It's all happening.  The garden is going nuts, we're going to go through a stage of not having to buy so many veges, and we're turning into those old people that like pottering around their gardens (though I don't do much of any garden work as I seem to have a knack for killing plants).

This morning, as we were going around to see how the garden was going (the zuchinni is huge, all zuchinni plants have gotten bigger since the last post), when we encountered this fellow practising kung fu on a mulberry leaf:

Mantis kung fu!

Not quite intelligent enough for a coherent post, so have lots of captioned photos instead.

Homeschooling art and English: storyboarding with Mummy (who was working on AR storyboards)

Seeing as I've decided to use lojban as the IAL for AEfter Ragnarok (easy way to facilitate communication between people who don't speak the same language; all people are strongly encouraged to learn their own culture, language, traditions etc first and foremost), I figured maybe I should have a "culturally neutral" (or something to that effect) global calendar as well.

The calendar reform article on Wikipedia had a bunch of links to check out.

The most popular types of calendar reforms seem to have 13 months with 28 days with intercalary ("leap") days and/or weeks to adjust for the fact the planet takes a slightly incomvenient slightly less than 365.25 days to potter around the sun.  The extra month tends to get grafted between June and July and called Sol or Luna.  One calendar called it Aten.

A lot less common (I've only managed to find one easily, probably would find more if I looked harder) were calendars based off varying the number of days in a week, like 6 Day Week, which advocates dropping a day from the week (they proposed Tuesday and gave reasons why) to make a 4 day work week with the standard 2 day weekend, 12 five week months of 30 days each and an Intercalary Period of 5-6 days depending on whether or not it's a leap year.

So, looking for a calendar that's either reasonably culturally neutral or at least flexible with the naming conventions and isn't going to blow my head up with implementation.

Good thing I'm not trying for ranking in keywords to position myself as an expert on anything, as this would drown in a search :)

I've been wanting to get back into training for A Very Long Time (tm), so have been poking around for a kung fu school.  There's some wing chun and other styles floating around the place, but in the end I admitted to myself that what I really wanted was Choy Lay Fut.

I found one with the help of Dogpile.

I'm in my second week training chi kung and tai chi on the weekends and one class on kung fu during the week.

It's awesome.

It's perfect.

I'm not convinced my colour map is working.  Will have to see when I do other random renders while fixing up the weight maps and seeing if I can work out cloth dynamics on the clothes.  And I think I need to darken my hair a little bit.  After that all I really need to do is see if I can work out how to get my freckle constellation on my face and I'm calling me done.

Did I mention I bit it and froze the model? Vastly better control on the shape and textures and things but gods working directly with the mesh is a pain in the system.

Animation coming eventually.  I really shouldn't keep going with the "rig test" but I really want to :S

Ruan likes experimenting in all media.  Recently I let her have a go with Pixelmator and my Cintiq.  This is what she came up with.

Now I have to go to Carousel to get her more paints and a canbus.

Ru: Can we get more paints and a canbus?
Me: Canbus? Canvas?
Ru: the canbus is what I paint on, silly.

So.  At work we've switched from using svn to git (and GitHub).

Difference: decentralised, therefore "commit" commits it to the local repo rather than the remote/centralised one, and you have to "commit" then "push" to the remote.

Problem: .gitignore was not gitignoring some files (settings.php and .htaccess which I had to change to make it work on my local) which it was supposed to be gitignoring.

Solution as per RobWilkerson.org:

Do:

git status

which should spit up a list of modified files since lasy commit/sync/something (shut up I'm still working git out ;)

Next:

git update-index --assume-unchanged path/to/file

Yay, can now sync!

And for a listing of what's --assume-unchanged:

I've had several.

Simultaneously, I've had several thoughts on which way this post was going to go.  Originally I was going to go along the vein of a blog post from Zauber Paracelsus (which outlines the "nymwars" debacle to the date of that post, people embarking on "Project DeGooglefy" and alternatives to Google services).

Then I was going to do something or other about G+ and Facebook and problems with centralised social networks.

Somewhere in there I wanted to write about the DiSo project (which appears to have died), and projects such as Diaspora and Friendika, and how I'm wanting to attempt to help with everything, and where I'm going to expend most of my efforts.

Then I started wondering what all those people that aren't me want.  Build it and they will come maybe, but "they" still need to have a use for it and be able to use it.