Loss and Love and stuff...

Had a fellow in the other day who had O.D'ed on alcohol and some pills....so we were trying to sober him up and determine the amount of damage he had caused to his liver by overloading it with medications (we couldn't ascertain exactly what pills he had taken) Turns out his boyfriend had left him and he wanted to end it all...in between trying to stop him from jumping out of the trolley and hurting himself some more, I had a little discussion with him that I thought I would share with you. Everybody hurts at some stage of their life or another. Everybody.
No-one can understand what another person is going through in times of pain and sorry because each individual's situation is just that, individual and subjective to one's own personal experiences, history and peculiar emotional and mental make-up. So no-one can exactly feel and understand other peoples pain, but some can empathize, as most, if not all of us, have had to carry our own burdens of pain, sadness and loss at some stage of our lives.
Some losses are inevitable. All of us will die, eventually. Our hearing and vision may fade with age. Our children will grow up and change into young adults. That favoured possession will break, get misplaced or stolen, and so on...In regards to those who we love and would have love us in return ~ well, sometimes we have our feelings reciprocated. Sometimes not. The thing is; to base your own personal happiness on other peoples feelings and emotions, actions and reactions, is a very risky thing.
It may be better to hope for a return of love given, but prepare for the possibility of indifference at best or outright rejection at worst...Frank Zappa said in one of his songs "Broken Hearts are for Assholes" which I feel is a bit harsh. Broken Hearts are certainly for people who may not be able to see beyond the immediate horizon, to a new day where one may wake up feeling whole in oneself and meet someone totally new, exciting and fantastic...
I have had many heartbreaks, losses of people I thought I couldn't live without. Guess what? I'm still alive! I look upon my past as leading me to the now where I am actually with who I am meant to be with NOW. Perhaps she will break my heart one day, I certainly hope not. Perhaps I will break hers...I certainly don't plan to. Who knows?
In situations of unrequited love I often remember the quote:
"There are two great tragedies in life ~ one is not getting what your heart desires, the other is getting it"
I wonder if any of what I talked about made sense to him (my patient) at the time...I may never know. Does it make any sense to anyone else, or am I just full of it?

What I tried somewhere else...

Will this work, will it, will it? bright ideas and bright sparks will not help you in the dark if you are working blindfolded...
The wife plays Gymnopedies on the piano whilst I type, so very soothing, far more than the scales exercise she was pounding piano forte previously!
Strange day today, after a night out last night to have a meal in celebration of four years of happy marriage and then to a film (Tim Burton's BIG FISH) - we had a late night, and early morning, which could explain why we were cranky this morning whilst trying to modify the chook shed...
I blame the previous owners of our block, who had an unfortunate habit of discarding their drained stubbies and beer cans seemingly wherever they had been finished. When we first moved here nearly four years ago now, we spent a good few months removing metal beer-bottle caps from the ground, and everynow and then we still find them. Back to the chook shed though, my wife was digging down to clear the earth a bit for me to modify the shed with an angle-grinder when she hit...you guessed it! A stubby. Reaching down to get it she was bitten by a bull-ant (a nest of which were disturbed by our business) Ouch. Being very resilient and not one to complain much she carried on. I went on to remove the roof of the chook-shed and started removing the roofing screws. Most of them seemed to be rusted in however...it seems all projects started involving anything to do with the past owners will inevitably hit unresolvable snags...I am not as resilient as my good wife, and am one to complain, which I started to do as well as throwing in some choice expletives worthy of a Tourettes sufferer. My wife got jack of this and we started sniping. Eventually we both decided it was a silly idea and said "fuck it" and went and had lunch. I will see what I can do with it tomorrow...

Happy Anniversary Baby...

Yes, four years today! I love you wife, love you! (and a little image for anyone curious enough to want to see how beautiful The Good Looking One really is (I think this proves beyond a doubt that she deserves that title, hmmm?) I also included this image for those curious as to how I look in a kilt. yowza!

also ~ More Distraction from the creator of "the scribbler" ~ on further investigation I found his whole site zefrank.com to be a cornucopia of amusing and interesting exercises, "toys" and flash videos. I particularly liked his "Dance Properly" and "My Cat Annie" pages, but there are many interesting and wonderful things to see and do...I've only touched the tip of a creative iceberg here (set aside a few hours).
But wait! There's more! I would also like to thank my latest visitor finelyspungirl for popping in and leaving some nice comments! (and also patty, downsydup, Dreamway, Agnes from Paris, Gilles from London, Ali from Malaga, and Pacale from somewhere... ah, the UK I think, for visiting, leaving comments and signing the guest book and so forth) - sorry I'm late responding to all that, but thanks!

Good Heavens...

Is it Sunday evening already? We have had a whirlwind week...First I work six shifts running, a couple of early morning shifts and four late ones...then friday we have Beth (my sister in law) and Paul's wedding, which was a wonderful occasion. The reception was held at a sailing club overlooking Elwood beach, with wonderful food prepared by Paul, Beth and some of their friends. Alcohol was laid on in abundance but Jane and I didn't really get drunk. The children were with us until about 2030hrs when my Mum took them home to her place for the night...Our friends who lived in Newport offered to put us up for the night, so a taxi-bus was called close to midnight. The ride in that was hilarious in itself with much merry making and our dear friend Nat lolling into Sonia's fella Tony's lap every time the minibus took a curve. The next day (Saturday) pretty well was accounted for, picking our car up from Beth & Paul's and making our way across town to fetch the children and get home finally mid-afternoon. After that, recuperation, of sorts. Today we went to my out-laws to met with Paul's family, the Irish contingent again, for a good old Aussie BBQ. Paul's parents and brother and sisters and their partners are great value and have a wonderful sense of fun...all in all it's been a wonderful and exciting time. Back to reality and work in the morning, and I must catch up with all the wonderfully patient members of the 2D forum I moderate at Renderosity to update this months current theme gallery (which is hands and feet) Ah well...to bed now and sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow I think, the way I'm feeling! Take care all, I hope everyone else is healthy and happy wherever you may be...

Distraction Station

The Scribbler

thanks to the people at Danny Gregory's new everyday matters discussion group for pointing me here!

Haircut and gel...

My wife was inconsolable the other day...turned her back for a second and the two and a half year old somehow managed to sneak into the bathroom and obtain some scissors from the hair trimming kit....With tears in her eyes (my wife) comes to me with a handful of golden locks...Yes, our daughter had given herself a mullet! Thankfully she hadn't put her eye out with the scissors in the process. My wife was upset because little miss naughty is to be a flower-girl at my sister in laws wedding in two days time...later, after the initial shock subsided, my dearest one and I had a good laugh over the incident. Our youngest has the sweetest face so she can carry it off....and there's always the hairband solution. As a sequel to this, yesterday we turned our back again for a just a millisecond and little miss naughty managed to experiment with the "clag" (the name we have for children's hobby paper glue) all through her hair, giving herself a bit of a "punk-mullet" style. She's ahead of her time, I swear!

Another Sunday in Triage

Another torrent of faces this afternoon evening, sick, hot children, lacerated hands, broken bones and general illness coming in the doors. Many genuinely in need of medical review today, some that simply seemed unwilling to pay a token fee to see their local doctor tomorrow (which moneys would probably equate to a mere fraction of their weekly expenditure on nicotine and/or alcohol) There are always a certain percentage who present to the Accident and Emergency Department who have suffered neither an accident or are in a state that could be described as an emergency ~ please excuse my tired cynicism...Ah well, I have come home to my lovely family and to sleep for 7 hours before presenting back to ED for a morning shift. I hope every one has or is having a nice weekend. Below are some framegrabs of 3 swf's 100 x 100 in dimension, with the code you will need to use them if you wish. Just remember to replace *swfname* with the name under the images. *Note: I haven't loaded the actual swf's because too many swf's like these running on the one page may slow down your processor, as they are all driven to one degree or another by mathematical functions...If you want you can save them to your own server to use from there (by right clicking and "save target as" on the thumbnail), as I'm not sure how long I will be with my current server (or indeed how much space I have left in my allocated 10mb home page space my ISP has given me...I had better check I suppose!)

Rad4c100         2Slynky100         Hvar100

<p align="center"><embed src="http://home.iprimus.com.au/punkclown/Flash/*swfname*.swf" quality="medium" width="100" height="100" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed></p>

[Current Audio Stimuli: I'm Turning Around - Gentle Giant - The Missing Piece (03:59)]

Above is a header logo-thing I have been working on for a friend from work ~ still in developmental stages, it's about a program to teach people paediatric resuscitation skills I think...
Meg asked "it is varying based on mathematics? It doesn't appear to be a repeating pattern" - regarding the graphic example of the henon phase variations below...the equation itself meg, is:

xn+1 = xn cos(a) - (yn - xn2) sin(a)
yn+1 = xn sin(a) + (yn - xn2) cos(a)

which graphs a point along a 2-dimensional plane x and y which after a number of iterations gives us a lovely fractal pattern, the nature of which changes depending on what value is entered for a. The example below runs the equation for a certain number of iterations (the more iterations the more complex the picture, but the slower the render time) - It varies because each time it runs a random variable is set for a - I've been a bit tricksy and set some other random variables into the equation, such as line thickness and so on as well, but basically that's the gist of it. Paul Bourke who wrote the equation above, is a faculty member of the centre for astrophysics and supercomputing at Swinburne University in my home town of Melbourne and he has many other fascinating experiments that can be seen here.

Gary has shown an appreciation of my fractally dotty almost-indigenous-art experiments. They are in fact based on Henon Phase Diagram calculations initially written by Paul Bourke, and can be seen here ~ the code for the flash version I garnered from Keith Peter's who said he borrowed it from Jared Tarbell (following me?) I took the code and blindly fiddled with it to get a few variations that pleased my eye and sense of perverted aesthetics, I'm just glad I didn't break the code - although I'm sure I messed up it's mathematical elegance a bit! Above is the latest version, but with some user control included. The thing that amazes me about these files are the size. This one is only 4kb. Ah, the beauty of mathematics!

Mediative Focus

This flash experiment, a mutation of the previous examples, reminds me somewhat of traditional and some contemporary Australian Aboriginal Art, with its pointillism and linework. This is not a static work of art however - it is a constantly changing cyber organism, made of light and quickened by the processing power of your computer, rather than an organism of cells and bio-electrical energy. What is it's purpose? Many would say it is mere eye-candy, and they may have a certain point. I feel "eye candy" to be a rather dismissive term though. For myself, I find this and some of the other flash experiments I have done quite peacefull and hypnotic to contemplate, similar to the meditative focus of the pendulum or candle flame, like watching the ever changing patterns of clouds, or waves coming into shore. Whatever it is, I hope it serves to amuse you the visitor for a few moments at least! To download it for your own amusement, right click here. (Gary at tfs reluctant has a smaller version for download too...)

Variations...

This little thingy was modified by myself after being borrowed/stolen from Keith Peter's (BIT 101) site after he copied it from Jared Tarbell's Complexification site...
Ok! Onto VARIATIONS on a basic theme, well...you know what a basic theme is...
If you happen to have the Netscape 6x or 7 browser, under the View menu, there is a Use style submenu that if there are alternate styles available will allow you to use them. This page and the links page have 2 other css style variations at the moment - underground and variationB, tres exciting... IE5/Mac users can use the "Choose stylesheet" favelet available at favelets.com apparently, not that I have tried this option. The application possibilities beyond mere eye-candy and punk-amusement is quite significant however, especially in terms of accesibility. So there you go, back to a bit of techy blogging. Passionately techy though, passionately ~ I just love fiddling about with this sort of stuff, but it makes the GLO's eyes glaze over....I really don't know why!

Different again...

some of you may recognise this variation on Meyer's complexspiral css page in the edge section of his site. It looks much better in Netscape and Mozilla etc than IE, and I will try and implement some different styles to "skin" the blog with soon, if you have a browser capable of viewing alternate styles. In IE the content background doesn't remain "fixed" so a great deal of the effect is lost...oh well...
Kat said in her last comment "I'm having one h*ll of a time getting your page to load lately, and I'm on dsl here at the office. (Shhh - don't tell I'm blogsurfing at work)." I hope the new template loads a bit quicker Kat, and I promise not to tell!

It was bound to happen...

someone has devoted an entry in their blog (sort of) to an entry in mine! ~ but I didn't think such a large piece of text would be given over to a discussion by Mr Useless on my little entry on attempting to have passionate stance on things I write (a few posts back) ~ Actually what I really love about this guy is that he continually brightens my day and makes me giggle by interspersing random Zappa quotes into his entries, like:

"Mmmm, I think my lips are getting heavy."
"I never know when you're telling me the truth!"
"I'm not."
"Then how do I know that anything you've said to me is--"
"You don't."

anyhow, Baloney dude...ah Mr. Useless, thanks for the Zappa, thanks for reading my stuff and thanks for discussing my random mumblings too. Anyone interested can read what he has to say about what I had to say here: The Morning Retort ...more on this later! (I think)...shake up the pale dry ginger ale!