If your band played in it, or you’d like a high-res copy or print, please click the contact tab at the top of the page and drop me an email. Sorry we didn’t cover everyone — there were up to 8 bands playing at the same time, and only three of us photographers.

College Station sucks as an area to grow things unless you’ve spent some time enriching your soil. The two varieties of lawn grasses that grow around here are Bermuda Grass and St. Augustine Grass, which isn’t that unfortunate because both will grow decently well in the clay subsoil we have, both are relatively drought tolerant, and as long as you’re not using fertilizers that favor one or the other, you can cross-seed them and they’ll help reinforce each other and present a greener total picture.

The clay sub soil is the worst problem. Any time it rains, most of the water hits the lawn and then flows straight down into the gutter because it runs off the clay. This is also true of any watering you do of your lawn or garden — it all hits the clay and runs right off downhill.

This summer, I’m growing some tomatoes in mostly unenriched areas. I did some enrichment using coarse sand and wood mulch to break up the clay, but it hasn’t been that effective and I’ve had to do a pretty extensive daily watering for brief periods to get the water deep enough to be effective. Thanks to the water running off the clay, most of my plants haven’t developed deep root systems … all of them have sent out wide root patterns just below the surface of the soil. And what’s worse has been the fungus. The lawn dries out and dies, and as it rots, it provides a fine thatch that retains water wonderfully and provides a great home for mushrooms and other fungus to grow… right in the middle of my yard. I’ve been putting down antifungal treatments as a preventative but still haven’t managed to get ahead of it. I’ve also had serious problems with blossom-end rot on my vegetable plants. My tomatoes, peppers, and squash have all had an impossible time establishing fruit.

After a bit of googling, I found two solutions to my lawn and garden problems. The first thing is deep spot watering. Deep spot watering means that you need to buy a programmable faucet timer and have it turn on the water in a specific area for five to ten minutes at a time, take a rest of about an hour (at very least a half hour), and then water again for five or ten minutes. You want to get the water down as far as possible into the soil — six inches if possible. If you find that any water is running out of your lawn and down into the drainage areas, then switch immediately to a different area. This cycle has helped to reduce my water bill and after three weeks has brought back almost my entire front lawn. You’ll want to water either early in the morning (4am-8am) or after the sun’s no longer directly on the lawn in the evening, but watering too late into the night will aid fungi in attacking your lawn.

The second solution is to spread some gypsum granules, which are available in a 40 lbs bag from Home Depot for under $10. Lime granules would also work. Gypsum is Calcium Sulfate and Lime is Calcium Carbonate. The calcium apparently over time will help break down the clay subsoil into actual soil — and it remedies the blossom-end rot problem in my fruiting plants, which is a sign of a serious calcium deficiency. Before an improvement is really noted it will take about three years of consistent applications, but I’m hoping to accelerate that a little bit by aerating the lawn and then applying it again next spring. The one caution when you’re using Calcium Sulfate instead of Calcium Carbonate is that you want to avoid ammonium sulfate-based fertilizers when you’ve just applied Calcium Sulfate because you can easily burn the grass.

I have no idea how specific this nutrient-free clay subsoil is to our area, but every house in the neighborhood that has been in place for over a year and doesn’t expend massive amounts of water via an automatic in-ground sprinkler system is having similar problems. My lawn now looks MUCH better. Hopefully this helps someone out!

Out of them, only GIMP runs on OS X. Anyone got alternatives that are focused on Mac?

Christ.

And this is supposed to be “enterprise-ready” software?

Here’s what actually did manage to rise above the surface over the past few weeks…

• Frosting shots are new hipster trend — I think hipsters are looking too hard for new ways to be weird. (Thanks, Becca!)
• Why Frameworks Suck
• Infoworld’s Best of Open Source Software
• Installing both Gnome and KDE on OpenSuSE 11.

Problem: Audio doesn’t work when the machine is docked in a Dell dock.
Solution: You need to enable the IEC958 Switch in your Volume Control application.

HowTo:

1. Click Computer, More Applications, and Voume Control
2. Click Edit, Preferences, and check IEC958. Then click Close.
3. Switch from the Playback tab to the Switches tab, and check the IEC958 checkbox.

I also clicked the IEC958 Default PCM box on my OpenSuSE 11 machine; this gave me control over the dock’s specific output port as opposed to the headphone port on the laptop.

The basic gist: If you need pictures taken for an event (please, though, no weddings) or to commemorate an engagement, birthday, or other event in the College Station area, drop me an email via the contact page. I’m all digital now thanks to the sale of all my film gear, which reduces my expenses significantly. I can provide portfolio work and references upon request.

Since I’m still building (well, rebuilding!) my portfolio and the equipment I have at my disposal, at least for now I’m not charging a sitting fee, but will instead put all proofs up in a password-protected area of my Smugmug site and sell prints and digital downloads via smugmug. They print very high quality prints on real photo paper and can print to all kinds of things — imagine assembling a christmas calendar using high-quality, professionally taken pictures of your pets and kids! Of course, with limited equipment I’m effectively restricted to outdoor, daylight stuff for now. But I’ll be working on that!

I’m already scheduled this month to shoot the Northgate Music Festival and two portrait sittings using the picturesque TAMU campus as a backdrop. This is very much a part-time thing for me, but I do hope to break into the market down here and to spend far more of my time being creative.

I take issue with the conclusion that the architect reaches. I’m not sure if the limitation is the 3dmax scripting language itself or if it’s the author’s programming skills — but no “genetic” algorithm is going to evolve a perfect design unless it’s given continuous feedback from an evaluation agent. The evaluation agent in the case of a draftsman at his table is the experience, including the human desires, that the draftsman possesses. Without digitizing twenty to thirty years of human experience and however many number of years personally experiencing and evaluating architecture, how the bloody hell did the architect in this progress even expect to end up with a workable solution?

From the video, you can get a couple of ideas of the types of criteria that the program was fed. Hallways should be sized so that they dampen acoustic noise. There must be a restaurant that is easily accessed. There are core services that need to be provided to all users of the building and they should be centrally located. There need to be multiple sizes of guest rooms. All guest rooms must be accessed via a hallway. And then there seems to have been a group of parameters fed that lead to solutions that -don’t- make any sense to a human … like insulating the guest rooms from one another. Aatmosphere and an external wall are the best insulators, so obviously a computer program would choose that solution, if given the criteria that a room should be made as quiet as possible.

I’ve been doing a lot of work with genetic and simulation algorithms for a computer game that I’m working on… or in other words, my idea of fun. The problem set I’m working with is limited enough (or I’ve made design decisions that have broken it down far enough) that I can provide the program with adequate limits. Anywhere that I can’t provide adequate limits, I’ve arranged to use some form of human evaluation — Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, requests for decisions by players, or a database of previous choices made that the program can “learn” from. Other actors are required to tune and refine the results of a simulation.

People, computers are only as smart as the program they’re fed. You don’t end up with a magic solution (what the video’s creator seems to have desired) by just running a program for long enough. Not going to happen. This is one of the arguments against evolution as the source of human beings… but if you think of fauna as independent beings, you realize that there are other actors, and the methods of evolution that lead to better products are designed such that the actions of the actors get the desired effects.

For instance, let’s say that a variety of plants are competing with one another. The solution so far has meant that the plants bear fruit, which is eaten by animals, and then the seeds are fertilized by being dumped along with the animal’s waste. One plant’s random solution is to make it’s berries sweeter. The second plant’s random solution is to make the seeds more bitter. The third plant’s random solution is to make the berries toxic, which causes the animals to gag and vomit after eating it. The animals that feed on this fruit are runners, and cover a vast distance in a day.

The predictable results of that random variation would mean that the sweeter seeds would be distributed far and wide, and more heavily consumed. The more bitter seeds would force the animals to seek water to quench the bitter taste with, and as a result may be found closer to water sources like streams and ponds. The vomit seed plants would only be found close to one another and would likely grow in recognizable patches — and later in their evolution, may die out as animals realize that “plants that grow in big bunches aren’t good to eat” … and if you think animals aren’t that smart, I’d like to introduce you to my dogs, who have a very acute sense of where “good things to eat” are, and as a result know how to open the dishwasher and refrigerator with their mouths.

Without those fruit-eating animals? All you’d get is more random variation, without the discreet . The plants would drop seeds close to the ‘parent’, and the sweetness of the fruit becomes inconsequential. The selection then comes from who can outgrow the other. Note that there are still agents involved — the other plants. Hotels (in some cases, unfortunately) don’t eat or outgrow one another without being utilized.

The movement towards computer-evolved designs in and of itself is interesting, but to technologists it has been inevitable. Unfortunately, this “experiment” has left out a huge chunk of the process that makes computer-evolved design work, and the conclusion that architecture is impossible without the draftsman’s human hand guiding the process is as fallacious, poorly thought out, and scientifically unsound as humanity’s persistent belief in intelligent design.