Blog of Josh Hall

Growing up at my dad’s house, we had an above ground pool.  I think it was about 4 feet high and 24 feet wide.  We loved when the water got low, because that meant that  Jay Gillis was coming over with his water truck to fill it up.  He’d take the hose from his truck, hook it up to the rim of the pool at an angle, and flip the switch on his truck to send gallons of water rushing into the pool, enough to create a decent current for a whirl pool.  It was awesome.

Mr. Gillis was more than our water guy, he was sort of a family friend.  His daughter, Janna,  went to school with us at Bentleyville Wesleyan.  Jay was a quiet guy though, and I think that’s why I enjoyed him so much.  When he would deliver water for our cistern, he’d go sit on our porch or play with our dogs, and I’d go out and hang with him.  Sometimes, I’d take him something to drink.  I didn’t want him to be out there by himself.

Anyway, after my parents had split, and my brother had died, our church attendance was sporadic at best.  One summer day, we did go to church, and Jay was there.  When the pastor asked what good news anyone had to share with the congregation, Jay raised his hand and stood up.  He said that he had delivered water to us the day before, and it just brought him so much joy to see us kids playing and laughing.  I was so stunned to see the quiet guy I admired so much speaking up to everybody about us.

What’s so great about that memory is that we were able to bring him joy.  I know he’s still around, and we have a few degrees of separation socially, so he may stumble across this, but Mr. Gillis played a big role in the happiness and maturing of my childhood.  He was a man that I respected, appreciated, and enjoyed.

I wish I could be invisible.  Yeah, flying is nice, but it sounds tiresome.  I think invisibility has at least the possibility of happening, I mean, as soon as we figure out how to bend light.

If you’ve got a bunch of unrelated people in the To or CC recipient sections, you’re doing it wrong.  Unless everyone needs to know of replies immediately,  use the BCC.  An informational trick here is to just copy and paste who it went to in the body of the email.

Awesome.

First off, as an action/super-hero movie, it has everything. It could have done a little more mutant fighting and special powers, but over all it was nice because it wasn’t over the top. Not much CGI (and the bits that exist are very well done) so it’s believable. No MAJOR plot holes, logic fails, etc and it was pretty engaging. There was a point that I thought it was getting a little long, but it cleaned it up nicely.

I have to admit though, this one is going to make the die hards a little upset. If you love the x-men franchise, meaning, know all the history from the comic books, be prepared to fork off your understanding of everything. Without giving too much of the movie away, it doesn’t stick to the historical context of the comics for magneto, charles (Professor Xavier), or a bunch of other characters.

The big realization that I had after the movie though was that the x-men franchise that I know and love is in danger! Professor X and Magneto are going to need to die here, and right quick. They’re old! The whole franchise is going to need a story arch and reinvent leadership. Maybe I’m just ignorant of the new comics, but since we’re given specific years, and the assumption that these certain mutants are also mortals, there needs to be a transition to new leadership, and eventually we need to run into the mutants and characters from the future, like sentinels (I LOVE SENTINELS!).

Anyway, it was nice not to see a movie blow it’s budget on big names and give a solid and entertaining story line.

5 feet out of 6.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270798/

Barcodes are ugly, but they don’t have to be.  A company called D-barcode makes functional barcodes that are aesthetically pleasing.  Design!

http://www.barcoderevolution.com/gallery/index.php?c=all

This is actually my second foray into the LEGO mosaic realm. The first one was a freehand design of the LEGO logo. A mosaic of Albert Einstein would require a little assistance though.

There are 2 methods for creating mosaics in LEGO bricks, this one is a studs out technique, where the studs face the viewer. It’s probably the easiest to do, because you can match up 1×1 bricks with a square pixel of an image. The other methods is the studs up technique, which involves stacking the plates or bricks vertically. With that method, you lose the ease in design, but you gain the opportunity for resolution since the profile of a plate is 2:5.

For this Albert Einstein design, I knew I wanted to keep it smaller scale. 32×48 studs looked like a nice portrait size and i had 3 16×32 base plates as a great canvas to begin. I took the image, cropped it down to the correct ratio, and then decreased the size down to something I could translate into block. If you just shrink it to 32×48 pixels…well, let’s just say it doesn’t resemble Albert Einstein anymore.

So, after 5 hours of adjusting blocks and trying to get it to resemble the picture, we have this:

I think I might have an easily producible art here, that I’m thinking of entertaining commissioned mosaics if I were to be approached.

Here’s the LEGO logo mosaic, if you were curious: