A little sketch that I did in my “computation pad” at work.  There is something alluring about female representations of lucifer, I’ve always had a thing for them. Note to self: start studying hand anatomy.

This isn’t nearly as dirty as it might seem to be, it’s just that I enjoy drawing octopi and women. Also, it was a request … kind of. You have to satisfy the fans.

An ink of my parents farm in Maryland. The perspective is a little off, and it probably needed a little more detailing. When I traveled through europe I used to love drawing the architecture, but this is probably one of the first buildings I’ve drawn since then.

My very first pastel. The model is Aishwarya Rai, though the pastel does not really resemble her. I should probably do a more realistic sketch of her sometime, seeming how she was Miss Universe…… My Great Aunt Janey helped me get the basics of pastel usage, and I’ve got some pictures of her in action.

It seems like the only times that I actually make a blog post, is when I destroy my old website and resurrect one from scratch… which, coincidentally, is exactly what I’ve just done.

Solid Sushi is now powered by Wordpress, a robust open source content management system (CMS) that I’ve used before. Actually, I had used it on Solidsushi, but then I wanted to get back to my programming roots and code everything myself (in PHP and MySQL). That nonsense lasted for a year with only a few lonely posts, so I figured that moving back to a conventional CMS would save me programming time and allow me to focus on the content.

I’ve slowly been moving my “favorite” artwork from the old site, hopefully it will all be present in the next week.

The little one is actually my cousin, whom I had the rare chance to visit with. This is one of the first times I’ve had to play with watercolor, it’s a fun medium!  One problem is attempting to scan the original watercolor, all of the pocks and waves in the paper create shadows in the scanned image. Perhaps just taking a picture of the art would work out better.

Midna from “Zelda: Twilight Princess”. This is honestly the first piece of fanart I’ve ever created, it was a hard line to cross… now I’m officially a geek.

Playing around with color a bit…. It seems like a better idea to color images in photoshop, than to spend the effort to vectorize them.

Octopi and squids are such beautiful creatures, so unlike all the other fish in the sea… There’s something interesting about the way they move, with their flowing tentacles searching about for some morsel.

Well, in some sort of spontaneous programming focus, I decided to actually write something outside of my dank office at work. My real interests with mathematics and art is visualizing abstract concepts — whether they be geometric series, or scantily clad women (they’re abstract for me at least).

So, I wrote a simple java applet (ohh the horror of applets!) that cutely visualizes the convergence and divergence of geometric series. It’s all open source under the GPL (not that anyone actually cares enough to reuse the code)…

Geometric Series Convergence Visualization

Writing this little memo entry highlights my need for some sort of tagging system… I’m writing this in hopes of people with this unique annoyance to be transfered here via the google bot….

Ok. So your coding with QT 4 and using dynamic_cast for your implementations of Qt’s widgets… There’s a very good reason for you not to be doing this… There seem to be some unique issues, and besides — QT has it’s own method of casting which does not require RTTI. In the Porting to QT 4 document on Trolltechs website I noticed a little blurb about the special casts available to you in QT. You’re probably thinking “Yea I know about the qobject_cast” from the QObject documentation on QT’s website. Hold on, my friend! QT has more than just one weird cast, there’s:

• T *qobject_cast(QObject *)
• T qgraphicsitem_cast(QGraphicsItem *)
• T qstyleoption_cast(QStyleOption *)
• T qvariant_cast(const QVariant &)
• T qdbus_cast(const QDBusArgument &)

The one that interested me was qgraphicsitem_cast which is needed because QGraphicsItem does not inherit (indirectly or directly) from QObject. Oh yes, and to add to QT’s idiosyncrasies with casting it seems that if (QGraphicsItem*)->isVisible() returns false (the object is invisible), the cast fails for your subclasses… this might just be related to QT 4.3 though. Alright I’m done with my first geek sarcastic post. Hurrah!