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 ...
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.
Okay, so some people are worried about me since I haven't posted in a while, so I thought I'd weigh in on what's going on - and explain why this will be the last update of the blog for a while, but hopefully, not forever.
As I mentioned earlier, I unexpectedly ran out of space to upload images to the blog - my reported quota was 35 gigabytes, but in practice the system craps out at 25. (And believe you me, it took a lot of debugging to figure that out).
This charming discovery happened right around the time that I spilled water on my laptop, which was a one-and-a-half week fix; that itself came in the middle of June, where I took 5 trips (Con Carolinas, the Nebulas, a Logical Robotics trip, CVPR/EAI, and Seattle) and was followed by July, where my wife and I, after almost five months of being mostly apart, had just two short weeks to catch up before her trip to go help her mother deal with the death of her stepfather. Not to mention the Unsolved Problems in Social Navigation Workshop, and The Neurodiversiverse copyedits and sensitivity edits. And Camp Nano, of course, far behind.
Good times, good times.
So, during all that, I didn't have time to update the blog's backend. Sorry.
Now, I've got a little free time, and I've started to do that - but it involves moving to a new provider, and that, itself, comes with a wrinkle. I'm going to have to copy all the data from the old provider, which is a painstaking process, since ~25GB and +25K files is far too large a file system for any normal FTP client to download without crashing. (And believe me, I've tried). So I have done the bulk of this copy now, but still have to verify that the files have correctly downloaded, which will actually involve writing a program to compare the trees, as I haven't found anything yet that will do that on a file tree this size over a connection this flaky.
Presuming success on that ... the next step is downloading the Library of Dresan database and migrating to the new provider.
So, if I blog any more here, I'm going to have to download that again. I already need to re-download this blogpost's image, as it wasn't in my first capture; but I wanted to test whether deleting the log files would have given me space to upload more images (it did). But downloading the database multiple times just because I can't stop blogging is a bridge too far.
SO! Until the migration is complete, I'm going to blog very sparingly, if at all. Sorry about that.
Hopefully it won't take too long.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A (mostly) vegan breakfast sandwich (except for the honey bread, since my favorite vegan bread was out at the store) - toasted bread, Just Egg, black salt and pepper, and two vegan patties from a new company whose name I can't remember; the ensemble of which always looks to me like a scream. Does that sandwich look right to you?
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).
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.
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???
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.
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.
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.
Hey folks! I am appearing at several conventions in the next few weeks, so I'm creating a "sticky post" to let y'all know about my schedule - in case the problems I'm having with my blog software get worse, at least this will be up here to let y'all know I'll be talking about AI, robots and writing in the next few weeks!
First up is Con Carolinas, the Carolinas' longest running science fiction convention, where I will be on four panels and an author signing, talking about book openings, artificial intelligence, neurodivergence, and what's possible and what's not in science and science fiction!
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.
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 ... ?????
I'd gotten out of the habit of doing these quasi-comic style art pieces based on photographs, but I've taken a few really good candidate pictures with the right layout for it, so I hope to get back into doing that. This is a picture of one of Sandi's art pieces she completed this weekend at Silicon Valley Open Studios, and it will now be on display at Kaleid Gallery in San Jose. Neat fact: this little guy is actually a cabinet!
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.
Cue "It's Happening" meme: Silicon Valley Open Studios is this weekend, May 18th and 19th, where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture!
Our friend Diane, a glass artist, dropped in to help us manage the day, bringing snacks and champagne!
Sandi has a lot of artwork and furniture on display today, including some very nice large-format art. Above you can see "Kirsten Piig" and "Jim Dairy" from Sandi's "Animals are People Too" series, and one of the geode tables (along with Diane on the left, Sandi on the right, and my toe at the bottom); on the other side is "Missy Elephant" and several of Sandi's other pieces with custom art boards made to look like stone:
Another room has more pieces and some works in progress:
Below you can see "Collie Parton", "Yeti White" and another striking geode table:
This is an open studio, so several of Sandi's in-process pieces are prominently on display, like this bar and chairs set (and also the finished art "Moo Paul" and "Mllama"):
In the back room, this enormous piece is going to be a conch-shaped day bed:
It is so big that Sandi's actually going to partially take it apart and make the top into a removable cabinet:
Not because it can't fit through the door or anything. Not at all. Sandi also let me have a space to display my books, since we needed to find a place to put that bookcase (which I designed and built, I'm proud to say). The giant egg creature is actually one of Sandi's furniture pieces - a hat cabinet!
At the back there is the final geode table, which I think I showed yesterday ... oh, no I didn't, here you go:
We will be here working on art today and tomorrow from 11-5, so please come on by!
Yeah, he's up there. Not sure how, but he is. Hope he's not stuck. Ah, just went out to check, and he's gone, so I assume he moved on. Come to think of it, I wonder if he's the same as this guy:
This little guy got in and disappeared into the fireplace - I assumed he fell from the chimney, but he's thin enough maybe to have wormed in a windowframe perhaps? Not sure, the other guy looks thicker about the middle, but it may be the case that he ate something.
Hypothesis is, the little guys are immature versions of this handsome fellow, a rat snake perhaps, who is also a climbing mofo ...
So I saw two make turkeys posturing outside, and carefully stepped to the French doors to take a picture. But what I assume was the female they had been courting had been on the other side of those doors, and decided to book it. Yet, even though their audience was gone, the two males didn't stop posturing.
I feel this make some subtle point about continuing the fight after the prize is gone, but it eludes me.
When stopping, my buddy commented "it was a gas station as if done by Pixar." After seeing it, I said "It's like Pixar had done a theme park for their movie entitled 'Murica'."
His response? "They already did that movie. It's called WALL-E."
