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!

Moving Up the Ranks

As of last night, the average of my top 3 Royal Round scores is now above 80 -- shot an 86, 85, and 80 (all three being my top scores) so now I've moved up from Bowman (60-80 average if I recall correctly) to Master Bowman. I'm going to see if I can reach the coveted Grand Master Bowman, which is a 100 or above. Given the way a Royal Round is structured, that's a pretty tall order. There's 3 untimed rounds with 6 arrows and a maximum possible score of 30. The fourth round is a timed round and the most arrows I can shoot in 30 seconds is 9, which would make my theoretical maximum 45 points if I could even fit all those arrows in the bull's-eye. I'd have to average 25 points per round, which is a pretty tough goal with wood arrows but it's not out of the question. Who knows, maybe one day Trimaris will produce five or six Grand Master Bowmen!

I also got a personal high on my IKAC score -- 215. I've yet to beat Sir Erika's record high (250-something I think) but I think I might have a shot at it and maybe put a bit more of a dent on those guys from An Tir and Aethelmaerc. I also suspect that there's a core group of five or six of us from the An Croisaire barony will bump things up nicely for Trimaris...

More FAA State Championship Pictures

These are courtesy of one of my fellow shooters, there should be another few posts coming as pictures roll on in.

FAA State / NFAA Sectional Championship

As always, click on the title for the entire collection of photographs.
I shot at the FAA/NFAA State/Sectional Championship at Gator Bowmen this weekend and went uncontested in the adult female traditional division. My score was by far the lowest score out of anyone on the range and I had the slowest setup out of all the people there, but heck, that 571/1400 (224/560 field, 161/280 animal, 186/560 hunter) is going to be my tournament baseline. According to other shooters, it was a pretty strong score given that I (in their eyes) shot with every possible handicap: longbow, heavy hunting arrows, feathers in the rain, and shooting directly off the shelf. A lot of people did comment on me having a lot of courage for shooting what I shot and staying with the entire shoot. Overall it was a real blast and I'd happily shoot another field round with my longbow! Now if I can only get my other half to also appreciate these shoots...

Swan-Song FAQ 1/n et al

I really don't appreciate being woken up by the local yahoos making insane amounts of noise, not too different from what I sometimes hear the nights of football victories. I don't know what it is but some noises really, really, really make me wish I either could cast disintegration or lightning bolt or even magic missile, with disintegration being my first choice because of its more permanent effects. Heck, a sphere of annihilation wouldn't be too bad either, provided I have full control of the blasted thing. In any event, I'm up and am having trouble going back to sleep so time to do a few things.

First, click on the title or here for a really funny video that improved my mood a bit and reassured me that there's still some tasteful music out there. Don't know what it is, but rap, hip-hop, and a lot of jazz and lite rock make me think about the effects of Vogon potery on non-Vogons. Just to give you an idea of the video, it's a live performance of "Mein Teil" by Rammstein, which translates to "My Part" or "My Male Thingy".

On to the Swan-Song FAQ...

Q: Which stories should I have read before-hand, if any?
A: Definitely Family Secrets (in the Palindor section), but the other Dunheasa stories are also helpful, particularly The Lay of Imladrien and Tinuvion

Q: What the heck inspired this story?
A: Lots of things. The main sources though were D&D campaigns while I was still in SoCal and South Park. I also gave a bit of a nod to the Knights of Solamnia in the Dragonlance series as well as to a lot of hero-story stereotypes.

Q: Why so much flatulence in the story?
A: Because it's funny and amusing to write about.

Q: Will there be more Rusvalki and/or S'vartalf in future stories?
A: Nearly certain. They're too interesting for a one story appearance.

Q: When will the Crossroad get cleaned up?
A: I have no clue. It'll reveal itself when the time comes and no sooner.

I'll post a second one later on when I get more feedback and/or questions :) Hopefully now I can curl up happily and actually get some rest.

Draft 2 of Swan-Song

Click on the title of the post to see the second draft of Swan-Song. If that doesn't work, click here.

Basically I re-added a few parts I had omitted earlier to give a better sense of a couple of the characters as well as cleaning up some details. As always, the story will continue to evolve.

Gratuitous IKAC Pictures

These pictures are courtesy of Wurmund.
Wurmund and Sir Erika Bjornstottir on the line.

Aesa, Guenhwyvar (me), Jochi, and someone being obscured by Jochi (can't tell who) on the line. Aesa is the one closest to the photographer, Jochi is the furthest whole person visible, I'm in the middle.

Another shot of Aesa, Guenhwyvar, and Jochi.

Swan-Song, Draft 1/ n

In case you can't click the title, click here.

This is my absolute first public draft of Swan-Song. Warning: this story is NOT for the easily offended for the following reasons:

1) Gratuitous fart and toilet jokes
2) Potentially politically / blasphemously offensive material in general

Well reason #2 is pretty weak at best but with people being so easily offended these days, thought it would be a good idea to put a warning. With that, here's the absolute first draft. Revisions, as always, will be coming up as I clean up and develop the epic further. Enjoy!

I Dreamt of Durians

I don't know what got into me, but I was dreaming that I was holed up in my office and protecting territory and research from the hordes of football players, cheerleaders, and politicians. All I had were my Chek-Mate Crusader longbow, 8 arrows, all with Razorcap broadheads, and some durians. I scored perfect double-lung and/or heart shots with the arrows 8 broadheads but that wasn't enough to repel the entire horde of evil entities trying to stop me on my quest. So I started throwing durians at them and for every durian I threw, two more showed up magically. I took out a lot of enemies with well-thrown (or not-so-well-thrown) durians because they can and will inflict some pretty good damage. Plus they do have an area-of-effect to take their advantage and give me some advantage (or remove a disadvantage). Let's just say I'd rather use a nice, sharp broadhead with a reliable bow, much more accurate and safer for me, but I guess I better keep a durian or two around for self-defense, especially during football season when there's a lot of idiots around, stupidity is glorified beyond reason, and I'm not allowed to protect myself in other ways.

Swan-Song Quick Update

Cabin fever, a general sense of "I hope this is adequate for an exploratory analysis" aside, and wondering what I did to offend my insides aside, thought I'd just put a little blurb on Swan-Song

I've been on an unusual roll on Swan-Song, courtesy of the large number of mind-blowingly boring things I've had to sit through and frequent bouts of severe stomach woes. I'm expecting to post a first draft after I finish up my soil-landscape modeling final. Swan-Song is NOT for the easily offended. I will write more on it when I actually finish my first draft and post it.

Shadowhawk is currently on a bit of a hiatus because of some rather interesting things that came up in Swan-Song. More on it later too.

From the Cave

Still holed up in my lab and finally got the artificial neural network to run and give me useful results. It actually did pretty well -- used a feedforward back-propagation flavored one after getting frustrated at trying to code perceptrons. It's a very trivial case: trying to predict productivity class based on 6 different Landsat bands + NDVI + EVI + elevation + aspect + slope, but at least it works. The real fun? Trying to map out the classification tree results because apparently CART doesn't give me outputs to stick back into ArcGIS like my neural network code that I did in MatLab... although CART did give me a nice set of tables and trees to stick in my write-up.

Darn if I got a penny for every profanity at the !#$& football fanatics uttered (actually uttered or thought of) today, I could probably afford a new Hoyt Ultra-Elite with a full set of Shrewd stabilizers, a CBE sight mount, a decent magnifying sight, a nice set of strings & cables from Winner's Choice, a matching T.R.U. Ball Sabertooth 360 4-finger release, and a dozen Carbon Express Nano arrows built and fletched to my specs. I could even here all the hubbub all the way from Newins-Ziegler and it's a difficult sprint from here to the football stadium.

Ok, think my lab computer has unfrozen up so I can resume working instead of thinking up what the Nine Layers of Hell would look like in my world.

What... The... Frequency...?!

Who the heck is evil or idiotic enough to schedule some massive maniac get-together (read: American football game on campus with those glorified over-sized gully dwarves who get more scholarship funding than most grad students can even dream of) so close to finals?! I'm already ticked off as it is when I had to put up with people getting excited over divine zombies and coprophagous lagomorphs and hideous pastels last weekend, but why the hell with an INTRA-MURAL American football game?! Why would THAT attract O(50k) people on campus and disrupt people trying to get work done!? It's enough that I hate sticking around town over the weekend during deer hunting season, why also have a @#$%&@ spring game right before finals?! I guess that's the down-side of being on a big jock campus.

In the meanwhile... back to CART (which I can't get for my own computer and am stuck using a campus computer) now that I'm done expressing my absolute disgust at the horrific traffic here in town and in/around campus as well as the excessive noise.

Just A Bit More...

I'm really, really hoping my body will hold up long enough for me to at least do some serious butt-kicking on my final project for my soil-landscape modeling class. I've already lost a full day to what can best be described as digestive distress from hell. Without going into gratuitous details, it involved a high fever and way too much time worshiping the porcelain god... so no work got done. I'm still not at full juice but I'm determined to do the best I can and hopefully finish the class with a solid, un-contestable A in the class as well as set myself up for a productive summer. This project is pretty much a mini prototype of what I will be doing summer, so I really want to do the best I can. I know I'm only looking at a very trivial case by using only Landsat data and some forest inventory data, but considering I'm also learning how to use and interpret classification & regression tree models and comparing it to an artificial neural network... yeah. I did shock my adviser a bit because while I was describing my term project, he thought I was talking about my dissertation research so I had to do a bit of a clarification with a bit of "this is for the next week" and "THIS is for my dissertation".

In any event... let's just hope I survive this next week... and that my models will actually run. At least the classification tree is kinda working and I got something that looks remotely reasonable. Wish me luck getting MatLab to read in the data sets so I can run the artificial neural network!

Think Dirt-y and Gassy Thoughts

The title about sums up this stage of my research as well as the state of my stomach (well, the gassy part). I'm currently grounded at home with a very bad case of the stomach flu (and wanted to be considerate of my colleagues, nobody enjoys a constant flux of H2S or repeated 5 meter dashes). I wanted to use the word "Soil" but Soil-y thoughts didn't sound as amusing to me. I survived my soil-landscape modeling midterm and got a pretty good score. Now it's time for me to do the real fun part of the class: the quantitative analysis exercise, which is the final for the class. So I did a literature review on eddy covariance tower footprints so that made me think a lot of gassy thoughts. I might be actually doing this over the summer along with some evapotranspiration modeling on top of NEE (net ecosystem exchange).

Anyway, why the dirty thoughts? Because I realized that I only have 3 eddy tower sites in north-central FL... but I have tons and tons of soil data as well as forest growth increment data. Also, NEE is *usually* closely correlated with NPP because NEE is the CO2 in/out of the ecosystem, while NPP (net primary productivity) is the carbon lost/gained by the primary producers (ie, plants)... which are pretty close even if NEE is gas only and NPP deals with solid stuff. So yeah now I'm thinking for this little final for the soil-landscape modeling (and my summer's work on top of footprint modeling and ET), I'll try to simulate NPP over a larger scale. There are a lot models out there for estimating NPP from growth increment data because foresters are really interested in how much wood you can get from a given stand so there's tons of allometric equations out there. My brain is churning and turning now!

SEEC 2009 et al

First... I will be presenting my poster at SEEC 2009 so hopefully I remember to take the camera (and batteries) with me to get a few pictures. Wish me luck in not causing too many aneurysms as I talk about artificial neural networks, net ecosystem exchange, and up-scaling! Admittedly I would rather be Guenhwyvar of An Crosaire, master archer (in my imagination at least), shooting IKACS, Royal Rounds, and 3D at the Trimaris coronation event tomorrow, but sometimes, I just gotta suck it up and stuff myself into a suit. Speaking of which, I'm hoping I haven't blobbed out too much from lack of exercise and too much studying or I'm gonna either look like an overstuffed sausage or just go in my natural plumage.

Second... Thought I'd share links to two blogs I get a bit of a kick out of reading. The first is Welcome to the Genetic Opera and the second is Slayer of Altoids

Okie off I go to finish up laundry -- seems like the only time I can do laundry without having to resort to a slug-fest (or defenstration) is weekday mornings or having to bite my tongue until it bleeds (to avoid excessive profanity at the @!#&$% who don't understand basic punctuality or the @#$%& who pollutes the air with perfume). Then it's an afternoon in tree physiology and most likely seminar unless fortune is in my favor and it's fisheries seminar instead of a carbon seminar. The seminars towards the end of the semester looked rather... wie Scheisse... too much emphasis on social, not enough emphasis on biophysical or simulations... and often a waste of perfectly good time to either be doing real work or working out.