Back in Michigan

It must be May, I am back in exciting East Lansing Michigan working with Keith Promislow at Michigan State University. He and the group here are great to work with and we've done a bunch of good things together. We've started some new projects this year. I didn't take me long to settle back in since I knew my way around pretty well. I am in the same glorified dorm room as last year.

Not much has changed here since last year. They finished (finally) the road construction on Harrison and Trowbridge and started up on the main road through town, Grand River. There is a Chipotle outlet. This is a great fast food place, pretty healthy with some commitment to local and organic food. I haven't been to the one here yet but have been at other places and really enjoyed it.

The new art gallery on campus is also finally finished. Actually, I think the building design is really interesting. I have heard that the permanent collection inside is not that great. 

The MSU bike place is no longer renting out old bikes that they refurbish, they have moved to using new bikes. I was disappointed at this and asked why they had made the change. Apparently,  it just cost too much in parts to keep the old bikes in good condition. Something is wrong in the world when it is cheaper to buy completely new than fix up an old item with some life left in it. Anyway, here is my trusty steed for this year. 

My exploration this year will be non-chain fast food places within riding distance. Going once a week (on Mondays) I'll never be able to see them all - it is a college town, full of fast food places for students. This week I went to nearby Giorgio's pizza and got a slice of pizza and a greek salad. Salad, that's pretty good for a fast food place. The pizza there is non-traditional in that it is not all tomato sauce, grated mozzarella and then other things. I see they have listed a mac and cheese and bacon pizza. Hmm... anyway, not bad but not as good (and more expensive) than Uncle Fatih's which is the Vancouver place I go to. However, it did have salad! So, Giorgio's advertises "grinders" if you can read the writing in the picture below. I believe that is Michiganian for "sub sandwich". My next stop will be Mena's in Hanna Square (where my local gym is). They advertise "hot dubs" (and enough times it's not a spelling mistake), but I am not sure what that is - yet! 

(long delay - I am writing this now in August, catching up on my blogging)

So I did go on to Mena's later on that trip. A Dub turns out to be a grilled wrap. I got a "loaded dub" which had potatoes, bacon, cheese, and ranch dressing. It was actually quite good. I would go back there. They also advertise breakfast dubs. If you look online, there are a lot of reviews of Mena's. It looks like the kind of place frequented by MSU students seriously close to blood alcohol poisoning. When I went school was out of session and it was relatively quiet and quite civilized. 

The last place I went to was a place called "Five Guys: Burgers and Fries". I discovered later it has a number of locations across the continent, even one in Vancouver. Because of this, it can't be counted as one of the local places I had intended. I thought the burger I got there was fantastic, the fries only OK.

The cinema at Meridian Mall has reopened (Studio C!). I went to see Iron Man 3 there. This is seriously the best theatre that I have ever been to. It has leather seats, fancy food and you can get beer. There is a seating grade higher that gets you reclining seats and waiter service. I didn't get that but would on my next trip! 

I went to the annual art fair in East Lansing. I saw it the first year I went but last year I came after it had already happened. There are some very nice pieces at the show. I bought a necklace for Lealle with matching earrings (which she has never worn - I have not had much luck over the years finding things to her taste). I bought a nice bowl for myself which I brought back with me. Red and blue, my favourite.

I cycled a bit further afield this time in the other direction (East). I took the interurban trail shown below to the townlet of Haslett. "Interurban" is a funny term for the trail that goes from the outskirts of East Lansing to near Haslett. My guess is that this is part of a planned route going from more major centres, or maybe someone just has a dry sense of humour. It was a very nice trail, and I had breakfast in Haslett with the Promislow family at Fernando's cafe at the end of it. Good times. 

Minecraft Continued: the Desert Challenge

I am still a few months behind on my Minecraft activities, but will describe my second foray into vanilla Minecraft. I liked the game and wanted to do something different and came up with the "desert challenge". This was a game started on a flat, all desert world with sand and sandstone all the way down, so no other resources except from villages and desert temples. The first thing to do was find a village for food, then find one with a sapling in a blacksmith chest, then use lava from a smithy to make a stone generator, then get more lava to turn into obsidian to make into a nether portal. The stone generator and portal are shown below. One of the subtle lack of physics things with Minecraft are that you can make infinite amounts of water with just two water buckets spilled into the right pattern. Two buckets and you can flood the world! The other one is that one bucket of lava spilling on to water can make as much stone as you want. 

So then I settled into a particular village and began building places for new villagers to live. If you build houses, they will come. In terms of game mechanics it is all about the number of doors so I made door heavy apartment designs.

Then, to get better gear I set about trading with the villagers. I fished for them, grew food for them and had a tree farm to make charcoal for them.

However, there was always some wise guy that would only trade me for chicken, and there had not been such a thing on this world for thousands of years. They say the sands of the village echoed with the screams of the dying after the stranger came to town. I couldn't just kill them outright, because by that time the village was full of protective iron golems, which then became a source of iron ingots after they were suffocated by sand.

At this stage, I got bored. As a mathematician, I had proved I could win the game and therefore didn't have to actually finish all the details to be satisfied. I later realized that the ongoing appeal of the game was not the "game" but the architectural design, which I pursued later as I moved on from vanilla Minecraft and on to the game with additional elements (mods) written by fans. I left this world when I finally found an abandoned mineshaft, which I had been searching for the whole time.

Pottery Spring 2013

I enjoyed another pottery class at Britannia Community Centre this Spring with instructor, Helen Spaxman. When my creative energy is at a low ebb, I tend to make a bunch of small bowls by hand (pinch pots). Some of the better ones from this round are shown below. I also made a bud vase (first pic below) out of pinched elements that I was happy with. I'll miss the next session because of a work trip, but will pick up again next Fall.

Misleading Advertising

I guess we are all used to seeing misleading advertising from the commercial sector, but see some evidence below from the educational sector. This is from last year sometime - an ad poster on a bus. It took me a while to get organized to post it. BCIT is a local technical college. The statistic is probably true, but if you read it carefully, you will see that it does not mean that 96% of graduates start working in their field of study within six months of graduation, as I expect they want you to read it. 

I am sure that the faculty at BCIT are as dismayed by this as the rest of us. Some administrator or public relations person thought it was clever. 

Brian Plays Vanilla Minecraft

I discovered the game, Minecraft, late last Fall, although it has been out for a while. It is a first person survival game, in which the world around you is made out of various kinds of blocks that you can mine and then build into whatever you want. It is quite a different kind of game, that I am really enjoying. It's like the Sims with zombies, or World of Warcraft but you can decide to rebuild Orgrimmar. The graphics and many of the game elements are simplistic, but they come together in a really nice way (emergent gameplay). You can really decide to do whatever you want to do (a sandbox game).

So I played single player, vanilla minecraft to "the End", when you are treated to a new age conversation with the universe. By "vanilla" I mean the base game, without any of the fan contributed modifications that are available. I'll describe my experience with some of those in later posts. Near the end, I started spending more time on design than play, which you'll see in the later screenshots below. You'll see many more elaborate minecraft designs posted online but when you play in survival mode (there is an alterative creative mode for just building) you appreciate where every block comes from and the dangers you faced to get it.

Minecraft is a great game. I recommend it highly. It will be the 2012 Golden Geek game winner for sure, whenever I get around to making that post.

Below are some screenshots of my main base, near where my character first spawned. It was kind of a showcase of blocks and trees from different places I went. It was not very practical and took me forever to level that big an area. I was plagued with dark spots for days, where mobs (hostile creatures in the game) could spawn.

While developing my main base, I set up a few other bases near resources I was looking for. One was a larger ranch, with wheat to breed cattle and seeds for chickens. This was to generate meat to feed my dogs, which I relied on heavily for combat. Dogs tend to kill themselves easily, jumping into lava, etc., so I needed an energetic breeding program which required a lot of dog food. I discovered that under the ranch were a whole network of caves, including two abandoned mine shafts (features generated by the game). 

I developed a desert area with flat open areas to hunt Endermen for their pearls and for experience in general to power enchantments. Later, I built a castle for fun. I think this is where my mindcraft character will retire to, eating bread and chickens and shooting mobs until the arrows run out and I am too tired to fend off the spiders.

In jungle biomes there are huge trees and I built a treehouse in one. 

And the last place I worked on was a base in the Nether, which I built with stone brick with decoration from the Stronghold special brick blocks. I was pretty happy with this one.

Through all of this, I had never come across an NPC (non-player character) village, which is another feature randomly generated on the landscape. I did find a zombie spawner in a cave, and read online that you could transform zombies back to villagers, so I built a system to do that which is pictured below along with the underground village I made for the villagers I "created" and their descendants. 

If you have played the game, you may find the last two pictures amusing. The first is of an Enderman escaping a rainstorm in my chicken coop and the other is of a creeper in the distance in my main mining tunnel near bedrock.

Nobody here but us chickens.

I think you have a lighting issue.

Pottery Fall 2012

For many (14?) years I have been taking pottery classes at Britannia community centre in East Vancouver. I still learn things from the instructor, Helen Spaxman, but it is also just helpful to have a definite time to go and a group to chat with while I am doing it. It was a great group this time around, I hope those guys sign up again in the Spring.

I have a default object that I make, which is a hand built (pinch pot) bowl, like the one below. This was one that I glazed with commercial glazes I have at home. Coloured underglazes are put on under a clear glaze. The light brown is the colour of the clay. I have made dozens of these little bowls. They don't all turn out and the good ones make good host gifts, but the real reason I have made so many is that I find it very relaxing.

You can see another such bowl in the left picture below, also decorated with the commercial glazes I have at home. There is also a larger coil-built bowl and a salt shaker (there is a cork in the bottom you remove to fill it). These are done with the glazes at the community centre. On the right is the piece I was happiest with this session. It's a sugar bowl for us at home, slab-built. The design on the side started out as an error as wax resist put on the base got away from me and ran over the side. "It's a feature" as Helen says (OK, she's quoting me when she says it). 

Remembering Bruce Kirkpatrick Hill

I learned a few months ago that my high school friend, Bruce Hill, had died. I sent a short e-mail of consolation to his wife, who I have met but did not know well, but that does not seem to be enough to do to remember such an extraordinary person. He was quite important in my life. We were not best friends but there were certain things we did together that I think fundamentally changed the way I looked at the world. Let me tell a couple of short anecdotes about him that may give you a sense of him.

We went to a private school, St. Michaels, in Victoria together for grades 8-10 (maybe only 8-9?). After this he went on to Oak Bay High and I stayed on. Anyway, at St. Michaels we had daily PE ("gym" in private school speak). One day a week was enforced cross-country running and other days there were various options. When it was time to sign up for the Spring term, Bruce found our little group (including Stephen Dancy, Paul Modos, possibly Sean Neely although I am not sure if he was still there at that time and maybe some others I am forgetting - apologies) in the library and said, "hey, let's sign up for cross-country running on Tuesdays". I should say that Tuesdays were not the mandatory cross-country running day, that all of us tended to the nerdy rather than the athletic side of things, and that therefore cross-country running was viewed by all of us as a rather gruelling affair. However, Bruce talked us into it. He hinted at a secret plan, and anyway, if you have ever met Bruce you know he has a real charm and charisma. This charisma didn't work on everyone, for example my parents didn't think much of him, but he certainly had our number. It turns out that Tuesday gym for our grade was right before lunch. The few jocks that had signed up for cross country to actually run loped off happily. When we realized we were basically unsupervised for the hour before lunch with "permission" to be off school property, Bruce's brilliance became apparent. You might imagine that we went off and did drugs or got into some other sort of trouble, or tried to do this same scam every gym period. Actually, it was just Tuesdays and we took our lunch up the local hill, "Mount" Tolmie, and ate our lunch outside and talked. I don't remember much of what we talked about, but it was kind of intellectual I guess. I look back now with the insight of having my own teenage children who try out various scams and I am sure that some of the school staff must have known of our clever scheme. I think they looked and saw that it was harmless and that we really had fun (partly with the thrill of breaking the rules), smiled and looked the other way.

My father had a rustic cabin in northern British Columbia on Babine Lake. This is a long, glacier formed lake stretching north of the road from Price George to Prince Rupert. My parents were divorced and I visited my dad there basically every year from when I was 10 or so. This continued into my university years at the University of Victoria, when I would try to have the last week of August free to visit there before the term started. For several of these years, Bruce joined me on these trips. My "other" parents also didn't think much of him, but I sure enjoyed having a buddy there. Bruce was also studying at UVIC and I believe his major was Political Science, with some thought that he might go on to Law. However, he had an increasing interest in music at that time, that later became his passion and his career. He learned to play the organ, began composing, and found some placements as church organist and choir director. I have read some of the other postings about Bruce after his death and it is clear that he made a real contribution to the religious music scene in Toronto where he lived for most of his adult life. Anyway, back in the early 80s he was just beginning this path. For several years, Bruce and I took the ferry to Vancouver, then the bus up to Kamloops (about four hours) where my father lived. The next day we would all go up to Babine in their RV (about ten hours). One year, Bruce missed the beginning of the trip (I don't remember why) and so missed on the ride for the longest part of the journey. We assumed he just wouldn't make it up that year and settled in without him. However, starting a day late he took the bus all the way to Prince George from Vancouver, then the train to Burns Lake, the closest town to where my parents' cabin is. There, he hit a bit of a snag. It is a 45 minute drive from town out to the lake on a logging road. Undeterred, he went to the local United Church and knocked on the minister's door. It turns out that the church shared an organist with another church (in Terrace I believe) too far away to allow him to make services on the same Sunday so he alternated between them. It turned out that the coming Sunday would be musically silent and so Bruce bargained his playing for a ride out to Pendelton Bay. It was not an empty promise. He worked on my father to drive him out that Sunday and dutifully played for the service. His playing improved steadily over these years. At that time, he was not a great player, but certainly enthusiastic.

I saw from the other postings about Bruce that many people knew him as full of energy and enthusiasm, always willing to participate and help out. I will remember him fondly. He will be missed.