Daniel Shorten

My brother and polyphasic sleep

Daniel Shorten — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 06:15:12 +0000

A couple months ago, my brother started talking about a strange idea dubbed the Uberman Sleep Schedule. Basically, this theory involves taking short, regularly-scheduled naps as a replacement for one, solid chunk of sleep at night. It sounded ridiculous to me, so I didn’t take him seriously, and forgot about it.

David obviously didn’t forget about it, however, and made plans to undergo the transition from monophasic to polyphasic sleep as a gentle and refreshing Christmas holiday project. He took his first twenty-minute nap at midnight last night, so he’s almost twenty-four hours in.

According to Steve Pavlina, who successfully spent five and a half months on Uberman’s schedule, the first 48 hours are the worst. After that, Mr. Pavlina experienced a rapid return to an energetic, focused state, so I’m hoping that David will fare as well.

After reading about Pavlina’s success, I was actually tempted to try the whole thing myself, but his objective comments in the Return to Monophasic post convinced me that, at least at this stage in my life, I’m better off following the crowd, even if it means spending more hours of the day in a semi-conscious state.

In any case, my brother seems to be going through with it, so I’m encouraging him to blog about his experience as well. If he decides to do so, you can follow the drama on his very own blog.

PS: Blogging is one of the disciplines I’d like to establish in my life. We’ll start with the mediocre goal of one entry a month. Cooking is also on my list of “to-disciplines”.

Soundtracks

Daniel Shorten — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 19:26:10 +0000

Back in June, I took the opportunity to lead the music on a Sunday at Balmoral Bible Chapel. My original idea was to incorporate some prerecorded drum loops into a couple arrangements—not too complicated. In the end, I recorded drums, bass, and other instrument parts for entire song arrangements. My brother and sister and I played and sang overtop of these when we lead worship.

It took me forever to make these recordings, and we only used them on that single Sunday. I’m making them available here in hopes that they can be reused. The recordings are based on arrangements by popular Christian artists; if you don’t recognize the song or sequence of verses and choruses, it should be easy to find the original recordings for reference.

As The Deer — Arrangement by the Maranatha Singers
Everlasting God — Similar to arrangement by Chris Tomlin; 12 bars of intro. before first verse.
Hallelujah (Your Love Is Amazing) — Arrangement by Brian Doerksen. Sorry, I didn’t get around to recording the celtic flutes and fiddles; you’ll have to play those yourself =p
Oh The Deep Deep Love Of Jesus — This is my arrangement, so you’ll have to use your imagination to fill in the gaps. Watch out for the chorus of How Great Thou Art tagged on the end. Watch out for my crazy drumming too… yikes.
You’re Good Lord — Arrangement by Kathryn Scott

Download soundtrack.zip — 5 songs, 256kbps MP3. Let me know if you use them.

Cougar Emergency Services

Daniel Shorten — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:24:58 +0000

The Cougar Emergency Services Web site was designed to be an attractive marketing tool, as well as easy to update and expand. The Web site was developed alongside the pamphlet and included custom industrial photography.

Visit site »

Tangawisi

Daniel Shorten — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:07:17 +0000

Cougar Emergency Services

Daniel Shorten — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:40:56 +0000

This pamphlet was developed alongside the Cougar Emergency Services Web site. The project also involved custom industrial photography.

Mild passport frustrations

Daniel Shorten — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 05:36:02 +0000

I picked up my shiny new Canadian passport from the Passport Canada office in Calgary today.

I’ve been pretty satisfied with the quality of service throughout the process of getting this important little booklet. This is my first time applying for a passport, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect. My guarantor told me that the shortest time she had waited in line when applying for a passport was two hours, so when I drove down on October 3^rd to submit all my paperwork, I was prepared for the worst with food, water, and entertainment. I even played it safe and paid ($18.00!) for three hours of parking. To my surprise, because I had filled out my application using the fancy online forms, I was put in a priority queue and waited for about two minutes to see an agent. I was finished in a flash: happy about the wait time, kinda’ sore about the parking.

As I was leaving, though, I was confused about whether I was supposed to pick up my passport myself or whether it would be mailed to me. I had come with the recommendation of paying an extra $30 to have my passport ready for pickup in three days, but the agent ended up convincing me that, since I didn’t need to apply for a visa, I should just wait the normal time for my application to be processed. He even said something about it “coming in registered mail” and that I’d have to sign upon receiving it.

What actually happened (I discovered this when I phoned for clarification this morning) was that I paid an extra $10 to pick up my passport. As far as I understand, it wasn’t ready any earlier. Instead of having Passport Canada mail me my passport, I paid extra to have them do nothing and let me drive down to Calgary to take it from them, essentially delivering it myself. I don’t really get that part.

Anyway, I have my passport. I’ll have to make another entry here soon to explain why I need a passport in the first place.

Fire Building

Daniel Shorten — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:30:05 +0000

Chrome: refreshing the Web browser

Daniel Shorten — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:35:20 +0000

Recently I noticed the little plug on Google’s home page: New! Download Chrome (BETA) - the new browser from Google. And my first reaction was, “Oh, great. Another Web browser.” But my feelings toward this new offering have warmed quickly.

A couple years ago, working on a Web application and trying to figure out this AJAX stuff, I encountered something like Zimbra for the first time. And although I was (and still am) very impressed with the complex applications being served through my Web browser these days, I started wondering how much further we’ll be able to push XML and JavaScript—technologies that were conceived when the Web was a much simpler place. To think that we’re now running HTML/JavaScript equivalents of applications that are normally run from optimized machine code is pretty amazing.

But they sure can be slow. Rearranging my pictures using that fancy AJAX-enable photo gallery brings a new meaning to click and drag. There are some pretty amazing apps online, but they really feel like they’re online.

So I’m excited to see the innovative steps Google and some other groups are taking to improve the performance of modern Web applications:

Webkit engine: Google is basing its browser on a very small, clean, standards-compliant rendering engine.
Process per Tab: a somewhat radical design decision, Chrome will nearly be its own operating system, spawning a process for every tab opened in the browser. Among other publicized advantages, this should increase JavaScript performance, as multiple threads can execute inside each individual tab process.
V8 (JavaScript VM): Chrome compiles JavaScript into an intermediary bytecode, allowing dramatic performance boosts for sites that make heavy use of the scripting language.

I’m also interested in the Gears idea, though I haven’t looked too deeply into that. Unfortunately the platforms I use on a regular basis (Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux) are still waiting for a release of Google Chrome to take for a test drive. I’ve signed up for email updates.

TicketTRACK

Daniel Shorten — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:38:53 +0000

As part of the practicum component of my CST diploma, I worked for LaLiberté Consulting Ltd. on the TicketTRACK project: a Web application to store and track welders and their respective certification. The application was built using ASP.NET. I was responsible for much of the design and implementation.

Awkward poses make great portraits

Daniel Shorten — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 04:17:38 +0000

It may sound strange, but some of my better portraits resulted from rather uncomfortable posing situations. I’m not sure I’ve decided whether or not making models squirm is an advisable technique for photographers, but I’ll back up my claim by showing you a few examples.

Take this portrait for example:

I had an image in my mind of this model shyly clearing her hair from her face, but figuring out exactly how to pose her was a lot harder than I imagined. I had her moving her hand a centimeter to the left or to the right, or rotating by a measure of degrees. In fact (at the risk of ruining my portrait), the look she’s giving me in this picture is probably along the lines of “Ummm… like this?” But even though the pose felt so contrived as we were standing there shooting, the portrait doesn’t really show it.

I generally work with inexperienced models, and perhaps less experience means higher chance of awkwardness. But I think what I’m asking here is does more awkwardness increase the quality of a pose or expression? Well, surely there must be some threshold where the awkwardness during the shoot starts to seep right onto the film. Yet I wonder if there might be something about the pressure, the discomfort of being posed that can call out the candor and honesty required for a good portrait.

This photo felt ridiculous when I was taking it. I had dragged a couch out of the corner of our living room and set up these two kitchen chairs in its place. Poor Grandma and Grandpa didn’t really know what to do, and I didn’t know exactly what I wanted them to do, other than sit on the chairs. I think out of the awkwardness of the situation, Grandpa just started laughing, and that’s how I got this shot.

You might be able to imagine how goofy this model felt as he growled and clenched his teeth. I think he figured the photo would look as stupid as he felt as I was pointing the camera at him. But I think it’s a really unique portrait.

I was trying a somewhat advanced pose with this model, and I wasn’t even sure how to execute it myself. I had her leaning and bending and twisting; but she made something interesting out of it, and I’m happy with the result.

I guess I haven’t come to a concrete conclusion. I think it’s important to experiment and to not shy away from poses that may feel contrived when you’re shooting them; they’ll likely feel a lot different as a finished portrait.