I’m taking a brief sabbatical from my social sphere. Blogging, Tweeting, Facebook. 2-3 months.
I know, it’s counter-intuitive to what I do, professionally, but hey, I kinda do everything… professionally, so maybe I’ll take this break, professionally.
No, seriously, I need to focus on some stuff.
If it’s absolutely critical; king@rogueking.com
Otherwise, I’ll see you all in a few months.
Cheers.
Wednesday 10th February, 10:37AM
I am seated comfortably in the waiting room of a certain institution of learning. I loathe being idle, especially in waiting rooms. I normally do something daft with my phone, or read. Today, however, I wasn’t in the mood for phone-shenanigans and I hadn’t any reading materiel on me.
My insatiable curiosity got the better of me, and I pulled a book from one of the magazine stands. A thick dusty volume, the kind I am attracted to. Sadly, it is no collection of prose, poetry, nor ancient wisdom. It is commercial drivel, created specifically to lure idlers like myself, or adherents, the likes of which walk these corridors and rooms endlessly.
“Why You’ll Love Germany” or something like that.
I flip through the pages, it is very commercial, meaning it’s well designed. At the very least.
Something catches my eye and I pull out my pencil and a small sheet of paper.
1. This series is for the four readers of my blog. You keep me going, yearning, and growing despite my inconsistencies.
2. This series is fiction. Get over it.
Saturday, 6th December, 11:37 AM
The fog slowly clears from the misty plains of a thousand dreamless sleeps. I have enjoyed my stay there, through the long peaceful hours. Being, and… not quiet being. The bright sun streams through the trees, sparkling brightly in the morning streams of consciousness.
My eyes open, and there’s a smile on my face.
It has been ages since I’ve had a good night’s sleep. The insomniac and the workaholic in me are constantly fighting for bragging rights to body, mind and soul. The battle is epic, the fields bloody with carnage, but what they think they fight for, I do not know, for how can nothing be a prize?
I get up from my room and walk straight to the bathroom. Stark naked.
One of the main reasons I like staying alone.
The other reason? The silence. The beautiful, still silence, when you can hear the cockroaches peacefully sleeping next to you. Until, of course…
Friday, 22nd January 11:48PM.
She shuts the door behind me. Her perfume lingers in the air, and I close my eyes and breathe deep. I can still taste her lips, I can still feel the electric tingle of her lips on mine. It’s dizzying. I am a feather floating gently on a breeze, carried higher and higher on the wings of something I cannot touch, but so real. Unbelievably real.
I am bliss incarnate.
And I am sad. Lonely and far far away from home. Floating, further and further away from something I once knew, but cannot describe, towards something I do not know.
I am the embodiment of sadness.
I walk slowly into the night. It’s warm, and there’s a bright moon in the sky, washing everything in a soft glow. The road is deserted on either end. I contemplate taking the shorter, relatively safer route which will yield a boda-boda in two minutes, or taking the longer, riskier fifteen-minutes-of-darkness route.
Foolishness wins. I need to think anyway.
Read more
Wednesday, January 20th. 12:20 AM.
There’s not a soul awake in the building, let alone at work. The office is deathly quiet and pitch black, lit only by the soft luminescent glow of the computer I’m typing on. Pages and windows flash across the screen as I bend the machine to my will. Mind and machine are one, and they are plotting the downfall of global economies and an ascent to glory like no other.
Vanity reigns supreme, and yet the quintessential cackling laugh of villainy is muted.
The thoughts that flash through my mind are many, and they are few. Focused and razor sharp, flying true to their mark but dulled by indecisiveness and self-perpetuated mediocrity. On the one hand, my brain is a soaring symphony of excellence and perfection, and on the other, an evanescent cacophony of thoughts, ideologies and memories that bear witness to a mind on the verge of insanity.
I am here. I am now.
1:19AM
Fatigue finally sets in, sipping away at the dregs of my mental reserves. I resist for a while, knowing well that I am only extending the inevitable. Twenty seconds later, I concede defeat. Pushing my chair away from the desk, I stand up and walk to the window.
Outside, a small measure of life continues. The loud thumping irony of a few merry-makers making more noise at night than an entire micro-economy during the day.
Neon lights from Fat Boys and Pavement Tandoori flicker to the beat of hip-hop music. A harsh clash of blue and red, reminding me that we live in a world governed by rules and law, and that the difference between heroism and villainy is choice. Split-second decisions that ripple through the sands of time, leaving chaos and order in their wake. Leaving a trail that will be studied, loathed, or glorified as examples of the frailty of our humanity. Studied by other people like me, who at this very moment are making the exact same choices, the only difference being, perhaps, in the magnitude of choice.
In front of Fat Boys, behind a parked car, a drunk man gropes an equally, if not more, drunk woman. They are oblivious to the world, their here and now having been decided a long time ago by several spirits, imbibed or otherwise. Her skirt goes up and his hands furtively find their way inwards.
Order. And chaos.
I love this view. It is a reminder of what I work for. It is a reminder of what I want to achieve and yet, in the deepest of ironies, to forget. It is the convergence of choice and kismet, focus and laziness, stupidity and timely wisdom, faith and wild-eyed disbelief.
It is the justification of past heres and nows.
1: 30 AM
Time marches on, and a new day beckons. New hopes, new challenges, new dreams and more importantly, new mistakes, and a chance to ponder even more on what exactly new is, considering we spend our lives doing the same things, or figuring out ways to do the same things better, and half the time, failing miserably.
Enough. I must leave.
With one final glance outside, I draw the curtains and shut down my computer. It takes a while, but finally, the whirring stops and the screen blacks out, plunging the office to absolute silence and darkness. I stay still for a while, thinking to myself how beautiful and perfect the nothingness is.
As I lock up the office and walk into the cold, dark night, a police patrol car tears past me, sirens screaming, lights blinking, heading towards town. Red and blue.
Order. And chaos.
Here, and now.
I have missed this.
Rumour ( NASA) has it that there will be an Annular solar eclipse this Friday, 15th Jan 2010, visible in most of Africa, including of course, Kampala, Uganda. And apparently, the eclipse will start in Uganda. Ooorah!!
It should be viewable from 8:00. From NASA’s local contact tables/statistics (60kb PDF), we should see it from 8:20AM local time (05:20 UTC) to 10:00 AM local time. Maximum eclipse will occur at 8:27 AM. Annular eclipse time is estimated at an average of 8 minutes at viewable places across the world.
An annular eclipse occurs when the Sun and Moon are exactly in line, but the apparent size of the Moon is smaller than that of the Sun. Hence the Sun appears as a very bright ring, or annulus, surrounding the outline of the Moon.
It will/should look something like this:
A little caution, buy some shades, looking directly at the sun with unaided eyes can be dangerous. From Wikipedia:
Looking directly at the photosphere of the Sun (the bright disk of the Sun itself), even for just a few seconds, can cause permanent damage to the retina of the eye, because of the intense visible and invisible radiation that the photosphere emits. This damage can result in permanent impairment of vision, up to and including blindness. The retina has no sensitivity to pain, and the effects of retinal damage may not appear for hours, so there is no warning that injury is occurring.
Under normal conditions, the Sun is so bright that it is difficult to stare at it directly, so there is no tendency to look at it in a way that might damage the eye. However, during an eclipse, with so much of the Sun covered, it is easier and more tempting to stare at it. Unfortunately, looking at the Sun during an eclipse is just as dangerous as looking at it outside an eclipse, except during the brief period of totality, when the Sun’s disk is completely covered (totality occurs only during a total eclipse and only very briefly; it does not occur during a partial or annular eclipse). Viewing the Sun’s disk through any kind of optical aid (binoculars, a telescope, or even an optical camera viewfinder) is extremely hazardous.
Glancing at the Sun with all or most of its disk visible is unlikely to result in permanent harm, as the pupil will close down and reduce the brightness of the whole scene. If the eclipse is near total, the low average amount of light causes the pupil to open. Unfortunately the remaining parts of the Sun are still just as bright, so they are now brighter on the retina than when looking at a full Sun. As the eye has a small fovea, for detailed viewing, the tendency will be to track the image on to this best part of the retina, causing damage. From Wikipedia
Have fun everyone.
—
Offtopic:
“On that day, says the Lord God,
I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth in broad daylight.”Amos 8:9
Apologies, I should’ve blogged this earlier.
Design Kingdom presents: FlashQuest
Date: 16th Jan 2010
Time: 10am-3pm
Fee:20,000/=
Only 7 spots left. Book Now.
FlashQuest is a series of Adobe Flash training, discussion and learning sessions, covering animation, interactivity and programming. Each session is unique and will have a specific theme or target project and will last 4 hours long, with a Q&A session at the end.
The Project: Creating an Interactive Portfolio CD with Adobe Flash
The session on 16th January 2010 will focus on interactivity with Adobe Flash and our goal will be to create an Interactive CD based portfolio.
The training will be carried out by Solomon King, founder of Elemental Edge and Node Six, and who has very many years of Flash animation under his belt.
Google.com and Google Chrome not playing nice. Click image for larger picture.
Meet Rover, an autonomous roving robot-ish thing. ( Pictures below )
Rover was borne yesterday in the Rogue Labs, and it took its first breath to much whirring of motors and blinking of lights. Rover is the result of many weeks of experimenting with a few PIC microcontrollers which a friend very very kindly lent me. [ Full Story ]
Basically, Rover is a mobile base unit I’m using as a platform for exploring autonomy in robotic systems. The motor control circuit and logic circuit are modular, meaning I can easily swap them out for components I’ll build later.
Rover’s “brain” is a PIC16F84A which controls the drive circuit on Ports A and monitors various inputs on Port B to determine what it should do when it detects something.
The drive circuit is an L298N 2-motor controller and a 7805 5v logic power supply/regulator for both the motor controller and the PIC.
Right now Rover has bumpers that detect a soft collision with an obstacle and then reverses while turning. So it basically runs around a room in a straight line until it hits something, then reverses while turning for a few seconds, then continues in another direction until it hits something else. Pretty cool to watch.
I’ll post videos later when I get a better quality camera.
I’ve have waited many many years to do this. [ Full Story ]
Over the next few days/weeks/months, I’ll be experimenting with non-tactile sensors like Sonar, IR and more outputs.
Also, since I’ve pretty much gotten the basics of Assembler and PICs, I’ll be moving on to more powerful microcontrollers and playing around with some advanced stuff.
Here are some pictures for you.
—
Rogue FM: Steve Jablonsky – Arrival to Earth (Transformers Soundtrack)
—
Memoirs: Thank you, Gonza! Thank you, Abba!
—
Offtopic:
Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer
So, it’s official. We have a venue for the biggest Uganda Blogger’s Happy Hour yet, set for the 18th December 2009.
The lovely Yvonne (http://walkonby.wordpress.com) will be hosting us at her home in Bunga. Directions will come later. Once we’ve gotten some kind of map or something.
Set the hype-machines rolling, y’all!
The Mega Ugandan Blogger's Happy Hour - Friday 18th December 2009
Let’s rock!
—
Rogue FM: Bajofondo Tango Club – Mi Corazon – Campo
Offtopic:
“Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we’re here we should dance.”
- Author Unknown
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