Often called "Stonehenge," for obvious reasons, perhaps the heaviest item in the Stuart collection is La Jolla Project by Richard Fleischner, installed in 1984. It is a grouping of solid granite columns and beams which form mostly asymmetric shapes over a Revelle college lawn. Most of the parts are centered in one area, but a few are scattered over the entire lawn. Most of the shapes are tall, but there are some squat pieces, probably meant to be sat upon. Some granite pieces are laid to suggest decay, littered below tall, naked columns.

To me this art speaks about time. The granite was cut very recently (geologically) by a machine, so the cuts are very clean. However, parts have been arranged like they were broken to suggest the passage of time. But these fallen pieces still have sharp, clean corners that don't look old at all. La Jolla Project reminds me of Stonehenge, which was built based on the celestial calendar. This one should last longer than any other Stuart collection item.

Although it is still a work in progress (see forward parenthetical note), the "Phratry Nexus" has been greatly improved today. (I don't know about you, but I remember some years ago when "Work In Progress" or "Under Construction" images were common on webpages. I don't see them so much anymore because I figure people finally figured out that all web pages are always "Under Construction" by definition.)

Back to my main point. If you look at the Phratry Nexus you'll see thumbnail sized screenshots of the various Phratry.net webpages (four as of this writing). Due to the already mentioned fluid nature of the web, keeping those thumbnails current would be pretty tedious if done by hand. That's where Applescript comes in. Ideally, I would have liked to write some kind of script and put it in crontab on the webserver, but doing screenshots is difficult from the command line. The Applescript I wrote (along with some help from my father, Mike) uses four apps, which either come with Mac OS X or are free: Cyberduck (for FTPing to the server), Freesnap (screencapture utility), Applescript Image Events (image editing) and OmniWeb (web browsing). OmniWeb isn't free, actually. Firefox would work too, but I got the script to work better with OmniWeb.

The specifics of the script aren't important, but the cool thing is Applescript allows me to do a 15-minute process of screenshot editing and uploading with just one double-click. It still takes about a minute for the whole thing to work (most of the time is from built-in delays in case of slow webpage loads), but that's still fifteen times better than before, and it's done right every time.

Hello from an entirely new server and address! The old steve.yikes.com (which equalled stephen.kicks-ass.net) is now stephen.phratry.net. The old site was hosted on my father's 933Mhz G4 using his residential cable modem connection (which was throttled to 40 kb/s for uploads). This new one is hosted by Site5 which offers feature-packed deals for not very much money.

You may be wondering what phratry means. According to Dictionary.com it means

1. A kinship group constituting an intermediate division in the primitive structure of the Hellenic tribe or phyle, consisting of several patrilinear clans, and surviving in classical times as a territorial subdivision in the political and military organization of the Athenian state.
2. Anthropology. An exogamous subdivision of the tribe, constituting two or more related clans.

Since I wanted to have other family members & possibly friends use this domain & hosting service, I wanted to think of a domain that wasn't too specific to any of us, but was descriptive. Although none of us are a member of a Hellenic tribe, the general idea is phratry refers to an extended family group, which describes the situation. I also kind of like the word because it's not very common and has an odd spelling.

The cool thing is everything is so fast! Downloading photos off of the old hosting situation was pretty painful. This should be much nicer.

The theater (or is it theatre?) arts part of campus is on the southern tip of campus, which overlooks La Jolla, University Town(e?) Center, and farther into Kearny and Clairemont Mesa. Situated here is La Jolla Vista View (1988) by William Wegman. Follow eitehr link and you'll learn he's best known for his photographs of posed weimaraners.

As far as I know there are no weimaraners etched into La Jolla Vista View, but there might be. The large bronze plaque is situated to match the vista in front of you, with mountains and communites named so you can find them in the distance, much like something you would find in a national park. However, the labelling is unorthodox, and that's where this becomes art. "Barren Wasteland," "A Big Development," and "La Jolla Gateway to Hell" are some of the named sites. There are also buildings & business, which are much less permanent than the mountains and communities also named on the plaque. Much has already changed in the two decades since Wegman designed the plaque.

My opinion of San Diego and urban sprawl closely matches the tenor of La Jolla Vista View. I like the small touches, like a tree with "Meow, Meow" coming out of it. The telescope even works for free! Since this piece of art is hard to find and in a far corner of campus, it is perhaps one of the least visited. I encourage you to check it out, it's well worth it, and you'll learn some real & humorous San Diego geography (which are not mutually exclusive) in the process.

Following up on my previous post about Yahoo! Mail Beta I noticed that the new beta interface has no space available thermometer bar, like the normal Yahoo! Mail does:

This is either an artifact of the beta not having all of the features of the old Yahoo! Mail yet, or that Yahoo! has something special planned regarding Mail. I'm willing to bet that unlimited mail is impractical and would be abused, but we'll see!

The blogging software I use for this site, WordPress, has the ability to add features through plugins. I just added a new plugin, called Akismet that is supposed to keep comment spam from appearing on my website. When I first set this blogging software up, I got a couple spam comments right away (get your viagra here! horny college co-eds!). I didn't feel like fighting it so I turned off comments for all my posts. Hopefully this weirdly spelled Akismet will actually work!

Okay, spammers, give it your best shot!

I just got added to the list of Yahoo! Mail users who get access to the new Beta interface. All in all, I actually like it, even compared to Gmail's interface. For a while now I've been hoping that Yahoo! would give users IMAP access to their email, so I could use a good email client with my own computer at home, but still have access to all my messages anywhere. This interface just might curb that desire. It has Gmail's trick of simple keyboard shortcuts, but also has drag-and-drop ability for messages, RSS feeds and cute icons. One really neat feature is you can have multiple "tabs" open. Tabs can have messages you're composing, reading, or your inbox. Very often I am writing a long email when I want to send a quick note to someone else. With tabs it should be very painless.

This new interface has the potential to be just as good as many email clients. I however, have some complaints:

1. Please, please, please use fixed-width fonts. Email is not supposed to look good. If I wanted it to look good, I'd send a PDF. There are many reasons why fixed-width fonts are a good idea, foremost being ASCII art (of course!). My signature has a cute little cyclist guy nestled between my name, email & web address. With a variable-width font it looks terrible.

   But seriously, though, if I ever wanted to email myself some sort of crontabbed system log, the unix-style of formatting with spaces between items would completely not work. Please, Yahoo!, at least give us the option to have fixed-width fonts. I know I could fix that using site preferences on my browser, but that's not very practical on every single computer I use.

2. When replying to messages, I like to reply to each of the person's points by quoting what they wrote, and then writing below that. Example:

   ```

   What do you think about the design? Too much? I think less red and more blue.

   Yeah, I agree. Red is pretty much the worst color you could ever choose. ```

   The way the beta does it is it puts the replied to message with about 4 carriage returns above it AND puts your signature above the message. This means that if I reply to a person's message the way I like to, the first thing my message will have is my signature. Dumb!

3. As far as I can tell, right now there is no way to differentiate between what I've written and what I'm quoting. Usually there are the greater-than signs (>), but in beta there aren't. Some email programs put colored lines. I'm asking for something to tell them apart, Yahoo!, are you listening? Don't take a step backwards!

4. The signature doesn't seem to recognize carriage returns. That's just silly. I have a three-line signature that gets turned into one very long line. Even if I didn't have ASCII art, it would butcher a simple signature.

5. Fix the bugs! Editing a replied-to message is buggy. Before I can delete any of the copied message (the one I'm replying to) I need to type something at the very top. The interface could be faster, too. But then again, old Yahoo! mail isn't that fast, either.

I'm sure I can think of more things to gripe about it in the next few days. I'll add to this list as I use it.

One of the most photographed member of the Stuart Collection is the lead-enacased tree in front of the main library on campus. There are two other trees part of the installation which are hidden inside of a eucalyptus grove southwest of this tree. Together, they are part of the Trees by Terry Allen which were installed in 1986. Apparently the trees encased in lead were salvaged by the artist from a group of eucalyptus trees that were cut down for a new building on campus. The two trees that I didn't take pictures of play music and speak poetry. But that would be hard to photograph, wouldn't it?

This is an excellent kind of art in my opinion. It's not too dense and obscure but isn't too simple. The tree forces the viewer to look up from a distance to take in the whole thing. Up close there are other things to see, too. Of course all the Stuart collection items are meant to be touched, but this one perhaps more than others. The soft lead is very easy to make an impression upon, giving everyone input to the art.

While I was in Berkeley for Thanksgiving, I took my camera & tripod out to a parking lot near the Lawrence Hall of Science which has a magnificent view over UC Berkeley, Berkeley, the Bay and San Francisco. A rainy weather system had come & gone recently so the air was very clean and cold making the view even better than normal. As good as these photos are, closer to LHS there is a grassy knoll which has an even better view. The hill slopes off in front of you and there are no trees to block the view. However, it is now fenced off and is only accessible through the inside of LHS. Lame!

The most recent addition to the Stuart Collection is Bear (2005) by Tim Hawkinson. The bear is made up of 8 large boulders weighing 180 tons altogether. It sits in a courtyard in the engineering school with several new and highly angular buildings. If you read the description in the link above the artist was fully aware of the contradiction of a stone teddy bear between high tech buildings.

I very much like this part of the collection. I've been eagerly awaiting it's completion since I heard about it. I always like it when art requires a massive effort, and moving a 100 ton boulder (which is what the body stone weighs) is massive. The bear does seem cuddly, like you could pick it up and take a nap with it. But of course you can't. I also like bigger than life art, which is a fairly popular category in cities around the world.

Green Table by Jenny Holzer (1992) is a large rectangular table with dozens of "truisms" etched into the granite. I like this peice of art because it's something I think I could do.

I like that not only can you use the table as you would any other, you can perhaps gain some small nuggets of wisdom. However, some of the truisms are sexist towards men, and others just plain wrong, in my opinion. But I guess that's the point -- these are not truisms. Some are common sense, others are simply cleverly-worded opinion. Truisms on the table contradict other truisms. Read the list linked above and see for yourself.

UCSD is home to a very unique art collection, the Stuart Collection. As of November, 2005 there are sixteen items in the collection scattered over the entire campus. As a way to practice using my new camera I'll be taking photos of all the items and posting them on this website.

My first posting is of Standing by Kiki Smith (1998). Personally, I think it's a disturbing statue/fountain. The water running from her hands and the nails sticking out of her body aren't a pleasant thing. Although the starfish nails are supposedly placed in the shape of the constellation Virgo, it's hard to tell when you're looking up at it. Also, the hands have rusted a dark red color, something like dried blood.

Continuing on my previous post I'm posting some more photos with my new camera. This time I've made some 4-up comparison JPGs showing my new SLR versus my old pocket digital.

The main point of the comparison photos is to see how the range of lenses compare. I've scaled down the SLR's photos and cut the aspect ratio of the Canon's shots, so image quality is not the main focus of this comparison. I also didn't play with the advanced features of the SLR because the Canon doesn't have the range of variability like the SLR. But I did take photos in two different modes just to see if I could discern any changes.

Overall the lens supplied with the SLR has about the same range as the Canon, while the telephoto lens & 1.4x multiplier attachment goes where the Canon can't. I took the photos on a partly-cloudy day so the ambient light changed between various shots, which diminishes the comparison value of color & exposure. One thing that is clear is the Canon suffers from the usual problem of depth of field. Even when I'm taking a photo of something close, the background tends to be in focus. In the above photo you can see that the Canon does have the background out of focus somewhat, but not nearly as much as the SLR.

One thing the Canon has going for it is portability, so I don't think I'll be abandoning it yet. It still takes great snapshots, and sometimes all I want is a snapshot.

My father gave me for my birthday a shiny new digital SLR. It's a Konica Minolta Maxxum 5D digital SLR. I already own a Minolta 35mm film camera, so I have a few lenses and accessories that are compatible with the new camera.

I'm still playing around with all the fancy features, and I really don't know how to use it to it's full potential now.

For the better part of half a year now I've been working slowly on a project with Mike Norman, my advisor. I'm basically implementing a test of the efficiency & accuracy of the cosmological simulation code his group uses. I do this by sticking a ring of gas into the simulator and watching the gas spread out. I compare the computer simulation to how it should go if all things were perfect (which the simulation is not). The two plots below are a culmination of my accelerating efforts.

Above is a 3D plot of the gas density. The two horizontal coordinates are the x-y position, while the vertical gives the density at that point. I'm doing my simulation in two dimensions right now, eventually I'll go to three.

The white line above (hidden by the red line) is a sideways slice of the density, starting at the center going out. The red line is a best curve fit of the white line. The curve fit is very good because the white line was generated by the same function I'm using for the best fit, but the picture shows my fitting technique works, and that's what matters.

I hope to make further, faster progress! I'll post things here as I go along.