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Posts published in “Real Life”

It’s what happens when we’re not working or playing or thinking or doing. That thing we do that doesn’t fit into all the other categories.

Sometimes we call it living.

a process of occlusion

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It snowed, and while ice remained on the ground in some shaded areas for weeks, in others, the disappearance of the light dusting of real snow was swift and stark.

Above, the snow was gone from the courtyard by practically the next afternoon, burned off by the sun - except in the places the winter sun didn't reach, leaving a line as sharp as a ruler.

There's some deeper message in this somewhere, but I find it elusive. Oh hey, look the Author button has returned to the Post settings. Where did you go, little buddy? I missed you.

<click>-the Centaur</click>

Pictured: um, well, I said it. And sure enough, whatever bug caused the Author setting to disappear has un-disappeared. How nice. At least that hasn't turned permanently to molasses like so many other things ...

not quite blogging every day … yet

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So ... what the heck happened to this website for almost six straight months?

The TL;DR (too long; didn't read summary) is that moving the Library of Dresan to a new provider was a huge endeavor, so I prioritized clearing everything else going on in my life until I could focus on the move.

I had lost faith in my old web service provider. Emails delivered to centaur at dresan dot com were randomly dropped to the point I had to stop using it, and image posting was no longer possible because the provider was only giving me 25 gigabytes out of my 35 gigabytes of allotted storage. The Library had to go elsewhere.

But that involved finding a new domain provider, setting up hosting, transferring all the files, transferring the database, getting the Library's WordPress installation running on a new site with new rules and a new version of PHP, and, as a bonus, transferring all the email addresses and lists to the new domain.

And, if you've never tried to transfer 25 gigabytes of files off a remote website, you can't just "do" that. A copy of that size off a consumer-grade website will just randomly fail at arbitrary points during the transfer. I had to write an entire program to help me track this (which I plan to clean up and release on Github).

But while all that was going on, I had to replace my laptop, volunteer at the Unsolved Problems in Social Navigation Workshop, launch The Neurodiversiverse, attend Dragon Con, attend the Milford Writing Workshop, clean up after a hurricane, start mushroom farming with the logs fallen from the hurricane (which had a clock attached to it), quixotically try to get some stuff prepared for GDC 2025, prep for EAI #6, handle submitting a +66 page paper with +30 authors, and prepare for the largest Christmas ever (where we hosted two parties with almost 20 people each, and had three separate groups of houseguests).

When Christmas was finally in the rear-view mirror, I then turned my attention to webworks - first fixing the Logical Robotics website, then fixing my wife's website, and finally fixing the Library itself. It was ... exactly the ordeal that I feared it would be. Actually the WordPress part, that part, it worked fine - I had already copied the files, and had frozen the database as of my July 26, 2024 post, and ... miraculously, the website was working to serve the pages with very little issue. But posting did not work (a permissions issue). And then logging into the website quit working (an SSL issue). And then posting images quit working (which turned out to be, indirectly, an SSL issue, due to the firewall bundled with the SSL).

And so on. And so on.

Yes, yes, yes, bla bla bla, you've heard all this from website developers before. But there's a very important insight I have to share with you. Yes, we are finite creatures with limited powers, and yes, sometimes we run into problems, and yes, sometimes, we run into problems that seem beyond our abilities to solve.

But, just as we are finite, so our problems are finite. Yes, yes, yes, it's important to understand the difference between a solvable problem (cleaning out your storage unit) and an unsolvable one (as when the legendary King Canute apocryphally tried to back the tide, which is actually a dirty lie given that he knew better and was just trying to stick it to his flatterers in his court, but, whatever). But as long as you are not actually trying to turn back the tides, your problems can be solved by focusing on them, one by one.

And so that's what I've been doing for the past several months since I came back from the Milford Writing Workshop. My 2024 was hectic - because we wanted to launch The Neurodiversiverse in time for Dragon Con 2024, and because I chose to do a lot of publicity for it at the Nebulas, Con Carolinas, and Dragon Con itself, but because I chose to not cancel many other events, like the Fifth Annual Embodied AI Workshop, or the Workshop on Unsolved Problems on Social Robot Navigation, or my attendance at the Milford Writing Workshop itself - requiring me to plan it down practically to the week.

After Milford, however, I had a few months until Christmas ... and I vowed to start "clearing the decks" of my massive todo lists. So I've spent the past three or four months methodically identifying things, working to eliminate them, and moving on with my life.

It has been refreshing and freeing. I have far to go - my todo list needs a fricking one inch binder clip, and I am not exaggering one bit - but, already, many things that have been bugging me are gone, just gone, leaving me with ... that ... much ... more ... free time and ... that ... much ... less ... mental load to carry.

So, this is a very long-winded way of saying, soon, I'm going to resume blogging every day.

But ... I wanted to clear the decks, and get off my chest why I haven't been.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Snow, in the "French Quarter," our tiny little courtyard.

[twenty twenty-four day one seven two]: i prioritize my marriage

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SO! I am behind on blogging. But my wife and I have been traveling so much this year (near constantly for five months between the two of us) that, frankly speaking, we need to focus on us time more than I need to focus on the blog. So it's going to take a little longer to get things rolling ... because other things come first.

-the Centaur

Pictured: an anniversary picture, from years ago (since the blog image uploading is still borken).

[twenty twenty-four day one seven one]: better late than never

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Welp, by my calendar, I'm about two weeks behind on blogging every day posts, but better late than never, eh? The Embodied AI Workshop went off quite well - we had standing room only three deep by the end - even though I was frazzled from 7am to 10pm trying to make sure things went off as planned.

And the next day, we had CVPR, which was quite the fun adventure! But, then, that evening, I spilled water onto my laptop. It promptly rebooted, then shut down, never to turn on again. Not only did that make me feel like an idiot, it put a serious crimp in the work I was planning to do during the conference.

Including blogging! Not only was it difficult to post on my phone, it was also practically impossible to start down the path of upgrading the dresan.com backend to deal with the file storage issue - and what computing time I had needed to be spent on The Neurodiversiverse. So everything ground to a halt.

So I'm not dead. But it is taking a bit of time to get things back on track. By my count I'm about two weeks behind on blogging and a week behind on art, and it looks like it will take several weeks to get caught up, back up to speed and on a regular posting schedule.

Stay tuned.

-the Centaur

Pictured: The backdrop for Embodied AI #4's scheduling poster, produced with several layers of generative AI combined in Photoshop and extended with Photoshop's own generative fill tools into the poster size. While I'm convinced we don't want to use generative AI for regular art, for this client, which was a workshop on AI featuring generative AI, we wanted the generative AI look.

not dead, still just recuperating

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yeah, it turns out spilling water into your laptop is not great for your productivity. back at home, still working through recuperating from all the travel (including some unexpected bits there at the end).

more soon. i go zzz now.

-the Centaur

Pictured: me from a decade and a half ago, because blog images are still down. Hard at work on Jeremiah Willstone and the Watchtower of Destiny though, and am making progress.

still not a real blogging every day post …

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... trying to catch up on the to-do list, stay tuned.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Past to-do lists, since one of the things to-do is to fix the blog backend.

[twenty twenty-four day one six eight]: what ISN’T embodied AI?

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two hangry cats

The Embodied AI Workshop is coming up this Tuesday, starting at 8:50am, and I am busy procrastinating on my presentation(s) by trying to finish all the OTHER things which need to be done prior to the workshop.

One of the questions my talk raises is what ISN'T embodied AI. And the simplest way I can describe it is that if you don't have to interact with an environment, it isn't embodied.

Figuring out that the golden object on the left and the void on the right is a tremendously complex problem, solved by techniques like CNNs and their variants Inception and ResNet.

But it's a static problem. Recognizing things in the image doesn't change things in the image. But in the real world, you cannot observe things without affecting them.

This is a fundamental principle that goes all the way down to quantum mechanics. Functionally, we can ignore it for certain problems, but we can never make it go away.

So, classical non-interactive learning is an abstraction. If you have a function which goes from image to cat, and the cat can't whap you back for getting up in its bidnes, it isn't embodied.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Gabby, God rest his fuzzy little soul, and Loki, his grumpier cousin.

[twenty twenty-four post one six three]: paranoia will ensure ya

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Okay, I was flying Tuesday, so I'm just going to pretend this was an abbreviated post, something something busy busy something something flying to Vancouver something something robot consulting.

At least I didn't try to fly on an expired passport ... this time. Strange how paranoid a mistake can make you! Like how I missed a flight - two days in a row - trying to leave London, ~30 years ago, the first time due to my mistake, the second due to a train stoppage, so I now try to go to airports ~2 hours early ... and missing my flight to Comic-Con due to traffic made me paranoid enough to leave ~3 hours early in LA's rush hour traffic so I'd have time to make it through any unexpected snafus with my international flight.

But that paranoia got me there safely and on time ... this time.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Me, at some event in 2015 ... wait, I owned this scarf in 2015???

[twenty twenty-four post one six two]: behindiness

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Super far behind, because we're in "the stretch" leading up to Embodied AI Five - which also happens to be the week of a site visit at one of my consulting clients. So, this past Monday, I met with them online, took care of some Neurodiversiverse stuff, met friends for dinner, then started packing to fly.

And, while I did draw, I forgot to blog. Mucha-girl disapproves.

Still, blogging every day, even if I have to backfill.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Detail of Alphonse Mucha's poster for Princess Hyacinth, incorporating, when you look more closely, a disturbingly strong right arm on the princess there - in my mind, probably symbolizing both her father, the blacksmith, and probably echoing Mucha's pro-Slavic symbolic interest in the goddess Slavia.

[twenty twenty-four day one five seven]: on my way to the nebulas

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Packing today (yesterday), flying tomorrow (today), so no real post for you. Yesterday I got up to drawing one five six and took in pushups and a walk plus Spectral Iron editing, so I'm caught up for yesterday, not so much for today, so I'll need to squeeze in some drawing time. Pictured: me at Dragon Con um ... 2019 ... which is a stand-in for some Nebula-specific post which I can't do until I update the blog backend.

Blogging every day, though. Keeping a regular habit helps.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one five six]: ugh and not so ugh

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So the broken door lock was indeed not a problem either power tool girl or I could have easily handled - it took the locksmith almost forty five minutes to lever, chisel and snip the latch assembly out of the door, using quite a bit of specialized equipment -air pumps and such - to try to create space before finally giving up and applying judicious elbow grease, a wrench and a hammer. When he finally got it out, pieces abruptly tumbled out in a tiny little rain of already-broken parts from deep within the latch assembly.

But the repair itself was cheap, and the same guy offered a great rate to re-key our other locks as well. So we now have easy access to my office again, and a plan for fixing some of the dead old locks around this rambling home. One ugh problem may just have made another ugh problem go away - which suggests that when you're facing a lot of problems, you should just dig in and try to fix them, one by one, until hopefully all those problems go away, leaving you with new problems for a new day.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Downtown Greenville's Falls Park, which is a beautiful place for a walk. Since, in the intervening hour since my last post, I haven't fixed the backend of the blog. Another ugh ...

Blogging every day: Today's exercise was thirty push ups, and probably a walk later, maybe or maybe not at Falls Park. Yesterday's exercise, which I didn't blog, was sixty pushups and an excursion in the attic. Yesterday's read was Neal Asher's PRADOR MOON, which I quite liked; today will be packing for the Nebulas. Yesterday's editing was Dakota Frost #4, SPECTRAL IRON; probably also that today. Drawing is up to one five five, so I need to work in a drawing today, ideally two so I don't have to worry about it while traveling.

[twenty twenty-four day one five five]: late post for you

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Snow in South Carolina

Last night was date night, but we also had to climb up into the attic to see what's up with this "leaky" roof. But it's bone dry up there, despite the recent rains, and even though it looks like there might be some damage, it doesn't seem like it can be causing what we're seeing with the drywall damage in the ceiling.

SO: The good news is, we likely don't need to get the whole roof replaced.

BUT: The bad news is, we don't know what's going on, and now need to seek new causes.

It's really easy to catastrophize: we were worried that we'd find a nest of mold up there and need to replace the whole roof. That isn't the problem, so that bullet is dodged. But now we've got a deeper mystery: we have what looks like water damage in an area that is - apparently - dry, with no explanation. And that's the thing about science: one thing can look like another, and causes can be hidden - so you need to take out the time to collect the observations and do the experiments and carefully check your work.

Especially if it can cost you a whole roof.

-the Centaur

Pictured: One from the archives - snow, likely from two years ago, as that frost killed most of that vine.

[twenty twenty-four day one five one]: traveling to con carolinas

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Long day packing, driving, arriving, and taking care of stuff, so, no real post for you, will post my schedule tomorrow.

Also, uploading images are still borken, so please enjoy the following blast from the past (my steampunk bookshelf from my old library) while I work on replacing my hosting provider (since there seems no way to increase storage as a stopgap).

Blogging every day.

-the Centaur

P.S. Posting "drawing every day" is on hiatus until I fix the images, but by my count I'm up to day one five two (one day ahead of today). I'll keep noting that as a postscript on the blogging every day posts.

P.P.S. Apparently I was real clever and posted my blogging for Wednesday late, late Tuesday night (in the Wednesday AM) so technically this is the Thursday post, but, whatevz.

[twenty twenty-four day one four nine]: master of all he surveys, redux

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Our big butch cat - Loki is 16+ pounds of fur and muscle, with relatively little flab - is actually a little scaredy guy. I mean, I might be a scaredy guy too if the situation was reversed: I'm approximately 6 times taller and 11 times heaver than Loki, and I'd be freaked to live in a world where 35-foot-tall, one-ton creatures felt like picking me up at random times for no discernible reason.

But he's scared of other things too, like his shadow. And I think that happened because once, when he tried to go outside, a baby rat snake was coiling by the door. He ran to the nearby French doors to be let out, but the rat snake had also fled - to the same doors! And then, both of them again fled to the next door down. He was pretty freaked, and a little more cautious going over thresholds since then. Not this guy, though:

Regardless, Loki frequently gets animated, starts looking outside or in the yard to see what's going on, and stares at it for a long time, before settling down and chilling out. Even when something is really there, though, it doesn't mean that the cause is always actionable. Sometimes things are just passing through, and worrying about them or doing something about them can only lead to more disruption.

I'm not saying to ignore real problems, of course; seeing the fox requires different reactions than the deer.

But how often do we stress out about things which will ultimately pass us by?

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, the snek, and the deer. Fox was not available for comment.

[drawing every day 2024 post one four five]: no rendering for you

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No rendering for you - I got the line drawing finished just before my late-night walk with my wife, and was about 50-50 on whether I would shade this when I got back - but it was raining, and we did a short walk, and, to our surprise, after our short little walk, the fridge in the kitchen was leaking.

So! Instead of rendering this, I helped my wife move all our food out of the dying fridge and into alternate refrigeration - fortunately we had enough room to save everything except for some freezer-burned home-made ice cream that really wasn't ever good enough to eat anyway.

Drawing every day; adulting as best as we can.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Another study from Goldman.

[twenty twenty-four day one four five]: so convenient

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It's good to be home, but Loki sure doesn't make it convenient. Cat, I have work to do.

Still, I guess you're going to do you.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, in my lap as I type this (likely because, right now, I'm not letting him sit on my recently-filled-in whiteboard desk) and Loki, eating with his feet in his food bowl, because ... ?????

[twenty twenty-four day one four oh]: this chair is mine now

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Brief placeholder I'm scheduling for tomorrow, in case we get caught up with Silicon Valley Open Studios stuff. But what it strikes me is how animals behave differently when we're not around. Case in point, Loki is pictured here, sitting in my rocking chair - which he rarely does if I'm present, either sitting on my lap, or sitting on the table. But never in the other rocking chair. I wonder why that is.

Or maybe it's Heisenberg's Cat Principle: if you observe a cat, you have disturbed it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, on MY rocking chair, disputing that "MY" part.

[twenty twenty-four day one three zero]: and then he rested

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It's been a long day dealing with a whole sequence of guff, so here I present to you Loki, taking a nap after his hard work on reconciling large language models with classical symbolic artificial intelligence.

-the Centaur

P.S. The Kickstarter is almost there! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thinkinginkpress/the-neurodiversiverse-alien-encounters-a-sci-fi-anthology ... 94%, with ~3 days to go! Like, back and share!

[twenty twenty-four day one one one]: cheers from clockwork

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Friday was slow, but Saturday was a pretty damn good day at Clockwork Alchemy. I have wordcount on Camp Nano and a late night event to attend, so I'll give a fuller update tomorrow.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the "Louie", a very nice variant of an Old Fashioned unique to the San Mateo Marriott "Craft / Code" bar, which is going out of business next week as the hotel is closing.