Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Sadly, my laptop is nearly dead after years of great service… I’m typing this on a USB keyboard, and the CD drive has had some sort of problem where it sometimes reverts its driver to PIO mode (instead of Ultra DMA), which eats up CPU cycles with needless hardware interrupts until I uninstall the driver and let it reinstall itself properly. This was a big pain in the ass to diagnose the first time! I think when I move I’ll be going back to a desktop solution.

Here’s a couple of paintings from the book project. As you can see I’m starting to put the final touches on them. It will definitely be nice to finally be finished so I can move on to the next idea! Other than that, since today I “pancake day” I suppose I’ll have to come up with something clever for supper.

I think that when a kid gets older, specialization and limitation is more important in order to build up specific expertise, but my feeling for younger kids is that it’s important to get a bit of everything — play with friends, solo play, skill-building video games, strategy games like chess and zig-zag and abalone, physical challenges of all sorts, mental challenges of all sorts, reading and writing and story telling (and yes, even TV), tests of responsibility and independence, science and history exploration, mischief and rule testing, and rule enforcement — in order to build the foundation of a robust individual that can become anything they later choose to. Nefarious and I go in phases of what physical activities we do after school, but I sure do enjoy the days that we go swimming. Today the pool was swelteringly hot — entering the pool room took my breath away… it was like a sauna. In the bad news department both of our goggles finally broke, but still, lots of fun.

Other than that, I successfully wrote my first Firefox extension today (a simple search bar — here’s a good tutorial if you want to try). It’s actually pretty simple — although with Javascript skills as poor as mine, “simple” may be a stretch. Anyway, feel free to add yourself to the mailing list at MyPrivatePla.net, and in time you’ll see why I’m brushing up on these skills.

PS. Oh my god that’s terrible.

Caitlin and I went to the bookstore a few days ago and I picked up a book called “Discarded Science” on the discount rack for a couple dollars. Subtitled “ideas that seemed good at the time”, I’ve read it over the last couple days cover to cover and greatly enjoyed it. In the same general realm, I watched a great movie this weekend called “The Man From Earth“, a sci-fi story that’s basically a full-movie-length conversation about/with a Cro-Magnon man who still hasn’t died after 14,000 years. The producer of the movie seems to be supportive of p2p distribution of the movie, so if you click the thumbnail you can download a torrent of it. Definitely recommended.

When we get our new studio space — it’s looking like April 1st — I want to start doing some sculptural works (let me know if you see a free kiln or other interesting gear locally on Craigslist), as well as working on a new car, so I enjoyed reading this interview with Chris Ryniak about his sculptures. In more online reading, I liked these musings about converting oil rigs into hotels, possibly self-sufficient ones. Hello, Waterworld!