This video shows what Edwin and Madeline do for most of their waking hours. It kind of amazes me that kittens generally get through this phase with both eyes intact.
Category: Uncategorized
General blog stuff.
Alas, poor Pluggo! I knew him, Horatio…
It was announced late last week that Cycling ’74 has discontinued Pluggo and related plug-ins. Since I had a hand in the creation of Pluggo, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect and reminisce a little. My own involvement with Pluggo ended six or so years ago when I left Cycling ’74, but I was there at Pluggo’s conception and birth.
I can’t say that I’m surprised by the decision. According to Harmony Central, whose memory is better than mine, Pluggo was originally released just over 10 years ago. 10 years is a long sale lifespan for any software product. Pluggo was a particularly complex product since it not only contained over 100 plug-ins but was also based upon the Max/MSP runtime engine. Getting this runtime engine to run within various plug-in hosts as a VST, RTAS, and MAS plug-in was a pretty remarkable feat of engineering in the first place. Maintaining it across all of the changes that have taken place in the hosts and the operating systems during those 10 years must have been something of a nightmare. (To put it in historical perspective, consider that the first release of Pluggo listed Mac OS 7.5.3 as a minimum requirement, and that I did much of my work on Pluggo on a “Wallstreet” Mac laptop which had a 266MHz G3 CPU.)
Oh, Happiness! Mother’s Cookies are Back!
Last winter I wrote with much sadness about the demise of Mother’s cookies. It was sometime in March that I finally cracked my last package ever of Mother’s Iced Oatmeal cookies–a bittersweet event indeed. Imagine my delight when Tracie came back from the grocery store the other day bearing two packages of Mother’s cookies!
Close examination of the bag revealed a mention of Kellogg’s, so I did a little googling and found the official announcement of Kellog’s acquisition of Mother’s trademarks and recipes.
Paper Jade Now Carries Elephant Hide Paper
The exotic paper I mentioned in my previous post is now on sale at the Paper Jade site. It’s called Elephant Hide paper, presumably because of its durability and not because it’s made out of the skin of pachyderms. (Honestly I don’t know what it’s made out of, but it doesn’t feel like it’s made from fibers commonly used in either domestic or Japanese papers.) It’s made by one mill in Germany and is difficult to obtain–or rather, it was difficult to obtain until Paper Jade started carrying it. I learned about it from Eric Gjerde’s wonderful book on origami tessellations, but my understanding is that it’s also used for book binding, exotic stationery, wine lists (so I’m told!), and so on. Click here to visit the appropriate section of Paper Jade’s site.
One of Those Stupid “Sorry For Not Blogging” Blog Posts
Yeah, it’s been sparse on this blog lately. That’s because the blogger has been stupid-busy. The kittens have some sort of digestive ailment and are quarantined to main-level bathroom, with forays into the kitchen for exercise. Yes, this is rather a PITA, but they should be all better in about a week.
Paper Jade should receive a shipment of rather exotic paper today. I’ll post more details once it’s available for sale in the store. It’s taken so long to arrange to get this stuff that I don’t want to jinx anything by even mentioning it by name until I actually have it in my hot little fists.
Does the World Really Need Another YouTube Video of a Kitten?
Of course it does. If they’ve got the server space, we’ve got the kitten.
More Photos of the Kittens
Attention cat fanciers: I posted photos of the new cats in residence here. (Actually there’s one photo of Widget, who isn’t new here, but they’re mostly of Zed and the kittens.)
O noes! We haz kittehs!
Tracie decided that there wasn’t enough chaos and fur in the house already, so yesterday we adopted two kittens. Submitted for your consideration are Edwin and Madeline:
Edwin’s the stripey one. I’ll post more photos when I have ’em. They’re currently confined to a small bathroom which makes it difficult to take good portraits. We try anyway, of course:
In case you’re wondering: yes, Zed is fine; no, he hasn’t met the new ones yet (nor has Widget). Here’s a photo of him, just because the web can’t have too many photos of cats:
Would You Give a Robot a Helping Hand?
There’s a somewhat whimsical page here about an experiment involving a small robot-like device that relies upon human assistance for navigation. What good is that, you ask? That’s sort of beside the point. The point seems to be more about exploring the interaction between unwitting human participants and technology. In a way it’s a little touching.
(Found on Hackaday.com)
Off to Japan
Tracie and I are leaving for Japan early Thursday morning for a much-needed vacation. This time I’m not committing to blogging regularly, or even at all. On our last excursion, blogging started to feel more like a burden than a pleasure, so this time I’m not forcing myself to do it. I probably will put up an entry now and then, but I’m certainly not going to do the sort of daily summaries that I did (or tried to do) last year. I have it in mind that I might try to write about the small, wondrous moments that make visiting Japan so magical–moments like the one I tried to describe here. I realized after the last trip that my attempts at broad coverage were leaving out the most interesting details. This time maybe I’ll try just writing about the details, even if these accounts prove to be oddly lacking in context. Or maybe I won’t write at all; this will be a vacation, after all, and I really need a vacation.