all that's gone down | 1:31 AM >

This post has been sitting as a draft on my machine for too long.

So the move is relatively finished. There're still a tonne of boxes lying around, but the living room is navigable and my CDs are all nicely alphabetized on shelves in my room.

This woman I met while in Japan, Helen O'Connell, died a few weeks ago due to complications from a car accident in South Africa. It's surreal; she was 25 and down there doing aid work. There's a FaceBook page up now, of all things, with a long list of well-wishes from everyone she touched as she moved through life, but even while she was alive nobody could have said a negative word about her. She was one of those people who set a good example just by being, and the world is worse for her loss.

That's actually three deaths recently, her whom I knew directly and two other who were tied to friends. That's enough for now, hear me, Shinigami? Take a vacation. I hear the Styx is nice this time of year, or at least as nice as it gets.

(So now I'm going to talk about other things that don't involve people dying, but that doesn't mean I don't feel the weight of what's happened. I do.)

I wrote my first Cinema 4D plugin last week. The C++ SDK is really well thought out, although the documentation goes from sparse to misleading, and the example code they provide isn't a very good starting point for what I wanted to do. On the up side, I was able to figure it out. Now I'm quite loving the whole thing, although there are still large areas where I have no idea what I'm doing. The one part that I really want to figure out is dialogues that are loaded at runtime. There's this plugin tool that's supposed to let you design them from within C4D but every time I try using it C4D crashes hard, so I can't just make myself a bunch of examples to pick apart. On the up side, GUI creation from C++ code is a snap.

I'm also nearing in on a milestone for the Secret Turkey Project™ (now with less gravy). That feels good.

Wednesday until just now I was in the States visiting my grandmother. My sister's been with her for a few weeks now, and it was her birthday so everyone gathered in to give her a little party. She's lost a lot of weight. She used to be this plump rascal; while still somewhat wily she was startlingly thin due to the chemo. Chemo scares me; she had me open a bottle for her but was adamant that I not even handle the pills. Anyway, she seemed in good spirits and her party was pretty nice. Besides, it's good to be around family now that I'm older and can appreciate that kind of thing.

But I'm home now.

Last thing before I sleep: the Google Cloud thing has me excited. Actually, all the cloud computing stuff excites me, but I would never trust data or programs to Microsoft servers even if they provided a cheaper alternative to the Google plans. I don't have a lick of time to spend experimenting with it, but it's a step towards The Street (which Second Life does not seem to be able to push closer to reality).

I think more than anything, the interfaces that people will use to interact with data and programs in the cloud will be the most exciting part. And it explains why Google's so excited about that Android thing-- it and the Cloud are a perfect match: a weak client that can display much more complexity downloaded from Cloud programs.

Wonder where Adobe is falling on all this. Seems to me that AIR would be the perfect partner for all these mesh computing experiments.