my plan for immortality

kevin, t., p. and i went to watch a documentary about curitiba, brazil. it's a rather remarkable city in that it was both master planned (something that many lefty anti-pov's rail against, and given the track record of master planning rightfully so), successful in the sense of creating a city that stands out globally as far as functionality and not only respectful of but enabling to both the poor and the wealthy, the educated and the illiterate. i'm not going to purport that curitiba is perfect, utopian or a panacea, but it does illustrate how pragmatism, empathy and sheer will can make amazing things happen. the documentary was called "a convenient truth: urban solutions from curitiba" and was hosted by a local eco group.

p. was mesmerized by the entire show. he was amazed by the things they were doing and often i heard him say "woah!" or "wow!". for a 7 year old, i think that's pretty healthy. i hope he grows up with the same feeling of "it can happen" that some of the people in the documentary displayed. my largest dreams include him making more of a difference than me.

and speaking of me making a difference, i finished out the first implementation of Phase class today, including the Animator plugin superclass. tomorrow i'll implement an Animator plugin that does background blurs and fade in/out transitions. the background blurs take advantage of the backing store composited window drawing in qt4, something other toolkits are only starting to explore. Phase takes extensive advantage of QTimeLine as well, another thing other toolkits are just now playing with. the end result is a very dynamic desktop that can be easily changed via plugins to either take advantage of today's best horsepower or tame it down to networked desktops and old hardware.

it's so fun to be at the leading edge of things, i have to say, and even more so to be part of a community where we all play off each other.

where we can say in the same breath "eat my dust, mofo!" and "oh yeah? we're doing that now too!" it's like those cartoon races where the cars inexplicably pass each other back and forth every few seconds. fun entertainment, but it's not supposed to work in real life. either we didn't understand real life, or we've changed it. either way, i'm having fun.

and yes, i'll be screencasting the results this weekend. the next step after this is panels. finally! =)

kevin is getting closer to finishing out the last few things in Solid he needs to normalize. we spent quite a bit of time discussing the naming and API of some new classes. well, mostly i listened and provided a sounding board to his thoughts.

hacking in proximity. gotta love it. but like love of the heart, it often takes distance first to appreciate the proximity.

now, i suppose i didn't get to the part about my plan for immortality. but if everyone knew what it was then people could copy it and then where'd that get me? a long, long time with the same people, that's what. ;)

love, hugs and adventures in the rain...