Taste of Long Hammock

Here's a sample of the various denizens that attend the Long Hammock shoots. I'm hoping the other photographer has some better, more representative pictures!









Oh and here's a few gratuitous pictures I took to cheer myself up after realizing that my gut looks a lot like an ameboid beer keg.

Insomnia and Inspiration for the Swan-Song Sequel

What can I say? I sometimes get oddly fascinated with certain songs and they color my writing for a bit...

Song for interval t: Stripped by Depeche Mode, both the original and the Rammstein cover.

In other news, I have a nice grove of regression trees growing and pretty soon they'll form a nice random forest and maybe some committees. I might have to prune a few of them though because they're starting to look like ents.

Trimarian Olympics

There's some scattered pictures from the Trimarian Olympics.
From Aesa: http://pics.livejournal.com/jasminedragon/gallery/0001zb6k
From Wurmund: http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=424483532&albumId=1302253

From me (Guenhwyvar): http://s375.photobucket.com/albums/oo194/cylithera137/Trimarian%20Olympics%202009-June-20/

It was a hot, humid day so we all braised very nicely (or miserably). Under normal circumstances, I would've participated in other activities like the foot-races and tug-of-war. (Un)fortunately, I made my Will save and decided to stay in the comfort of the shade. Still though, the merciless FL sun combined with FL summer humidity buggered the life out of me. It was a real blast and something I'd happily do again. Next time, I'll hopefully have my own garb that's a wee bit more breathable than the nice Roman tunic that a friend of mine loaned me!

Why the Heck Not...

The latest build of all of the stories in the Dunheasa series, including Swan-Song. I've also added two short stories: Idiocy and Innocence, a story I had written back in 1997 about Killer Parakeet and an almost disastrous journey and cleaned up after years of gathering cobwebs, and The Sundering of the Tuatha, which is a bit of a legend which may or may not be true. I also have a bit of a revised bunch of fragments for the sequel to Swan-Song. The tentative title has gone from Shadowhawk to Morgenstern as things have unfolded bit by bit. As always, no telling which way this one's going to go although I can honestly say the (mis)adventures of T. Morgenstern, his companions, and the Shadowhawk may span a handful of stories.

900 Round

No pictures this time -- camera seems to have gone on strike on me. I shot a 526/900, which according to everyone else, is a pretty strong score for me shooting a longbow with hunting arrows. The Olympic barebow shooters were in the mid 600s and the highest score in the whole shoot was 870-something. My best round was at the 40 yards, where nearly all of my arrows were in the gold except for one flyer (the 1st arrow out of 6 of that round). That round, I had 55/60 and the arrows scored as follows: X, X, 10, 9, 9, and 7, where X is a 10 in the X. That's better than some of my compound (with full field setup) rounds at 40 yards! I think I also made some compound and Olympic shooters rethink their opinions about longbows in these types of shoots, at least one compound shooter in my group couldn't believe that I pulled that off. I had some trouble re-calibrating myself at 60 and 50 yards, leading me to a total of 5 non-scoring shots (out of 90), but once I figured out what my gap was, it was (usually) smooth sailing. All in all, it was a real blast!

Now if I can only convince my fellow traditional shooters to come to some of these shoots with me! At least I've got some friends shooting their Olympic recurves with nothing on them to keep me company!

Another Pic Rolls In

Still waiting for pictures from one of my fellow shooters but I received this pic earlier from the K family.

In other news, I finally was able to get some useful output from PnET-Day after wondering why the frequency MatLab kept giving me strange errors like undefined variables and boiler processes. And now to use my own data instead of the Harvard Experimental Forest site, which is predominantly hardwoods. Which model has the greatest predictive power? Tune in and find out if PnET, regression tree, or artificial neural network is the Most Powerful Predictor of NEE and evapotranspiration!