Breathe with the egg (day 96)

I've started to animate spheres stretched into egg shapes (as stand-ins for lungs).   They breathe.  I'm trying to simulate regular breath, calm breath, excited breath, anxious breath, and so on.  So far I've got calm breath down I think.  I'll post a video soon.  It's an interesting process.  I tweak the animation curves and breathe with the egg.  I keep breathing with the egg and notice how I'm feeling.  Sometimes I end up out of breath and feeling like I need to breathe more often or more deeply.  Sometimes I feel I have to get up and do something.  Sometimes I feel light-headed.  Sometimes I even feel good.  It's an interesting process.

Just looking at the eggs breathe makes me think that we might want to consider a more stylized model for the lungs.  Not necessarily cartoony but maybe something with more personality.  I'm not sure which would be more effective.  Certainly the anatomical look of the current lungs gives a kind of visceral feeling.  Something would be lost with a more drawn look.   May be worth a try though. 

A song for this post.

Rant + Celestial Beauty (day 72)

I bought myself an Apple Airport Express.  I connected it, went through a short setup process and was able to play songs from iTunes on my speakers in the living room, remotely.   I was happy.  But the next step was not so easy.  In fact, it seems to be impossible.   All my music is hosted on a NAS which permits all my computers to store it once and share it with all the machines on my network.  So far so good.   iTunes on my machines can connect to the shared library on the NAS.  But if I try to use the Remote app on the iphone to see the shared library, I can't do it.  I can't pair with the library on the NAS because there is no way for me to enter the pairing code on the server (there seem to be some hacks out there that might work, but it certainly is not easy or sanctioned).  Even if I connect with the itunes client running on one of my machines, it doesn't see the shared library.  It looks like my library is empty.   So I'm stuck.  Apple does not provide a proper iTunes client on the iPhone, and does not allow the browsing of share libraries on the Remote App, and does not allow pairing with servers without a GUI.   This is a sad state of affairs.  The only other solution I've found is to buy an expensive media player that would be paired with PlugPlayer which can see my NAS (but not the Airport Express).  There is an application called Air UPnP which will make the Airport Express look like a proper device to applications like PlugPlayer but it needs to run on a PC which defeats one of the purpose of having the NAS in the first place -- not to have any other machines on besides the NAS.  My real beef is with Apple for not providing support for externally hosted libraries with the Apple Remote app.   It would make the Airport Express so much more useful.

I may still find a hack around this mess, but for now the frustration of being so close is driving me mad.

I will redeem this post with a picture of a beautiful animation I saw the IDMAa09 conference exhibition : Celestial Clock by Anson Call.  I can't find any information online about it unfortunately.  No video, no pictures.  What I'm posting here is a snapshot from my iPhone.

A song for this post.