Three stories, wood deck, well positioned near major streams and paths. Serious inquiries only.
-the Centaur
Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”
So, my wife's furniture business is finally kicking off! Here's the first ad for Studio Sandi's custom sustainable furniture, made from (almost) all eco-friendly, recycled and recovered materials:
Check them out at studiosandi.com , where more information will be added soon!
-the Centaur
Pictured: An ad for Silicon Valley Open Studios, showing four pieces of art and two pieces of custom furniture, almost entirely made from recycled / sustainable materials except for the resin tops.
We have a black cat, so we got a black cat condo (just barely visible to the left). But of course, our cat-shaped void is a cat, and so prefers the blue couch, where its voluminous shedded fur is easily visible. My wife caught him in the act, so, enjoy this picture of our cat-shaped void, doing cat-styled things.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki on our couch. Interestingly, this picture was taken at an angle, so I rotated it, then used Adobe Photoshop's generative fill to recover the outer edge of the picture. The very outer edge is ... mostly right. Some weirdness is visible in the carpet patterns on the lower left, the brick pattern on the upper left, and whatever it is on the table on the right isn't there in reality. Otherwise, not a terrible job.
busy putting out a fire. this is what you get. ciao, xiao.
I'm a night owl - I'd say "extreme night owl", but my wife used to go to bed shortly before I woke up - and get some of my best work done late at night. So it constantly surprises me - though it shouldn't - that some things are easier to do earlier in the day.
Take blogging - or drawing every day, two challenges I've taken on for twenty-twenty four. Sometimes I say that "writer's block is the worst feeling in the world" - Hemingway apparently killed himself over it - but right up there with writer's block is deciding to call it a night after a long, productive evening of work - and remembering that you didn't draw or blog at all that day.
Sure, you can whip up a quick sketch, or bang out a few words. But doing so actively discourages you from longer-form thought or more complicated sketches. Drawing breathes more earlier in the day, especially in the midafternoon when your major initial tasks are done and the rest of the day seems wide open. And blogging is writing too, and can benefit as much from concentrated focus as any other writing.
SO! Let's at least get one of those two things done right now.
Type Enter, hit Publish.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Downtown Greenville as seen from the Camperdown complex.
I take a heck of a lot of pictures, seemingly way more than most of the people I know other than the ones in the movie industry; in fact, one of my friends once said "your phone eats first". But there's a secret to why I take pictures: it's for something, for the creation of an external memory - and memory is my brand, after all. With those photographs, I can figure out what happened in the past, even sometimes obscure things - like the attachment point of this lightsaber, which isn't just the diamond-shaped piece of wood, but also includes two hooks that seem to have disappeared in the move.
We may not find them, but at least now we know what to look for.
How can you turn the things in your life into an unexpected resource?
-the Centaur
Pictured: the old library, which was very nice, but not as nice as this one:
My wife eats vegan almost exclusively, and I often try to eat vegan when I'm with her. But she's experienced a lot of difficulty in finding vegan food, even at restaurants that claim to serve it; it's not resistance to veganism per se, but a strangely baffling lack of understanding that vegan means "no animal products".
On our recent trip to Asheville, we got a BIG set of clues as to why this is happening: purely by chance, a number of people inadvertently exposed to us why there's so much confusion around the concept of vegan as "plant based food".
First, there's no such thing as an "egg vegan" - but, apparently, there are a lot of people who are going around claiming that they are, and confusing the heck out of restaurants because of it. At one restaurant in Asheville, the host stand told us they had a "vegan southwestern benedict" but there was nothing vegan about it: it had eggs, butter and hollandaise sauce (which is egg AND butter). Our server then let slip that many people claimed to be "egg vegans" and this dish was aimed at them.
Well, maybe they THINK they're "egg vegans," but there's no such thing: the word for someone who eats eggs is "vegetarian", or if you want to get specific, "ovo-vegetarian". Regardless, the FOOD is not vegan if it has eggs in it, so it is really unhelpful to people who have chosen to be vegan, or who are avoiding eggs for health reasons, to mislabel food with eggs in it as vegan.
"Egg vegans" remind me of another group of people: those who say "they're mostly vegan, but they eat fish". The word for that is "carnivore", or if you want to get specific, "pescatarian". I actually knew a real vegan who added fish to his diet for about a month for nutritional reasons, but he was clear to everyone and himself that this was a departure from the vegan diet.
Second, some people literally do not understand that vegan is different from vegetarian - and if that person owns a restaurant, he's going to have many unhappy customers. At one Japanese restaurant we visited this weekend, there were dozens of "vegan" items marked as such on the menu - but a kindly waitress stopped by our table and warned us that the owner did not know the difference and repeatedly labeled food with butter and eggs as "vegan", despite being told otherwise.
This reminds me that some people do not understand that any animal products makes a dish not vegan. My wife's mother frequently tried to get her to eat food cooked with a ham hock in it because "it's just for flavor". The P.F. Chang's we used to go to put fish flakes in most of their vegetarian items, which makes them not just not vegan, but not even vegetarian. And so on.
Third, even when a restaurant is trying, vegan and vegetarian are confusing because they both start with VEG and end with N - and there's no standard abbreviation for either of them which can be used to unambiguously label a meal. I've seen "V", "VG", "VE" all used to refer to both vegan and vegetarian, and if you look around I bet you'll find some menus using "VN" for both purposes. Regardless, at one or two restaurants this weekend, even the waitstaff got confused as to what was vegetarian or vegan due to the "V/VE" issue.
And finally, sometimes the waitstaff just gets it wrong. And at another restaurant this weekend, the waiter didn't write our order down and completely messed it up in her head - but fortunately came back to ask before passing the wrong order to the kitchen. As another example, the staff at a very vegan-friendly local pizza joint told us that one of their pizza sauces was vegan, only to discover months later that it was not.
So it's seemed strange to us that some people can't seem to wrap their head around what vegan is. But if some people are running around claiming to be "egg vegans", the owners are mislabeling the meals, the meals are not labeled clearly enough even for the staff to tell, and sometimes people are just mistaken even when they're trying to get it right, it seems more clear why things get messed up.
But really, vegan is just plant based food, and if it's not plant based food, it's not vegan.
-the Centaur
P.S. Fine, fine, bacteria and fungi aren't technically plants, but they're vegan. Just nothing with a face or a mother, and nothing from something with a face or a mother, okay?
Pictured: Sunny side up eggs, bacon, and French toast, NONE of which are vegan.
Some people wonder why me and my wife are so strict about not using pesticides and weedkillers in our yards. Well, there's the general principle of not contributing more toxic chemicals to the environment, and in San Jose there was the concern that our cats walked in the yard, then slept in our beds, and we didn't want them tracking in chemicals (other than dust and pee and poop, but, oh well).
But in South Carolina? We have a well. Our yard is our source of drinking water. And the recent unexpected excess precipitation event really brought that home by making the water drainage channels visible:
We get enough chemicals from our neighbors poisoning their lawns. We don't need to add any more to it. In fact, we're busy enough trying to slowly clean up the waste that the previous owners left on the property ... it's a nice house, but someone seemed to think that the woods around it were a dumping ground.
One step at a time. But one of those steps is, don't add pesticides or herbicides to your own drinking water.
-the Centaur
P.S. Yes, I understand a lot of chemicals get filtered out by the dirt. There's still no need to add to it.
When we decided to live in a place where water falls from the sky, we didn't realize how much we meant it.
The good news is that there's more places to go swimming. The bad news is that you can swim in only one direction, much like a muddy simulation of the interior of a black hole.
Honey, I hope you didn't need anything at the store.
-the Centaur
Loki, trying to pull off his best Le Chat Noir:
He moved before I could get a good closeup, though, because Loki is a cat.
-the Centaur
... or you're not blogging every day. And I even went down to the library TO blog, but forgot what I was supposed to be working on when I got here, and did a whole buncha other tasks.
So, anyway, here's a margarita. It was strong. Enjoy.
-the Centaur
Welcome to 2024, everyone! This year, I plan on resuming my aborted "Blogging Every Day" and "Drawing Every Day" experiments (and, perhaps, even "Music Every Day"). But let's focus first on the blogging. I really enjoy reading the blogs of people who regularly take out the time to comment on the world, because it gives me a view not just into their thought process but into the gears of the world as they grind.
As for my gears grinding, this first day of the new year has been quite busy! It feels like I did nothing, as there were things that I had planned to do this morning that never happened. But, actually, I spent a few hours managing (counts them) 8 research projects and 2 nonfiction book proposals, met with a friend/research colleague online, did some prepwork for the Neurodiversiverse, helped my wife with some plane tickets, resolved issues with some online systems, and hung out with a cat.
Little of that was on my agenda, but it all has to get done. And it's easy to forget that. One way I've been using to track that is Clockify, which I started using when my consulting business picked up a bit. It really helps you see what you've been spending your time on - or neglecting - if you remember to use it.
Of course, one of the things I had wanted to do this morning was enter my hours for the weekend. Time to get to timing it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Downtown Greenville's Falls Park.
Wow, what a year. I'd love to say it had its pros and cons, but the stark reality of it is that the one bad thing - getting laid off, not just years before I wanted to retire, but one day after we successfully showed our new project was working, thus throwing me years off course in my research - overshadows all the good stuff. As I was describing it to my wife, it's like falling down into a well and finding some shiny rocks down there. They might be nice rocks - heck, they might even be gold, and worth a fortune - but you've still got to cope with falling into the well, and figure out how to climb back out again, before taking advantage of the good stuff.
And, I have to admit, there was a lot of good stuff. We submitted a great paper on social robot navigation and held a great workshop on embodied AI, which was renewed for next year. Thinking Ink Press published a new book, was chosen for the Innovative Voices program and launched a successful Kickstarter. We proposed the Neurodiversiverse anthology, announced it at Dragon Con, and have almost a hundred submissions as of the close of the year. That inspired me to write two new stories, "Blessing of the Prism" and "Shadows of Titanium Rain", which I think are some of my best work. I even started a robotics consulting business and got a few clients, which is helping to reduce the uncertainty.
But 2023 was the worst year for me for a while. There have been bad ones recently - in 2016 we elected a wannabe dictator and many of my friends and family seemed to lose their minds; in 2019 my mother died; and in 2020 I had the double whammy of the pandemic with the most stressful period of my work life. But, like 2023, each of those years had ups with the downs: in 2016, my current research thread started; in 2019, we proved that our research ideas were working (for all the good it did us); and in 2020, we moved back to my hometown into what we hope is our forever home.
And yet, with the exception of the loss of my mother, none of those seemed quite as life changing as getting laid off. Even for Mom, I was somewhat prepared: my father had unexpectedly lost one of his siblings early, and our extended family had developed a kind of shared knowledge of how to cope with loss. I had already lost my father and grandmother, and knew that Mom, while healthy, was in her mid-80s, and could pass at any time; so I was spending as much time as practical with her. I spoke to her the day she died. And so, after she was gone, I started down a road that I had been preparing for mentally for a long, long time.
But I wasn't in the mindset that Google would kill off half its robotics program just in AI's hour of triumph. We were even working on a projects directly related to Google's new large language model focus. It made no sense, and left this strange kind of void, creating a severance I didn't expect for another decade.
Despite all of what happened this year, I keep coming back to one thing:
Was it worth it if I wrote those two new stories?
Yes.
So, farewell, you crazy year you: thanks for all you gave me. My wife even said "Supposedly what you do on New Year's Eve is what you'll do for the rest of the year," and today we worked on our businesses, worked on writing and art, met friends old and new, and even moved furniture (which, metaphorically, is her new business venture). So's here's to more writing, more art, more friends, and more business in 2024!
-the Centaur
P.S. I see that I kept up "Blogging Every Day" in 2023 for 91 days, almost a quarter of the year; my earlier attempt at "Drawing Every Day" in 2021 lasted 103 days, a little over a quarter of the year. Let's see if we can break both those records in 2024, now that I have far more free time (and flexible time) on my hands!
Still at the Conference on Robot Learning. LOTS of robot dogs were about, lots of diffusion model and transformer work, and lots of language model planning. More later, gotta crash.
-the Centaur
In ATL for the Conference on Robot Learning, very tired after a long day, please enjoy this picture of a Page One from Cafe Intermezzo. Actually, today was a really good example of "being where you need to be" ... I ran into a fair number of colleagues from Google and beyond just by being out on the town at the right time and the right place, and was also able to help out a fellow who seriously needed some food. And when the evening was ending ... three more Google colleagues appeared on the street as I sat down for coffee.
I don't actually believe we live in a simulation, or in the Secret, or whatever ... but if you're doing the right thing, I find that Providence tends to open the doors for you right when you need it.
-the Centaur
P.S. Being in the right place DOESN'T mean you get all your nano wordcount done though. I am making progress on "Blessing of the Prism", my Neurodiversiverse story, but on Dakota Frost #7 I found myself spending most of my writing time sorting chapters in the big manuscript into sections, as I realized that one of the ungainly sections I didn't like was actually a coherent start for Dakota Frost #8.
P.P.S. On my blogroll, I saw someone say, "no writing is wasted", and in a sense the chapters I just saved are not wasted. In another, and I say this as a bloviating maximalist, a big part of writing is selection, and sometimes having too many versions of a thing can make it hard to pick the right one and move on.
Okay, really going to crash this time, peace out.
When I was a kid, I read an article by Isaac Asimov complaining that the pace of scientific publication had become so great that he couldn't possibly keep up. When I was an adult, I realized that the end of the article - in which he claimed that if you heard panting behind his office door it was because he was out of breath from trying to read the scientific literature - was a veiled reference to masturbation. Yep, Isaac is the Grand Dirty Old Man of science fiction, and, man, we love you, but, damn, sometimes, you needed a filter.
Well, the future is now, and the story is repeating itself - sans Isaac's ending; my regular fiction is a touch blue so there's no need for my blog to get prurient. I'm a robotics researcher turned consultant, focusing on, among a kazillion other things, language model planning - robots using tools like ChatGPT to write their own programs. As part of this, I'm doing research - market research on AI and robotics, general research on the politics of AI, and technical research on language models in robotics.
A good buddy from grad school is now a professor, and he and I have restarted a project from the 90's on using stories to solve problems (the Captain's Advisory Tool, using Star Trek synopses as a case-base, no joke). And we were discussing this problem: he's complaining that the pace of research has picked up to the point where he can no longer keep up with the literature. So it isn't just me.
But the best story yet on how fast things are changing? Earlier this month, I was going through some articles on large language models my research - and a new announcement came out while I was still reading the articles I had just collected that morning.
Singularity, here we come.
-the Centaur
Zonked because I was up early trying to get something resolved with my passport. Crashing early, still not certain what project I'm going to pick for Nanowrimo tomorrow.
Until then, enjoy your magic salad!
-the Centaur
Had a great day with a buddy from grad school who drove up so we could bike the Swamp Rabbit Trail. During that, I had a great idea for a blogpost, which has completely evaporated on the bike back.
So, please enjoy this picture of a pizza instead!
Bon appetit.
-the Centaur
Continuing on the forest theme, sometimes you come across a tree that you think is just dead. This is a good time of year for it: the foliage is falling, so you can more clearly see all the trees, but some of them still have leaves, making the ones which are completely barren stand out. Often the bark is black and cracking, or all the small branches have fallen off, leaving just a stick. I've twisted a fair few of these out of the ground with one hand and added them to the growing border that is creating our path.
But others are bigger - the kind that tree experts call "widowmakers". You can walk up to one, and just push on it, and it may start to fall - but you get more than you bargained for. The tree's momentum, once started, cannot be stopped, and its weight - even if rotten - is enough to cause a cascading chain reaction, breaking off healthy limbs and knocking over other trees on its way down. These slender systems, dead but balanced in a semblance of life, crash with unexpected impact, ringing out through the forest as they land.
It may be fun to knock over a system you don't like, but the crash can kill you, and it can do a lot of damage to other people as it falls to rest.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Well, I don't have pictures of the trees that fell over, but I do have vines that I've pulled down, which looked twenty feet long but proved to be fifty feet of falling debris that also could kill you.
Sometimes when working on a vast project it transcends "you can't do it all at once" and moves into the territory "it's hard to know where to get started". One such project is trying to bring the woods in our house under control. Apparently the previous owner's yard folks had been trimming the landscaping around the house and throwing the cuttings into the forest, so an entertaining variety of invasive ivy, grapes, something like holly, and other vine-like things were progressively destroying the trees of the forest.
It's been a process. The yard looked like wilderness once you got past the landscaping and was nearly impassable. But, after we were forced to take out the first of our dying trees (NO, well, full disclosure, a delivery truck took out the FIRST of our trees when it ran into it) when it got consumed by ivy one year and threatened to fall on the driveway, we decided to start the multi-year project of rehabilitating the yard.
We took out that tree, then took out another half-dozen. We hired goats that year to eat the vines down to the ground, then followed up with chainsaws and clippers to sever the roots of the vines climbing the trees. The goats decided they were done with it and didn't eat any new growth that came back up, so the next year, we hired a guy to bring in a "mulcher" (really, a bobcat with a giant grinder on the front of it) to clear out runways through the landscape, leaving islands of greenery for the deer and other animals.
Then, we started on the paths.
Our idea - and I'm not saying it's a good or feasible one - is to have paths running through this forest. This would take way, way more money than we want to spend on it - but we're patient, and have time. So, slowly, step by step, we've been taking fallen tree limbs and creating borders for the paths.
Drawing that line is an act of magic - even if it's just with an old rotten piece of wood thrown onto some leaves. As soon as the line is drawn, you know what's inside it, and what's outside it. You know which plants you can leave alone, and which weeds need to be pulled up. And once you've done that, you have an even larger area of order, which brings increased clarity, which brings more opportunities for order.
I don't know if we will ever complete our plan to rehabilitate the forest.
But at least now, there are paths we can walk.
-the Centaur