be able to be corrected, shot down, or crushed by the arguments of those who know even more about the subject.  Finally, you must be able to incorporate those ideas into your own without focusing on the fact that you were bested in order to continue your education about the idea.
Chances are, though, that if you care very much about a subject, your position should not be boiled down to anything that could fit on a bumper sticker.  It should not come to buzz words, demagoguery, or rote quotations when you argue your point.  It should come down to wisdom born of knowledge, knowledge born of experience, experience born of research, and research leading you out of ignorance.  If it takes metaphors, such as thinking of LSI as a configuration space problem, that's okay, but when Joe shoots you down and says "no, not really", then be ready to slog through an explanation, read up on the 'Net, or check it out through experimentation in order to build your new world view.

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%title 2010-10-31 20:24:26
%date Happy Halloween
:blog:fossil:diary:
Little song I whipped up in Reason for the occasion <a href="http://mjs-svc.com/rand-bin/dark ambient test.mp3">here</a>.

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%title 2010-11-01 10:12:04
%date Data Visualization: Aging Sexuality
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I just realized that I posted this to Twitter and not anywhere else; whoops!
Anyhow, I'm an avid reader of <a href="http://flowingdata.com">FlowingData</a>, because Nathan Yau, the man behind it, does some pretty awesome stuff.  His visualizations are clear and still aesthetically pleasing, and his concepts are always nice.  Of particular interest to me, when I first started reading, was <a href="http://your.flowingdata.com">your.flowingdata</a> which is a means to track your own life through Twitter - for example, you can tell it when and how far you ride your bike every day and have it automatically generate a visualization of distances ridden over time.
Recently, however, he posted a little challenge of sorts.  Given a dataset, we, the readers, were to visualize it our own way and draw some conclusions from our visualizations (that, after all, being the point of visualizations).  I'd never done anything like that before for various reasons.  I didn't want to learn a new domain-specific language such as R that would then require me to edit my results in the form of an image in some other program such as Gimp or Inkscape.  Also, Gimp and Inkscape have some quirks that I'm still learning, and I didn't want to have to chose between learning those and buying Adobe CS.  However, I have been working quite a bit with Javascript recently, so it seemed to make sense that, when I found two libraries - <a href="http://code.google.com/p/flot/">Flot</a> and <a href="http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/">Protovis</a> - for visualization in JS that I go ahead and use one of these 'Visualize This' challenges to learn one of them.  It'll definitely be helpful in the future.
The most recent <a href="http://flowingdata.com/2010/10/20/visualize-this-sexual-health-data-from-national-survey/">challenge</a> was visualizing data from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior.  Given a small set of data - percentage of respondents in different age groups admitting to engaging in nine different behaviors over the past year - I worked hard to learn Protovis from scant documentation in order to pull together a visualization.  Since it takes place over three 'slides' and has text to go along with it, I'll let it speak for itself <a href="http://mjs-svc.com/rand-bin/sex/">here</a>.
<!--more-->I think I did fairly well, given the fact that I wound up doing exactly what I didn't really want to - learn a new DSL.  Granted, this one will be useful in my web design in the future!  With the time limitation of a due date and the fact that I was learning as I went, I didn't quite pull off exactly what I wanted, and the trends I was interested in looking after weren't as apparent I was hoping.  The problem was mostly due to inadequate documentation on Protovis - much of the documentation that wasn't simply API documentation was either examples or brief write-ups about concepts in statistics as the applied to Protovis.  I learned most from the examples, after I learned some of the basics from the API docs.
I'll probably find another dataset somewhere that interests me in order to visualize it soon, but I also expect that I'll be implementing the visualization process in my own projects as well.  I've got <em>lots</em> of ideas.

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%title 2010-11-01 11:30:59
%date Addendum to 'Res Est'
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I had a few more thoughts on the <a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/2010/10/01/res-est/">earlier entry</a> and I don't want to belabor anything, though this may come rather close to the last post, but I hope to make just a small addendum to that with three points.  This has been sitting in the 'drafts' queue for a while now, and was mostly written.  Sorry for flooding!
<!--more-->
Many of those things can be considered 'greater than the sum of the parts'.  When you look at politics, for instance, you can look at it as being different levels - federal, state, county, city, and so on - but you if you take all of those politics together, you get something that's much more complicated than just the sum of the levels.  When thinking about legalizing marijuana, you can see that Colorado and several of its cities are all okay with the issue, and so medical marijuana dispensaries have popped up everywhere.  However, marijuana is still illegal at the federal level. Instead of it it just being two different laws, an interaction between the two laws occurs, with federal agents acting under the marijuana-is-illegal law and state agents acting under the marijuana-is-legal law.
The same goes for partisan politics: while states may have several republican elected officials, counties and the country may have more democratic elected officials.  The result is far more complicated than many people attempt to reduce it to.  Instead of this current election being a fight between socialism and free-market liberalism as the media is putting it, it's much closer to being a fight between a loose amalgam of left-of-center ideas and a loose amalgam of right-of-center ideas.  Neither extreme - though they are represented - will win out due to the fact that the sum of the parts being much more complex than any of the parts would like to believe.  In other words, this is not good and evil (I'll let you pick which is which), this is abstract thing and abstract thing.
Perhaps the reason that so many are so okay with talking so much about those things when they know so little is that they have a tendency towards behaving as fractals.  That is, you can start with the big picture and a general understanding of the concept - enough to form (and thus voice) an opinion - but you can drill down almost infinitely deep to find that the issue does not become clear cut, but instead becomes more and more complex with more and more magnification.  This is sort of the opposite of the previous point, leading to a weird sort of feedback loop: each of the parts is probably just as complex, if not more so, as the whole system.
A big theme in finance seems to be the discussion between those who are interested in macroeconomics and those who are interested in microeconomics.  With macroeconomics, the focus is on the flow of need and want through the entirety of the economy.  If you drill down, you get to microeconomics, which focuses on scarcity and how that affects decisions made by households, firms, and individuals.  Most stop there, but you can focus on scarcity itself and the concept of limited goods, or look at the concept of money as a representation of labor, or look at society as a collection of actors with needs and abilities and how they interact with each other, or even look at how each individual has a different internal representation of their worth to themselves, their family, their friends, their community, their country, and the world at large.  Needless to say, the entire concept of the financial system just gets more complicated the closer you look, and while self-similarities appear here and there, perhaps the actual complexity is just as infinite as the length of a fractal's border.
Finally, it seems that it's easier to form strong opinions about something the <em>less</em> you know about it, rather than the other way around. Perhaps due to seeing both sides of the issue, whether through research or exposure, it gets harder to be one-sided about an issue.  With the previous point in mind, one can look at the Mandelbrot set and generalize it as looking like a fat, spiky bird as seen from the top, but zoom in and change that generalized image as one goes, and of course this differs from person to person.
When I grew up, I was raised to think of religion as being a mildly malevolent group of forces determined to get people to act the same under the cover of benevolence.  Most of this concept came from my mom, who had had a difficult time with her family's religion growing up.  However, the more I researched, the less I was willing to just believe this out of hand: it seemed that a good many religions focused on social justice, and even those where social justice wasn't evident in the religion itself, schisms and portions within the religion had lead to groups that focused on social justice.
It's easy to see how that would work from the other side as well, though.  Someone who was brought up in a religion that provided everything they needed for all of their life finally realizes that certain things about the scriptures or certain stories in the news don't add up to a completely benevolent organization.  One of my good friends, John Wright, went through something like this with the LDS church: while much of the religion and many of the people provided the spiritual outlet that he needed in life, certain things began to irk him about the texts the church used and the way the institution was run.  Finally, after his first year of college at Brigham-Young University, he moved to Fort Collins to go to CSU and filed his apostasy officially with the Mormon church.
It's difficult to say where this study leads us, since on the surface it appears to end in ambiguity about the things we know most about.  My composition professor, Dr. David, believes that it leads to the desire to study the issue more - specialization - and finally production or implementation of the ideas that remain, some of which are likely to be very impressive indeed.  Thus, a beginning composer might write a two minute piece in the style of his favorite composer, which he considers the best there is, but an experienced composer might write a twenty-minute large-ensemble work that incorporates new ideas formed in the process of his study of the subject.
Until the point when you know enough about something to form real ideas and not just blind opinions, though, the previous article stands: it's a thing.

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%title 2010-11-17 15:59:38
%date Data visualization: Wikipedia Fundraising
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Nathan Yau, over at FlowingData, posted <a href="http://flowingdata.com/2010/11/16/visualize-this-winning-wikipedia-fundraiser-banners/">another "Visualize This" challenge</a>, this time to take a look at some <a href="https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AsJJL4_lxQL9dDc5dWU3WUtUMWM0QW1IUnM2c3N3enc&amp;hl=en#gid=24">data</a> that Wikipedia released regarding their recent fundraising campaign.  They tracked four banners' performance - how many people visited the pages, how many people wound up starting the donation process, and how many people actually completed the donation process, amongst several other factors.  Again, I figured I'd take a stab at showing the data with Protovis.
You can see the result <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/wikiappeals/">here</a>.
<!--more-->I like it when data is already fairly organized, and I like it when it winds up being hierarchical.  I think we, as humans, are attuned to dealing with hierarchies as it is, so it makes sense when we can work with data that's organized as such.  We're also pretty good at spatial recognition, so it's neat to play around with using area charts in a way that people wouldn't normally expect.  This led to the natural conclusion of the tiered pie chart, or 'Sunburst' as it's been called.  The fact that all of this is all so easy to work with in Protovis (their documentation aside, but no rants on that this time), certainly made this visualization easier!
I'll be doing most of these challenges and posting their results here, along with any other little projects I can think up for learning this whole concept.  I've got a few ideas planned for when I've got the time!  They'll all be archived at that new site, too, <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com">http://vis.mjs-svc.com</a>

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%title 2010-11-20 20:26:51
%date Visualization-in-a-day
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I woke up this morning with an idea in mind and, lo and behold, over the process of the day, <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/fastats/">finished the visualization</a>.  At least, a rough draft of it.  This one's even personalizable!  Check out a sample <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/fastats/?user=ranna">here</a>.
FurAffinity.net is a neat site full of neat artists and good community.  However, the statistics they provide for each user's art are not only private, but rather lacking, being simply a list of numbers.  Sounds like a good job for visualization, though!  The numbers FA provides are views, favorites, and comments per submission.  Not only did I display those, but averaging them and normalizing for those averages gives a pretty good idea of relative popularity of each submission.  Users can view all four statistics in a steam chart, and also each alone in a bar chart.  I figured this was a good way to divide things up: trends are visible in general over time and one can explore specifics for each set.
There's still some work I'd like to do, and I'm planning on collating the data I collect into a general graph of submissions on FA, but that's for later.  It's fall break and I'm still on the job!

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%title 2010-12-07 19:24:40
%date Two New Visualizations
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It's been a busy few days at home and work.  Work itself was really slow, so I started working on one large visualization project and wound up completing another smaller one in the meantime.  I may need to take a break from protovis for a little while, as I've been working for several days straight on these projects.
The smaller of the two projects was a very fast (about two hours) visualization of data regarding a disturbing punishment discrepancy between heterosexual/non-heterosexual teens by both the justice system and schools.  You can <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/lgbsanction/">see in the vis</a> that, in some cases, non-heterosexual teens can be two to three times as likely to be punished by schools or police.  Some reasons for this are debated in the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/06/AR2010120600035.html">original article</a> that was pointed out to me.  The comments section on the article is rather distressing, I should warn.
The second, larger project has taken up most of my energy over the past few days.  A friend pointed me toward the results of the <a href="http://www.klisoura.com/furrypoll.php">Furry Survey</a>, which I hadn't seen before.  The furry community differs from society at large in several very important demographic areas, from gender to sexual orientation (or at least openness regarding the same), to mean age.  With these important differences, I felt that a series of visualizations was almost necessary.  I've pulled those together into a <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/sf/">dashboard</a> that displays each visualization in miniature (not just thumbnails - the visualizations are reconstructed in miniature within the dashboard).  Check it out and find out some neat things about the furry fandom.  If you don't know what furries are... well, Google carefully.

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%title 2010-12-07 19:25:49
%date Two New Visualizations
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It's been a busy few days at home and work.  Work itself was really slow, so I started working on one large visualization project and wound up completing another smaller one in the meantime.  I may need to take a break from protovis for a little while, as I've been working for several days straight on these projects.
The smaller of the two projects was a very fast (about two hours) visualization of data regarding a disturbing punishment discrepancy between heterosexual/non-heterosexual teens by both the justice system and schools.  You can <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/lgbsanction/">see in the vis</a> that, in some cases, non-heterosexual teens can be two to three times as likely to be punished by schools or police.  Some reasons for this are debated in the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/06/AR2010120600035.html">original article</a> that was pointed out to me.  The comments section on the article is rather distressing, I should warn.
The second, larger project has taken up most of my energy over the past few days.  A friend pointed me toward the results of the <a href="http://www.klisoura.com/furrypoll.php">Furry Survey</a>, which I hadn't seen before.  The furry community differs from society at large in several very important demographic areas, from gender to sexual orientation (or at least openness regarding the same), to mean age.  With these important differences, I felt that a series of visualizations was almost necessary.  I've pulled those together into a <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/sf/">dashboard</a> that displays each visualization in miniature (not just thumbnails - the visualizations are reconstructed in miniature within the dashboard).  Check it out and find out some neat things about the furry fandom.  If you don't know what furries are... well, Google carefully.

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%title 2010-12-08 19:01:26
%date Update to State of Furry Vis
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Two new aspects visualized: <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/sf/extras/species.html">species</a> and a <a href="http://vis.mjs-svc.com/sf/extras/states.html">choropleth of population for the US</a>.  I had to grab, shred, and parse the data myself from responses to forum topics (i.e.: members would respond with their location and a moderator would add their name to one enormous list - I had to turn that into JSON with magic), so the data may not be terribly accurate, but some trends may be visible.  Since they're separate but related, I've added them to a different section of the site.

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%title 2011-04-18 14:39:51
%date A Visual Resume
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At the beginning of this year, I had two jobs.  By March, however, I had quit one and been informed that I was, for all intents and purposes, being laid off from the other.  While this wasn't a huge surprise, I was still pretty disappointed - time to start the job-hunt again.  I brushed up my resume, pulled all my references together, and got started searching.  As I applied and attended job fairs and the like I started noticing a disheartening trend, however.  I'm graduating in May with a degree in music composition, but applying for technical jobs.  More than I once, I was turned down without further consideration as soon as the recruiter got to the education section of my resume.
Rather than be coy about my education, however, I'm combining the fact that much of my applying for jobs happens online with my resume into a <a href="http://resume.drab-makyo.com">visual resume</a> that offers all the same information while show-casing my design and visualization abilities.
<!--more-->There's a lot of conflicting information on how to structure a resume these days - should it be restricted to one page?  How personal should you be?  Avoid using 'I'? Should you have an overview or skills section?  While I can't say one way or the other what's best for a personal resume (personally, I keep it to one page, have short overview and skills section, use 'I' while still being professional), I had a little more freedom working with visual resume.  Not only would it be divided up into separate pages  for clarity's sake, I could take a little more time on each page to talk myself up and explain the accompanying graphics.
This project used, of course, Protovis, but I also included a map using OpenLayers and with CloudMade tiles.  It was nice to get back into the swing of mapping again, as I haven't really touched that in a while with the library maps project being shelved.  And of course, it was fun to work with Protovis as always.  The biggest problem came up when I had finished the whole project, though, and started checking it in other browsers.  Chrome: great.  FireFox: great.  Safari on iOS: great.  Internet Explorer: ...nothing.  Neither Protovis nor OpenLayers would work properly in IE8 64bit.  This could prove to be a problem.  The solution I'm working on is to export the graphics generated by Protovis (SVG format) to a format that IE does recognize and have an IE version of the page (done unobtrusively, of course, using IE's browser-specific tags).  The plus side to this is that, since I will have the graphics already exported, I'll be able to pull together a paper version of this resume that I can print out on glossy and use in some circumstances in person.  The down side being that I lose almost all the interaction that I have in place currently in the other browsers.  Ah well.

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%title 2011-04-18 14:40:58
%date A Visual Resume
:blog:fossil:diary:
At the beginning of this year, I had two jobs.  By March, however, I had quit one and been informed that I was, for all intents and purposes, being laid off from the other.  While this wasn't a huge surprise, I was still pretty disappointed - time to start the job-hunt again.  I brushed up my resume, pulled all my references together, and got started searching.  As I applied and attended job fairs and the like I started noticing a disheartening trend, however.  I'm graduating in May with a degree in music composition, but applying for technical jobs.  More than I once, I was turned down without further consideration as soon as the recruiter got to the education section of my resume.
Rather than be coy about my education, however, I'm combining the fact that much of my applying for jobs happens online with my resume into a <a href="http://resume.drab-makyo.com">visual resume</a> that offers all the same information while show-casing my design and visualization abilities.
<!--more-->There's a lot of conflicting information on how to structure a resume these days - should it be restricted to one page?  How personal should you be?  Avoid using 'I'? Should you have an overview or skills section?  While I can't say one way or the other what's best for a personal resume (personally, I keep it to one page, have short overview and skills section, use 'I' while still being professional), I had a little more freedom working with visual resume.  Not only would it be divided up into separate pages  for clarity's sake, I could take a little more time on each page to talk myself up and explain the accompanying graphics.
This project used, of course, Protovis, but I also included a map using OpenLayers and with CloudMade tiles.  It was nice to get back into the swing of mapping again, as I haven't really touched that in a while with the library maps project being shelved.  And of course, it was fun to work with Protovis as always.  The biggest problem came up when I had finished the whole project, though, and started checking it in other browsers.  Chrome: great.  FireFox: great.  Safari on iOS: great.  Internet Explorer: ...nothing.  Neither Protovis nor OpenLayers would work properly in IE8 64bit.  This could prove to be a problem.  The solution I'm working on is to export the graphics generated by Protovis (SVG format) to a format that IE does recognize and have an IE version of the page (done unobtrusively, of course, using IE's browser-specific tags).  The plus side to this is that, since I will have the graphics already exported, I'll be able to pull together a paper version of this resume that I can print out on glossy and use in some circumstances in person.  The down side being that I lose almost all the interaction that I have in place currently in the other browsers.  Ah well.

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%title 2011-09-09 15:35:12
%date New Job, New Site
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I feel like I've been neglecting this blog and my site as a whole, but it's been for legitimate reasons.
<!--more-->
After running through a few rather interesting interviews (one of which involved rewriting the Java collections API from scratch, one involved a shortest path graph traversal with some added edge-weights), I wound up with a new job the Monday after finals week at bConnected Software in Louisville, CO, where I've been working for the past four months or so.  I've had an absolute blast so far, doing a ton of Grails UI development, and I've learned a lot about user interface and experience design.  The company deals mostly with health insurance, which is proving to be a nicely complicated problem to solve, and I've gotten in at the right time, what with all the legislation surrounding the topic.  There has been quite the focus on Health Care Exchanges here, and we've been really working on defining the process of those in terms of both backend and UI/UX.
There have been a few little problems with the job so far.  The biggest by far is the commute - the drive averages about fifty minutes each way and is costing quite a bit, what with gas and tolls.  Since I was not a very smart kid over the last six or seven years, I've got quite a bit of credit card debt to pay down, so I wind up with relatively little money left after paying for the commute and paying down the card's balance.  Other than that, corporate life is taking some getting used to: seventy hour weeks and business rules especially.
In other news, I did another experiment with rapid prototyping in Django and came up with <a href="http://characters.openfurry.org/">http://characters.openfurry.org/</a> which is a good deal more complicated than my <a title="Badger!" href="http://badgerific.com" target="_blank">last experiment</a> which proved to be pretty fun.  I wrote it after watching several furry artists deal with different ways of accepting information from commissioners regarding what they want drawn.  The result is a site which lets you manage a hierarchy of information about characters, from the characters themselves, to different morphs (basically a combination of species and gender), to potentially several descriptions of those morphs.  The site will also let you attach characters to different locations - places on the 'net such as MUCKs and chat clients - and attach images to just about anything.  As an afterthought, I added a means for activity to be logged so that you could see what the owner has done recently with their characters/morphs/descriptions.
I had originally intended to use this site as a playground for <a href="http://angularjs.org" target="_blank">Angular</a>, a nifty new Javascript library that I'm quite taken with.  I ran into some snags, however, and did not get that implemented in my allotted time span, so it will have to wait, perhaps until this weekend.  In the mean time, I've been slowly poking through <a href="http://mbostock.github.com/d3/" target="_blank">d3</a>, the successor to Protovis, in order to provide some visualizations for the site, using this as a learning experience.  It's proven tougher than I had thought, but definitely a lot more flexible because of it.  Another new thing I've been playing with is the <a href="http://goldengridsystem.com/" target="_blank">Golden Grid System</a> in order to lay the page out in a flexible manner without having to think about it too much.  Once I get some time, I'd like to get the Angular interface running, and maybe also play around with <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/" target="_blank">Twitter's Bootstrap</a> to make this a much prettier site than it is currently; though I'm partial to minimalist designs, as it stands now, I know a lot of people like flashier sites.
Finally, here are some thoughts from a commuter's perspective:
<ul>
<li>No one who drives a Saturn is happy to be on the road.</li>
<li>Most people who drive Priuses and work trucks are pretty predictable drivers - I like that.</li>
<li>Most people who drive Mazda 3s and 6s, Infinities, and Audis are pretty unpredictable - I don't like that.</li>
<li>"Arrest-me red" is a real color.</li>
<li>Pickup drivers are usually somewhere on a scale from angry to smug SOBs; usually, the older, beat up pickups are smug SOBs and the brand new, super clean, very large pickups are angry SOBs.  This is not necessarily the rule, though.</li>
<li>Audiobooks are awesome.  News radio is depressing.</li>
</ul>

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%title 2011-09-09 15:37:42
%date New Job, New Site
:blog:fossil:diary:
I feel like I've been neglecting this blog and my site as a whole, but it's been for legitimate reasons.
<!--more-->
After running through a few rather interesting interviews (one of which involved rewriting the Java collections API from scratch, one involved a shortest path graph traversal with some added edge-weights), I wound up with a new job the Monday after finals week at bConnected Software in Louisville, CO, where I've been working for the past four months or so.  I've had an absolute blast so far, doing a ton of Grails UI development, and I've learned a lot about user interface and experience design.  The company deals mostly with health insurance, which is proving to be a nicely complicated problem to solve, and I've gotten in at the right time, what with all the legislation surrounding the topic.  There has been quite the focus on Health Care Exchanges here, and we've been really working on defining the process of those in terms of both backend and UI/UX.
There have been a few little problems with the job so far.  The biggest by far is the commute - the drive averages about fifty minutes each way and is costing quite a bit, what with gas and tolls.  Since I was not a very smart kid over the last six or seven years, I've got quite a bit of credit card debt to pay down, so I wind up with relatively little money left after paying for the commute and paying down the card's balance.  Other than that, corporate life is taking some getting used to: seventy hour weeks and business rules especially.
In other news, I did another experiment with rapid prototyping in Django and came up with <a href="http://characters.openfurry.org/">http://characters.openfurry.org/</a> which is a good deal more complicated than my <a title="Badger!" href="http://badgerific.com" target="_blank">last experiment</a> which proved to be pretty fun.  I wrote it after watching several furry artists deal with different ways of accepting information from commissioners regarding what they want drawn.  The result is a site which lets you manage a hierarchy of information about characters, from the characters themselves, to different morphs (basically a combination of species and gender), to potentially several descriptions of those morphs.  The site will also let you attach characters to different locations - places on the 'net such as MUCKs and chat clients - and attach images to just about anything.  As an afterthought, I added a means for activity to be logged so that you could see what the owner has done recently with their characters/morphs/descriptions.
I had originally intended to use this site as a playground for <a href="http://angularjs.org" target="_blank">Angular</a>, a nifty new Javascript library that I'm quite taken with.  I ran into some snags, however, and did not get that implemented in my allotted time span, so it will have to wait, perhaps until this weekend.  In the mean time, I've been slowly poking through <a href="http://mbostock.github.com/d3/" target="_blank">d3</a>, the successor to Protovis, in order to provide some visualizations for the site, using this as a learning experience.  It's proven tougher than I had thought, but definitely a lot more flexible because of it.  Another new thing I've been playing with is the <a href="http://goldengridsystem.com/" target="_blank">Golden Grid System</a> in order to lay the page out in a flexible manner without having to think about it too much.  Once I get some time, I'd like to get the Angular interface running, and maybe also play around with <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/" target="_blank">Twitter's Bootstrap</a> to make this a much prettier site than it is currently; though I'm partial to minimalist designs, as it stands now, I know a lot of people like flashier sites.
Finally, here are some thoughts from a commuter's perspective:
<ul>
<li>No one who drives a Saturn is happy to be on the road.</li>
<li>Most people who drive Priuses and work trucks are pretty predictable drivers - I like that.</li>
<li>Most people who drive Mazda 3s and 6s, Infinities, and Audis are pretty unpredictable - I don't like that.</li>
<li>"Arrest-me red" is a real color.</li>
<li>Pickup drivers are usually somewhere on a scale from angry to smug SOBs; usually, the older, beat up pickups are smug SOBs and the brand new, super clean, very large pickups are angry SOBs.  This is not necessarily the rule, though.</li>
<li>Audiobooks are awesome.  News radio is depressing.</li>
</ul>

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%date Test Subpage
:blog:fossil:diary:
Testing?

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%title 2012-01-01 17:31:55
%date New site, personal issues
:blog:fossil:diary:
I don't want every post to turn into an apology for not posting more, but I do feel bad for not writing more here, particularly given how much I've been writing in general. Not since when I was deep in the throes of the Manifesto Project have I spent so much time writing down my thoughts. This has me a little worried given how that project sort of petered out. However, I think that the fact that I've given myself more constraints to work within rather than trying to define something so large as my faith and spirituality is going to be working in my advantage. Even so, this is going to be one of those "the more things change, the more they stay the same" type posts.  It's also gonna mention some pretty personal stuff (like, say, depression and sex), so I apologize in advance.<!--more-->
To begin with, I should explain that the new project I've started is another blog, this one in the more traditional sense of a log of articles about one topic written in a semi-professional tone (rather than the LiveJournal-esque sense). It's really no secret that I'm pretty deeply embedded within the furry fandom, now. I've been so for something like twelve years now, even. While I'm not necessarily an oldster or anything, I do like to think that I've hung around more than a good portion of people do, if not most. I've done the con thing, tried my hand at art and storytelling, and even gotten into fursuiting, and I've now got these years of experience behind me.
All this I'm combination with a clash of both fortunate and unfortunate events within the fandom for me has givin me plenty of fuel for writing about what all I've seen, where all I've been, and what all I've done. I started to pull all these together into a blog, <a href="http://adjectivespecies.com" target="_blank">[adjective][species]</a>. That blossomed to include a twitter account (@adjspecies), a Google+ page (named the same as the blog), and an FA account (adjspecies). All this to say that I've been having rather a lot of fun writing and tweeting about the not-so-little subculture I've ensconced myself in.  Or, at least, I've been having some fun, and it's brought some internal strife to the fore.
I've been going through quite a few ups and downs emotionally over the last few years.  I think a lot of it is tied into creativity: I went through almost a manic high when I began my job at bConnected, for instance.  That I was able to translate a lot of the creativity that I felt I had into something that would be used by people on a daily basis in order to not only benefit their own lives, but potentially benefit others was just awesome to me.  However, when I switched from the development cycle to the QA cycle, my level of energy dropped.  It was difficult for me to have people actively seeking issues with my work.  I believe that the strongest aspect of my degree was honing my ability to be creative, and this same cycle was evident in my college years (and years and years) as well - create : positive :: critique : negative.  In the long run, however, I'd say that my degree was a net gain: the benefit I get from having fine-tuned my creativity far outweighs the negative feeling of having to have my creativity critiqued.
If you had asked me five or even two years ago where I would be, however, I don't think I would've been able to tell you, and I certainly don't think that my best guesses would've included anything about working a salaried job as a web developer in the health care industry, wouldn't have included anything about writing anything beyond IMs or tweets, and certainly wouldn't have included anything about gender.  And you know what?  If you had asked me even a month or two ago whether I would ever want to share this in a public setting, I don't think I would.  I mean, I mentioned it basically as vaguely as possible on [a][s], and offered no explanation.  I don't feel comfortable talking about it, it makes me feel terrible to even think about, but I suppose that's probably a good sign that I should say something about it, and it's part of my New Years resolution to figure this out..  If nothing else, it'd give those around me some idea of why things have gotten steadily weirder for me over the past few months.
I have never felt so uncomfortable in my own body.  I had never done something like have sex with the guy I'm engaged to and felt that it was wrong, nor has the feeling lingered into the next days as despair.  While I had been plagued with suicidal thoughts before for what felt like no real good reason, I'd never considered anything like self mutilation with the specific goal of removing my sex drive via chemical or physical castration so I wouldn't have to experience it.  I had never thought back on my childhood and thought to myself that the way my parents had acted around me would prove to be the source of a lot of strife in my adult life.  They had always been fairly liberal people bringing me up, but I've been impressed with very straight-forward gender roles, and to feel those being tested as the lines blur in my own self-image is causing more grief than any other single thing in my life since I came out in the first place.
I felt that furry would be a safe way for me to explore along the cline of gender identity and you know, I really did pretty alright at first.  I could pretend to be a female fox and get away with it pretty easily - remember the right pronouns, act just so, and it goes over pretty well. I wrote about that in one of my posts for [a][s], even, how the fact that furry is endowed with both an even distribution of sexual orientations along the Kinsey scale and a population that is 80% male leads to it being rather acceptable for a guy to play a girl on the 'net.  That is, acceptable as in fairly innocuous - there would be eye-rolling and some banter about the issue, but not necessarily any real issues in a group setting (speaking from experience, it can cause issues among couples, of course). But, you know, I'm just not a girl.  I certainly think I would be less uncomfortable if my biological sex were female, but I don't think I would necessarily fit within that gender role, either.  Even so, I went along with things for quite a while, pretending to be a guy sometimes, pretending to be a girl others, and feeling awkward about either for different reasons.
Now, I'm sure that, whether or not it's known, it's probably pretty easy to guess the next step - something in between.  I should state right off the bat that I don't think that being a hermaphrodite is some sort of ideal, nor do I think it would make me feel less uncomfortable.  If you pressed me for a possible solution to the fact that I don't feel comfortable with my given sex and probably wouldn't feel comfortable as a biological female, I think the only thing I could think up is that I just wish that biological sex were as fluid as gender seems to be.  But to the point, I figured that I would give something in the middle a try, since most anything is acceptable within the fandom.  What did I have to lose?  I felt bad basically no matter what I did.  So I went ahead and made myself a new character as a hermaphrodite that steered rather close to the male end of the spectrum (folk call it male-herm, but since that's become almost derogatory, I've left it out).  Making  a character in furry is a pretty standard thing, for me - I've got my own small horde - and I figured that this would be something of a lark - a way for me to see if something in the middle would feel more comfortable than either end of the spectrum.
Well, <em>turns out</em>, that made the problem a good deal worse in many respects.  I had never thought, for instance, that the move would be so polarizing.  I will, in all probability, lose friends over this, despite having made a few more because of it.  I've been called disgusting online and to my face, but I've also had more than one person tell me that they find it hot.  I've done my best to find myself a comfortable spot somewhere within the spectrum and it's turned out to be something viewed as a purely sexual move by just about every party involved, to the point where those opposed have said, and I quote, "I was caught in the trap... grody vagina", or, and here I'm paraphrasing several people, "herms are just a way for gay men to have straight sex while two dicks are still involved."  Great.  Awesome.  I love being called grody or a trap.  I really enjoy being considered a cheat just in order to obtain heterosexual intercourse; I didn't even <em>mention</em> my orientation. Part of me wanted to say, "Yeah, well, if I understood, I probably wouldn't want to shoot myself in the face, so maybe you all should just leave me alone."
The response from the positive side was even weirder.  Despite some people simply mentioning that it's hot or whatever, many have latched onto the fact that I've got a grody vagina  as purely a means of reproduction.  I've attracted a healthy combination of the impregnation fetishists and male-pregnancy fans.  I'd have to say that a very large part of why I feel so uncomfortable is that I'm now in a committed relationship - engaged to be married, even - wherein children play absolutely no part.  I've mentioned it once or twice to James, but since he seems on the fence about it, I'm going to take that as a no: no parent should be on the fence about being a parent.  I want to be a parent.  Badly.  And as part of my own gender issues, I feel that I'd make, and I feel really weird saying this, a very motherly father.  So for this to be totally fetishized with people, turning something that makes my chest ache in that wrong feeling into something that gets you off...well, it's a little hard to cope sometimes.
I can't say all that without adding that the experience hasn't been totally negative for me.  The comments I mentioned earlier in the negative aspect came mostly from the fact that I got James a (very expensive) commission for Christmas, from a very widely viewed artist.  When I posted the image to my own FA account, I received largely positive comments and a fairly high percentage of favorites, given the number of views.  When the artist posted the commission, however, The comments were a mix of both positive and negative, and the percentage of favorites was decidedly less.  The most striking thing, though, and this is the positive aspect, was seeing the different ways in which people treat art within the fandom: when the patron posts the piece, it's a representation of themselves, but when the artist posts the piece, it's a piece of art.  It's the difference between, "You look really good," and "It looks really good."  This is, I shamelessly admit, excellent fodder for [a][s].
Another positive side to the whole situation is the fact that I <em>have</em> made a lot of new friends, and in at least two instances, rekindled old friendships.  The fact that I'm willing to start expressing a gender that, in some respects, more closely matches my own identity is certainly divisive, but the positive side (weirdness aside), has been really welcoming.  As part of [a][s], I polled my twitter followers as to whether or not furry was more dramatic than society at large and why, and one of the responses is decidedly pertinent: "Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics. [...]"  That I have this extra minority identity now seems to mean that the friends I make are much more willing to set differences aside in order to be together.  I've made friends with people I don't think I normally would've even considered approaching for such outside this context, and I'm happy for that.
Outside of the context of furry, I don't know how much this means.  James and I have talked about it quite a bit, and he's very supportive, even if that means that things don't always work out between us in terms of sexual compatibility, but that's always been on the table.  I have no desire to go through any transition; the goal isn't the same as my concept of self, and I've received a fair bit of trouble in that field as well.  Several people have told me that they think it's wrong, or that all transgendered people who go through the process are crazy.   The latter is supported by a very good friend who is a good way through transitioning, himself: hormones, he says, are not easy on the mind.  My job, friends, and family are all on the line when it comes to my identity, as well, and I've no desire to even begin any sort of process that would put any of that at risk, even if it were to fix some physical aspect of myself that's causing pain.
The whole situation has caused plenty of problems within my life already, and me forcing it to the fore like this is likely only going to cause more.  I fully expect this to at least lead to strife, if not the loss of some social connections, but, as I mentioned, this is something that's part of my goal to better myself in the guise of a resolution: I need to figure this out in order to stay sane and healthy, and as much as I love my social interaction with those around me, this need is going to win out in any cost-benefit analysis.  I met my friends in a good mix of some very adamantly homosexual circles as well as circles that were almost in violent opposition to this; I fully expect anything that has to deal with gender to be divisive. Even if my PN friends or those I've met after stop talking to me, it's eminently important to me that I be able to be comfortable with my concept of self.
Relationships shift between people, and perhaps I'm making more out of this than it warrants.  When I moved in with my dad and away from my mom, my friends groups shifted; when I moved back, they shifted again, but not quite back to what they were before; and when I graduated high school, I transitioned into a different person and welcomed the change in social circles.  If all of this comes at the cost of some of my friendships, I'll be sad, but I don't think it will ruin me.  The thoughts of suicide or weirder will pass given increased comfort levels, and I think that I'll be happier when things have settled down - I will have, if nothing else, come to an understanding with myself about all these issues, I will have begun an interesting exploration of some of the common threads that bind me to this strange subculture that is furry, and I will have grown as a person, as cheesy as that sounds.  I'm just glad that I'm now able to give back with [adjective][species] as well as partake in even more of the human experience, despite the drama.

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%title 2012-04-18 22:20:49
%date Love Letter 1
:blog:fossil:diary:
James,
One of the interesting things I read in that Straight book was about how the process of courtship has changed over the last hundred years.  Where once there was the idea of "calling," now there is dating.  Where once there was the idea of arranged marriages for social and financial benefit, now there are relationships based on love, affection, and sex.  And where once there were love letters, there is now the instant communication of the Internet and mobile devices.
I'd have to say that I think we lost something really great when the genre of love letters started to fade.
I certainly appreciate being able to text you at any time or, if we're at all separated, being able to talk with you over AIM.  It's a way for me to experience you when I'm not actually around you.  And beyond that, it's a medium that allows both relatively instantaneous communication while still retaining the benefit of being able to think about our words before we actually hit send.
This is an example of the benefits of a specific medium.  The letter is an altogether different medium, however, and has its plus-sides to counter the "down side" of being not immediate.  Not only does writing a letter like this allow me to get my thoughts all in line before I give it to you, but it provides me with a whole slew of options when it comes to the structure, phrasing, or, if we compare it to Twitter, verbosity.  You, of all people, know how I like to use lots and lots of words.
The love letter, as it evolved to near extinction, was a place for two emotionally connected individuals to share their deep thoughts and feelings for one another.  Thoughts and feelings that, for whatever reason, simply would not work in speech, whether due to distance or privacy, shyness or simply needing to be set down on paper with more forethought than would be allowed by talking.
You and I are getting married in less than a month.
Married.
What the hell?!
James, I met you at FFF EIGHT years ago.  That's longer than it took for me to finish a college degree.  It's longer than it took for me to learn to read and write after I was born.  It's longer than it took for so many things, and yet I'm still learning about you.  Things that I had never even imagined that first night.
I had to leave early, remember? Broomball with the GLBT Student Services people over at EPIC.  I hugged on you and talked to you just because you seemed really aloof, and like you weren't having that good of a time.  I didn't realize that you were shy or anything, I basically just hit on you because you were a chubby, awkward, intelligent guy who was just getting into this weird thing called Triangle.
We wound up becoming friends.  We had some awkward conversations.  I wasn't really into dating, but I was into sex, so we played around.  It lead to some weird craziness with Andrew, and that awkward time when we weren't really sure where we stood with each other.
Remember Pride, too? That was another milestone with us.  On the drive back home, we talked about our status, and I think I left you disappointed. Now that I look back on that talk, I realize that I really was not ready for a relationship.  I was weirdly in the middle of something with Rikoshi, and that had gotten in the way - not to mention the awkward mess that was Andy!
I wouldn't be ready for a relationship for a long time.  There was Tyson, Andrew, Kayla...None of those worked; they all failed because of me being not ready, being still just a kid, really, when it came to emotions.
I don't think that what I had with each of those people was invalid or anything.  In each case, I left the relationship changed - more mature.  I don't think I would be who I am today without them.  Namely, I don't think that I would be ready to take this momentous (if purely symbolic) step with you in May if I hadn't ran that gauntlet before.
I hope that our love for each other always deepens, broadens, never stays static.  We should always be willing to change and grow with each other, to get past the rough spots together, to fight with each other, to have crazy make-up sex together.  I hope that you and I will always be two halves to a whole, really.
You always hear "hopes and fears" in the same breath, so here is what I fear.  I fear that I am too much my father's son, and that I will not be able to remain with you forever.  I allay that fear with the knowledge that you and I do not rely solely on monogamy to keep us together.
I fear that an emotional shock will be the end of our relationship.  Zephyr will not live forever, and I fear his inevitable death for this reason.  I allay that fear with the knowledge that we will have each other to share our sorrow, our grief, our anger, hatred, and jealousy with as the years go by.
And I fear any end to what we have right now.  Whether due to death, an end to romance, or distance, any end would be terrible.  I allay that fear with the knowledge that we are both complex, mature individuals.  We can take hardship and integrate it into our lives, make it part of ourselves, and grow stronger and better because of it.  You see?  With each fear is a little bit more hope.
I love you, James, and I'm so excited to spend each day with you.  All of these hopes and fears and words make me glad that I can't tell the future: that would take away the joy I feel at living out my life with you.  Lets get married and be awesome.
&nbsp;
Love,
Matt

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%title 2012-04-18 22:21:51
%date Love Letter 1
:blog:fossil:diary:
James,
One of the interesting things I read in that Straight book was about how the process of courtship has changed over the last hundred years.  Where once there was the idea of "calling," now there is dating.  Where once there was the idea of arranged marriages for social and financial benefit, now there are relationships based on love, affection, and sex.  And where once there were love letters, there is now the instant communication of the Internet and mobile devices.
I'd have to say that I think we lost something really great when the genre of love letters started to fade.
I certainly appreciate being able to text you at any time or, if we're at all separated, being able to talk with you over AIM.  It's a way for me to experience you when I'm not actually around you.  And beyond that, it's a medium that allows both relatively instantaneous communication while still retaining the benefit of being able to think about our words before we actually hit send.
This is an example of the benefits of a specific medium.  The letter is an altogether different medium, however, and has its plus-sides to counter the "down side" of being not immediate.  Not only does writing a letter like this allow me to get my thoughts all in line before I give it to you, but it provides me with a whole slew of options when it comes to the structure, phrasing, or, if we compare it to Twitter, verbosity.  You, of all people, know how I like to use lots and lots of words.
The love letter, as it evolved to near extinction, was a place for two emotionally connected individuals to share their deep thoughts and feelings for one another.  Thoughts and feelings that, for whatever reason, simply would not work in speech, whether due to distance or privacy, shyness or simply needing to be set down on paper with more forethought than would be allowed by talking.
You and I are getting married in less than a month.
Married.
What the hell?!
James, I met you at FFF EIGHT years ago.  That's longer than it took for me to finish a college degree.  It's longer than it took for me to learn to read and write after I was born.  It's longer than it took for so many things, and yet I'm still learning about you.  Things that I had never even imagined that first night.
I had to leave early, remember? Broomball with the GLBT Student Services people over at EPIC.  I hugged on you and talked to you just because you seemed really aloof, and like you weren't having that good of a time.  I didn't realize that you were shy or anything, I basically just hit on you because you were a chubby, awkward, intelligent guy who was just getting into this weird thing called Triangle.
We wound up becoming friends.  We had some awkward conversations.  I wasn't really into dating, but I was into sex, so we played around.  It lead to some weird craziness with Andrew, and that awkward time when we weren't really sure where we stood with each other.
Remember Pride, too? That was another milestone with us.  On the drive back home, we talked about our status, and I think I left you disappointed. Now that I look back on that talk, I realize that I really was not ready for a relationship.  I was weirdly in the middle of something with Rikoshi, and that had gotten in the way - not to mention the awkward mess that was Andy!
I wouldn't be ready for a relationship for a long time.  There was Tyson, Andrew, Kayla...None of those worked; they all failed because of me being not ready, being still just a kid, really, when it came to emotions.
I don't think that what I had with each of those people was invalid or anything.  In each case, I left the relationship changed - more mature.  I don't think I would be who I am today without them.  Namely, I don't think that I would be ready to take this momentous (if purely symbolic) step with you in May if I hadn't ran that gauntlet before.
I hope that our love for each other always deepens, broadens, never stays static.  We should always be willing to change and grow with each other, to get past the rough spots together, to fight with each other, to have crazy make-up sex together.  I hope that you and I will always be two halves to a whole, really.
You always hear "hopes and fears" in the same breath, so here is what I fear.  I fear that I am too much my father's son, and that I will not be able to remain with you forever.  I allay that fear with the knowledge that you and I do not rely solely on monogamy to keep us together.
I fear that an emotional shock will be the end of our relationship.  Zephyr will not live forever, and I fear his inevitable death for this reason.  I allay that fear with the knowledge that we will have each other to share our sorrow, our grief, our anger, hatred, and jealousy with as the years go by.
And I fear any end to what we have right now.  Whether due to death, an end to romance, or distance, any end would be terrible.  I allay that fear with the knowledge that we are both complex, mature individuals.  We can take hardship and integrate it into our lives, make it part of ourselves, and grow stronger and better because of it.  You see?  With each fear is a little bit more hope.
I love you, James, and I'm so excited to spend each day with you.  All of these hopes and fears and words make me glad that I can't tell the future: that would take away the joy I feel at living out my life with you.  Lets get married and be awesome.
&nbsp;
Love,
Matt

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%title 2012-07-07 22:21:23
%date New site, personal issues
:blog:fossil:diary:
I don't want every post to turn into an apology for not posting more, but I do feel bad for not writing more here, particularly given how much I've been writing in general. Not since when I was deep in the throes of the Manifesto Project have I spent so much time writing down my thoughts. This has me a little worried given how that project sort of petered out. However, I think that the fact that I've given myself more constraints to work within rather than trying to define something so large as my faith and spirituality is going to be working in my advantage. Even so, this is going to be one of those "the more things change, the more they stay the same" type posts.  It's also gonna mention some pretty personal stuff (like, say, depression and sex), so I apologize in advance.<!--more-->
To begin with, I should explain that the new project I've started is another blog, this one in the more traditional sense of a log of articles about one topic written in a semi-professional tone (rather than the LiveJournal-esque sense). It's really no secret that I'm pretty deeply embedded within the furry fandom, now. I've been so for something like twelve years now, even. While I'm not necessarily an oldster or anything, I do like to think that I've hung around more than a good portion of people do, if not most. I've done the con thing, tried my hand at art and storytelling, and even gotten into fursuiting, and I've now got these years of experience behind me.
All this I'm combination with a clash of both fortunate and unfortunate events within the fandom for me has givin me plenty of fuel for writing about what all I've seen, where all I've been, and what all I've done. I started to pull all these together into a blog, <a href="http://adjectivespecies.com" target="_blank">[adjective][species]</a>. That blossomed to include a twitter account (@adjspecies), a Google+ page (named the same as the blog), and an FA account (adjspecies). All this to say that I've been having rather a lot of fun writing and tweeting about the not-so-little subculture I've ensconced myself in.  Or, at least, I've been having some fun, and it's brought some internal strife to the fore.
I've been going through quite a few ups and downs emotionally over the last few years.  I think a lot of it is tied into creativity: I went through almost a manic high when I began my job at bConnected, for instance.  That I was able to translate a lot of the creativity that I felt I had into something that would be used by people on a daily basis in order to not only benefit their own lives, but potentially benefit others was just awesome to me.  However, when I switched from the development cycle to the QA cycle, my level of energy dropped.  It was difficult for me to have people actively seeking issues with my work.  I believe that the strongest aspect of my degree was honing my ability to be creative, and this same cycle was evident in my college years (and years and years) as well - create : positive :: critique : negative.  In the long run, however, I'd say that my degree was a net gain: the benefit I get from having fine-tuned my creativity far outweighs the negative feeling of having to have my creativity critiqued.
If you had asked me five or even two years ago where I would be, however, I don't think I would've been able to tell you, and I certainly don't think that my best guesses would've included anything about working a salaried job as a web developer in the health care industry, wouldn't have included anything about writing anything beyond IMs or tweets, and certainly wouldn't have included anything about gender.  And you know what?  If you had asked me even a month or two ago whether I would ever want to share this in a public setting, I don't think I would.  I mean, I mentioned it basically as vaguely as possible on [a][s], and offered no explanation.  I don't feel comfortable talking about it, it makes me feel terrible to even think about, but I suppose that's probably a good sign that I should say something about it, and it's part of my New Years resolution to figure this out..  If nothing else, it'd give those around me some idea of why things have gotten steadily weirder for me over the past few months.
I have never felt so uncomfortable in my own body.  I had never done something like have sex with the guy I'm engaged to and felt that it was wrong, nor has the feeling lingered into the next days as despair.  While I had been plagued with suicidal thoughts before for what felt like no real good reason, I'd never considered anything like self mutilation with the specific goal of removing my sex drive via chemical or physical castration so I wouldn't have to experience it.  I had never thought back on my childhood and thought to myself that the way my parents had acted around me would prove to be the source of a lot of strife in my adult life.  They had always been fairly liberal people bringing me up, but I've been impressed with very straight-forward gender roles, and to feel those being tested as the lines blur in my own self-image is causing more grief than any other single thing in my life since I came out in the first place.
I felt that furry would be a safe way for me to explore along the cline of gender identity and you know, I really did pretty alright at first.  I could pretend to be a female fox and get away with it pretty easily - remember the right pronouns, act just so, and it goes over pretty well. I wrote about that in one of my posts for [a][s], even, how the fact that furry is endowed with both an even distribution of sexual orientations along the Kinsey scale and a population that is 80% male leads to it being rather acceptable for a guy to play a girl on the 'net.  That is, acceptable as in fairly innocuous - there would be eye-rolling and some banter about the issue, but not necessarily any real issues in a group setting (speaking from experience, it can cause issues among couples, of course). But, you know, I'm just not a girl.  I certainly think I would be less uncomfortable if my biological sex were female, but I don't think I would necessarily fit within that gender role, either.  Even so, I went along with things for quite a while, pretending to be a guy sometimes, pretending to be a girl others, and feeling awkward about either for different reasons.
Now, I'm sure that, whether or not it's known, it's probably pretty easy to guess the next step - something in between.  I should state right off the bat that I don't think that being a hermaphrodite is some sort of ideal, nor do I think it would make me feel less uncomfortable.  If you pressed me for a possible solution to the fact that I don't feel comfortable with my given sex and probably wouldn't feel comfortable as a biological female, I think the only thing I could think up is that I just wish that biological sex were as fluid as gender seems to be.  But to the point, I figured that I would give something in the middle a try, since most anything is acceptable within the fandom.  What did I have to lose?  I felt bad basically no matter what I did.  So I went ahead and made myself a new character as a hermaphrodite that steered rather close to the male end of the spectrum (folk call it male-herm, but since that's become almost derogatory, I've left it out).  Making  a character in furry is a pretty standard thing, for me - I've got my own small horde - and I figured that this would be something of a lark - a way for me to see if something in the middle would feel more comfortable than either end of the spectrum.
Well, <em>turns out</em>, that made the problem a good deal worse in many respects.  I had never thought, for instance, that the move would be so polarizing.  I will, in all probability, lose friends over this, despite having made a few more because of it.  I've been called disgusting online and to my face, but I've also had more than one person tell me that they find it hot.  I've done my best to find myself a comfortable spot somewhere within the spectrum and it's turned out to be something viewed as a purely sexual move by just about every party involved, to the point where those opposed have said, and I quote, "I was caught in the trap... grody vagina", or, and here I'm paraphrasing several people, "herms are just a way for gay men to have straight sex while two dicks are still involved."  Great.  Awesome.  I love being called grody or a trap.  I really enjoy being considered a cheat just in order to obtain heterosexual intercourse; I didn't even <em>mention</em> my orientation. Part of me wanted to say, "Yeah, well, if I understood, I probably wouldn't want to shoot myself in the face, so maybe you all should just leave me alone."
The response from the positive side was even weirder.  Despite some people simply mentioning that it's hot or whatever, many have latched onto the fact that I've got a grody vagina  as purely a means of reproduction.  I've attracted a healthy combination of the impregnation fetishists and male-pregnancy fans.  I'd have to say that a very large part of why I feel so uncomfortable is that I'm now in a committed relationship - engaged to be married, even - wherein children play absolutely no part.  I've mentioned it once or twice to James, but since he seems on the fence about it, I'm going to take that as a no: no parent should be on the fence about being a parent.  I want to be a parent.  Badly.  And as part of my own gender issues, I feel that I'd make, and I feel really weird saying this, a very motherly father.  So for this to be totally fetishized with people, turning something that makes my chest ache in that wrong feeling into something that gets you off...well, it's a little hard to cope sometimes.
I can't say all that without adding that the experience hasn't been totally negative for me.  The comments I mentioned earlier in the negative aspect came mostly from the fact that I got James a (very expensive) commission for Christmas, from a very widely viewed artist.  When I posted the image to my own FA account, I received largely positive comments and a fairly high percentage of favorites, given the number of views.  When the artist posted the commission, however, The comments were a mix of both positive and negative, and the percentage of favorites was decidedly less.  The most striking thing, though, and this is the positive aspect, was seeing the different ways in which people treat art within the fandom: when the patron posts the piece, it's a representation of themselves, but when the artist posts the piece, it's a piece of art.  It's the difference between, "You look really good," and "It looks really good."  This is, I shamelessly admit, excellent fodder for [a][s].
Another positive side to the whole situation is the fact that I <em>have</em> made a lot of new friends, and in at least two instances, rekindled old friendships.  The fact that I'm willing to start expressing a gender that, in some respects, more closely matches my own identity is certainly divisive, but the positive side (weirdness aside), has been really welcoming.  As part of [a][s], I polled my twitter followers as to whether or not furry was more dramatic than society at large and why, and one of the responses is decidedly pertinent: "Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics. [...]"  That I have this extra minority identity now seems to mean that the friends I make are much more willing to set differences aside in order to be together.  I've made friends with people I don't think I normally would've even considered approaching for such outside this context, and I'm happy for that.
Outside of the context of furry, I don't know how much this means.  James and I have talked about it quite a bit, and he's very supportive, even if that means that things don't always work out between us in terms of sexual compatibility, but that's always been on the table.  I have no desire to go through any transition; the goal isn't the same as my concept of self, and I've received a fair bit of trouble in that field as well.  Several people have told me that they think it's wrong, or that all transgendered people who go through the process are crazy.   The latter is supported by a very good friend who is a good way through transitioning, himself: hormones, he says, are not easy on the mind.  My job, friends, and family are all on the line when it comes to my identity, as well, and I've no desire to even begin any sort of process that would put any of that at risk, even if it were to fix some physical aspect of myself that's causing pain.
The whole situation has caused plenty of problems within my life already, and me forcing it to the fore like this is likely only going to cause more.  I fully expect this to at least lead to strife, if not the loss of some social connections, but, as I mentioned, this is something that's part of my goal to better myself in the guise of a resolution: I need to figure this out in order to stay sane and healthy, and as much as I love my social interaction with those around me, this need is going to win out in any cost-benefit analysis.  I met my friends in a good mix of some very adamantly homosexual circles as well as circles that were almost in violent opposition to this; I fully expect anything that has to deal with gender to be divisive. Even if my PN friends or those I've met after stop talking to me, it's eminently important to me that I be able to be comfortable with my concept of self.
Relationships shift between people, and perhaps I'm making more out of this than it warrants.  When I moved in with my dad and away from my mom, my friends groups shifted; when I moved back, they shifted again, but not quite back to what they were before; and when I graduated high school, I transitioned into a different person and welcomed the change in social circles.  If all of this comes at the cost of some of my friendships, I'll be sad, but I don't think it will ruin me.  The thoughts of suicide or weirder will pass given increased comfort levels, and I think that I'll be happier when things have settled down - I will have, if nothing else, come to an understanding with myself about all these issues, I will have begun an interesting exploration of some of the common threads that bind me to this strange subculture that is furry, and I will have grown as a person, as cheesy as that sounds.  I'm just glad that I'm now able to give back with [adjective][species] as well as partake in even more of the human experience, despite the drama.

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%date A few days after
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%title 2012-07-15 22:44:41
%date A month after
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%title 2012-07-15 22:47:06
%date Three months after
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%title 2012-07-15 22:49:28
%date Three months after with cover-up
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%title 2012-07-15 22:53:18
%date Some consequences
:blog:fossil:diary:
It is important to understand that there are consequences to every action, no matter how hard you try to diminish them.  I've done all that I can over the last six months to piece some sort of life together out of disparate shards - a bit of not-using-my-degree here, a bit of overworking there, a generous sprinkling of gender and self-image issues...
Even the things that you think live only in your head, though, even those have consequences that you will have to take into account in your interactions with the outside world.  Feeling sad, feeling mad, feeling like you're going crazy; each of these presents itself to those around us and helps them form opinions of us both holistic and minute-to-minute.  But either way, whether you chose to stop through a long slow life of too much alcohol or in one short night of exquisite terror, there's always consequences, success or failure.
<a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-58" title="A few days after" src="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /></a>
You'll snap at friends and friends will shy away from you.  Those who you tell will be as sympathetic as they can while keeping their distance or helping too much, because it takes a lot of crazy to cut that deep.
<a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-59" title="A month after" src="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/2-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /></a>
Those whom you hold most dear will start questioning whether or not maybe they shouldn't try to off themselves as well, and you'll have to do your best to keep the crazy down around them, because it takes a lot of sanity to protect those around you.
<a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/3.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-60" title="Three months after" src="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/3-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /></a>
You'll lose friends.  You will lose friends. You <em>will lose</em> friends.  You have attempted to betray the expectations of others that the world around them will go on with you in it, and some of them will leave you for it.  <em>If you had succeeded, people would hate you forever.</em>
<a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/4.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-61" title="Three months after with cover-up" src="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/4-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /></a>
You can try to cover it up, but you will stay ashamed forever.  You can say the scar is a constant reminder never to do something so stupid again, but it will be a reminder to feel bad always.  You can buy long sleeve shirts, you can try to go back to work with the boss that threatened to have you committed, you can try to laugh it off, but<em> </em>nothing will make you feel better about how crazy you got.
Don't try.  Get help.  Things will get better.  Even for those with scars, things will get better, and you will move on.  Just don't, though.  Just don't.

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%title 2012-07-15 22:54:20
%date Some consequences
:blog:fossil:diary:
It is important to understand that there are consequences to every action, no matter how hard you try to diminish them.  I've done all that I can over the last six months to piece some sort of life together out of disparate shards - a bit of not-using-my-degree here, a bit of overworking there, a generous sprinkling of gender and self-image issues...
Even the things that you think live only in your head, though, even those have consequences that you will have to take into account in your interactions with the outside world.  Feeling sad, feeling mad, feeling like you're going crazy; each of these presents itself to those around us and helps them form opinions of us both holistic and minute-to-minute.  But either way, whether you chose to stop through a long slow life of too much alcohol or in one short night of exquisite terror, there's always consequences, success or failure.
<a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-58" title="A few days after" src="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/1-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /></a>
You'll snap at friends and friends will shy away from you.  Those who you tell will be as sympathetic as they can while keeping their distance or helping too much, because it takes a lot of crazy to cut that deep.
<a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/2.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-59" title="A month after" src="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/2-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /></a>
Those whom you hold most dear will start questioning whether or not maybe they shouldn't try to off themselves as well, and you'll have to do your best to keep the crazy down around them, because it takes a lot of sanity to protect those around you.
<a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/3.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-60" title="Three months after" src="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/3-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /></a>
You'll lose friends.  You will lose friends. You <em>will lose</em> friends.  You have attempted to betray the expectations of others that the world around them will go on with you in it, and some of them will leave you for it.  <em>If you had succeeded, people would hate you forever.</em>
<a href="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/4.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-61" title="Three months after with cover-up" src="http://blag.drab-makyo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/4-223x300.jpg" alt="" width="223" height="300" /></a>
You can try to cover it up, but you will stay ashamed forever.  You can say the scar is a constant reminder never to do something so stupid again, but it will be a reminder to feel bad always.  You can buy long sleeve shirts, you can try to go back to work with the boss that threatened to have you committed, you can try to laugh it off, but<em> </em>nothing will make you feel better about how crazy you got.
Don't try.  Get help.  Things will get better.  Even for those with scars, things will get better, and you will move on.  Just don't, though.  Just don't.

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%title 2012-08-26 21:22:10
%date Now is the second springtime of me
:blog:fossil:diary:
It's a little strange how, even in so technological an age, we can still come back to the yearly cycle for metaphor and feel comfortable.
Five months ago, on March 21, I had the worst night of my life, period, <em>ever</em>, and tomorrow marks five months to the day when I returned back to work for the first time after that. That makes it May 5 in this new springtime.
And unlike the previous springtime of adolescence, this is a springtime of unknowing. Before, I always knew what would come next. Elementary to middle to high school, and college afterward. College to a job to retirement. Buy a house, get a dog, get married. But now, I don't know when summer comes, I don't know when the year ends.
Two weeks ago, I gave a presentation in front of a standing room only audience on data visualization and the furry fandom.
A week and a half ago, I resigned from my job as project lead to accept a position at Canonical as a developer.
A week ago, I began tapering off the last of my medications, and picked up a nervous tic from it.
Friday, I received a call telling me it was okay to stop that medication flat out.
Yesterday I painted my toenails with James for No Reason At All.
Four hours ago, I experienced hypnotism for the first time, and the imagery of springtime was cemented in place. I haven't been this relaxed (even with the tic) since the summer of the previous cycle.
There are things embedded in the western doxa which will make this all sound so trite to just about every one of you, but folks, life is so big and <em>so wonderful,</em> the high points so exalted and the low points so profound, that there is honestly no better reason to go on living than life itself.
Have at it.
All my love,
~M

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%title 2012-08-26 21:23:16
%date Now is the second springtime of me
:blog:fossil:diary:
It's a little strange how, even in so technological an age, we can still come back to the yearly cycle for metaphor and feel comfortable.
Five months ago, on March 21, I had the worst night of my life, period, <em>ever</em>, and tomorrow marks five months to the day when I returned back to work for the first time after that. That makes it May 5 in this new springtime.
And unlike the previous springtime of adolescence, this is a springtime of unknowing. Before, I always knew what would come next. Elementary to middle to high school, and college afterward. College to a job to retirement. Buy a house, get a dog, get married. But now, I don't know when summer comes, I don't know when the year ends.
Two weeks ago, I gave a presentation in front of a standing room only audience on data visualization and the furry fandom.
A week and a half ago, I resigned from my job as project lead to accept a position at Canonical as a developer.
A week ago, I began tapering off the last of my medications, and picked up a nervous tic from it.
Friday, I received a call telling me it was okay to stop that medication flat out.
Yesterday I painted my toenails with James for No Reason At All.
Four hours ago, I experienced hypnotism for the first time, and the imagery of springtime was cemented in place. I haven't been this relaxed (even with the tic) since the summer of the previous cycle.
There are things embedded in the western doxa which will make this all sound so trite to just about every one of you, but folks, life is so big and <em>so wonderful,</em> the high points so exalted and the low points so profound, that there is honestly no better reason to go on living than life itself.
Have at it.
All my love,
~M

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%title 2012-10-08 09:26:41
%date Some SVG/mouse event oddities
:blog:fossil:diary:
A task at work had me pulling my hair out, but I finally got it, thankfully!  I figured it might also be a good idea to do a little write-up about it, and potentially do more about future items, just because they can sometimes be kind of interesting.
(drawing an edge between two vertices on a graph)
(rubberbanding pending edge)
(mouse events fire on containing elements in html, but also on covering elements (which  may not be contained) in svg, so mouse events can fire on the pending edge, because mousemove isn't fired all the time, so your cursor can wind up over the pending edge)
(solution for first part is, in theory, to use mouseenter and mouseleave instead of over and out)
(solution to the second part (and covering the first part) is to check if the cursor is within  the vertex)

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%title 2013-01-04 17:44:27
%date Book 1: Freakonomics
:blog:fossil:diary:
<strong>Title: </strong><em>Freakonomics - A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything</em>
<strong>Authors: </strong>Steven D. Levitt and Step

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%title Diary
## 2020
### April
* [Markdown and writing tech](2020-04-22)
* [2020-04-10](2020-04-10)
* [2020-04-09](2020-04-09)
# Diary
## 2020
@ -14,3 +6,88 @@
* [2020-04-22](2020-04-22)
* [2020-04-10](2020-04-10)
* [2020-04-09](2020-04-09)
## 2013
### January
* [2013-01-04-17:44:27](2013-01-04-17:44:27)
## 2012
### October
* [2012-10-08-09:26:41](2012-10-08-09:26:41)
### August
* [2012-08-26-21:23:16](2012-08-26-21:23:16)
* [2012-08-26-21:22:10](2012-08-26-21:22:10)
### July
* [2012-07-15-22:54:20](2012-07-15-22:54:20)
* [2012-07-15-22:53:18](2012-07-15-22:53:18)
* [2012-07-15-22:49:28](2012-07-15-22:49:28)
* [2012-07-15-22:47:06](2012-07-15-22:47:06)
* [2012-07-15-22:44:41](2012-07-15-22:44:41)
* [2012-07-15-22:43:25](2012-07-15-22:43:25)
* [2012-07-07-22:21:23](2012-07-07-22:21:23)
### April
* [2012-04-18-22:21:51](2012-04-18-22:21:51)
* [2012-04-18-22:20:49](2012-04-18-22:20:49)
### January
* [2012-01-01-17:31:55](2012-01-01-17:31:55)
## 2011
### December
* [2011-12-08-14:37:21](2011-12-08-14:37:21)
### September
* [2011-09-09-15:37:42](2011-09-09-15:37:42)
* [2011-09-09-15:35:12](2011-09-09-15:35:12)
### April
* [2011-04-18-14:40:58](2011-04-18-14:40:58)
* [2011-04-18-14:39:51](2011-04-18-14:39:51)
## 2010
### December
* [2010-12-08-19:01:26](2010-12-08-19:01:26)
* [2010-12-07-19:25:49](2010-12-07-19:25:49)
* [2010-12-07-19:24:40](2010-12-07-19:24:40)
### November
* [2010-11-20-20:26:51](2010-11-20-20:26:51)
* [2010-11-17-15:59:38](2010-11-17-15:59:38)
* [2010-11-01-11:30:59](2010-11-01-11:30:59)
* [2010-11-01-10:12:04](2010-11-01-10:12:04)
### October
* [2010-10-31-20:24:26](2010-10-31-20:24:26)
* [2010-10-01-01:28:59](2010-10-01-01:28:59)
### September
* [2010-09-08-20:13:41](2010-09-08-20:13:41)
* [2010-09-07-23:10:02](2010-09-07-23:10:02)
* [2010-09-07-23:07:13](2010-09-07-23:07:13)
### July
* [2010-07-25-20:18:21](2010-07-25-20:18:21)
* [2010-07-25-20:09:29](2010-07-25-20:09:29)
### June
* [2010-06-19-00:12:43](2010-06-19-00:12:43)
* [2010-06-10-13:28:16](2010-06-10-13:28:16)
### May
* [2010-05-14-20:16:54](2010-05-14-20:16:54)
### April
* [2010-04-19-11:48:06](2010-04-19-11:48:06)
* [2010-04-16-12:08:13](2010-04-16-12:08:13)
### March
* [2010-03-31-21:04:58](2010-03-31-21:04:58)
* [2010-03-31-18:02:01](2010-03-31-18:02:01)
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