Varka's Journal

Hmm.

I've recently noticed a disturbing choice for my daily life... It seems to break down into tree categories.

Nighttime = good for hacking. no distractions. Stuff I want to do.
Evening = good for socialising. people are online. Stuff I sometimes need (and sometimes want) to do.
Daytime = university. Stuff I need to do.

Choose Two.

That was the problem... I never noticed it before or recognised it as such, but in any given day there's three things you want to do, and you only ever have time to do two (because you have to sleep.. well... sometimes).

I refined it down to the following schedule:

Hacking, Socialising, University.

University = 9 or 10am until 5pm.
Socialising = 5PM until Midnight.
Hacking = Midnight until 9 or 10am.

You can only choose two, and the remaining slot must be used for sleeping.

For example, today I did 'university' and 'hacking', because I was trying to get work done on both aspects.

However, I accidentally slept from 5pm until 10.30pm... Pretty much missing getting to talk to my mate. This sucked, quite a bit, and was logically equivelant to not choosing "socialising".

Hence what I was thinking was that planning ahead could solve the problem - as Yiffstar never closes, and there are always sexy people online, no matter what time it is...

I'll revisit this later.

Well, my mate arrived (Eee!), and we went to the cinema to watch this:



It was the most disturbingly bad film I've ever watched: Like Narse said at AC2007 about "The Stuff" - one of his *terrible* horror movies - "it's so bad, it's good".

Still, it makes me smile to see latex used in such imaginative ways to make people taking bites out of rabbits more interesting; that and the whole concept of vicious, predatory sheep.

That said, there were a few particularly disgusting moments - for example, the guy smoking, naked from the waist down in his study with the sheep he genetically created (post-sex is implied), arguing that what he did wasn't wrong - "it was just a semen sample, really" XD

Plus, rubber penis for the win. Go watch this trashy film, it'll make your eyes bleed.

Varka

Woohoo! Finally - after 5 hours of fighting with it, my pawfoot is complete!



Now I need to smooth it, dry it, sand it, clean it, seal it, and then start the huuuuuge casting process that eventually results in a finished toy.

I am not looking forward to making the toes seperate in the mould one bit... This is going to be one real pain in the ass to produce.

I had a little fun with the stub - I don't think this will get moulded though!



My mate arrives here in 5 hours and I've not slept a wink... wish me luck, I'm gonna need it!

Varka

I had a little accident. Yeah, that's what I'm going to call it.

In my infinite wisdom, I decided to build a fiberglass support case to support the upper part of the foot so I could sculpt the bottom. So, poured, applied fiberglass, allowed to dry...

..Well, the fiberglass worked great!

...Perhaps too well.

It stuck fast around the clay original, and upon removal did not seperate properly... also, I had to cannibalise part of the fiber jacket to make it slip out correctly as it'd formed an impenetrable sheath around the soft, malleable clay.

Once I managed to get her out of the fiberglass shell, it wasn't looking good... A lot of damage had been done during removal, and there were shards of fiberglass like broken glass embedded in the sole. However, I did manage to rescue it, and sculpt the bottom.

Here's what I've got now:


As you can see, it's the right general shape... I do think I've somehow managed to lose a toe segment on every single one in the sculpting process, but I'm going to let it slide... There's not much I can do about it now, other than try and make the rest of it look about right.

I'm never using fiberglass in a sensitive application again...

I may be a total geek for thinking this up, but I like it.

Two hours ago a friend messaged me, asking what I thought of Dreke's smexy art. I responded an astonishing 2 hours later, and he asked why.

So, here's my explanation:

I'm using a HTB method of loadbalancing, not round robin or CFQ.
HTB stands for heirarchical token bucket - "take these tasks and divide them into two - work and pleasure. give 40% to work and 60% to pleasure".
The heirarchical part comes in that there are multiple instances of these 'classes' spread throughout the structure - for instance - "Work: take these tasks and divide them into three - toy related stuff gets 20%, business related stuff gets 40% but with bursts of up to 80% with a ceiling [most amount it can borrow] of 40 minutes, and university gets 40%."
These continue until you get down to the individual tasks.

There's a couple of problems with the standard HTB implementation as used in network Quality of Service (something I'm very familiar with due to the subject of my business): namely the overhead of context switching [going from one task to another]. In humans, context switching can result in up to 10 minutes of unproductivity for a single context switch, where you 'lose your place' or forget what you're doing.

Here are a couple of tweaks to the algorithm which could make time management (assuming you can run this algorithm in your head, which is no mean feat!) a lot more productive:

1. Set each bucket [minimum allocated task time] to 10 minutes.
2. Cluster buckets together, so when you loadbalance between two tasks, you do one, then the other - not like in networking where zero-overhead context switches are easy, and you just alternate which one you're working on for each bucket.
3. Limit interrupting context switches [jobs with higher priority] coming in from interrupting a task which is less than 3 buckets away or 30% from completion, whichever is smallest. This stops unproductiveness as a result of "oh crap, I got an email! I better stop sculpting".
4. group similar-priority tasks together. This means if you have two really important things in the queue to do for the business, then do both of them before returning from the interrupt.

I think with a little work this algorithm could easily be adapted to suit the human task scheduling problem, perhaps in conjunction with a small, portable device to track tasks and priorities... and tell you what you're meant to be doing. Presenting the entire task tree might be a bit of a distraction, but providing a clean and simple interface that lets you *navigate* the tree and very quickly insert items into the tree might  be an ideal solution. I can forsee a simple "change priorities" tag for each child node in the HTB tree displayed, allowing you to change the percentages and weightings easily. You could set up filters for incoming mail, using detected words or gmail's Tags to filter and auto-add them (auto-deleting them when the mail is archived), etc. It'd also be useful to add a simple "add task" button that lets you very quickly set a task name, task description/space to chuck down notes, and to choose a category from the tree, where you've tagged certain nodes as being choosable using the quick interface.

It's amazing how ideas spawn from the tiniest inspiration, isn't it?

Varka

Coming soon, to a bedroom near you...



The Footpaw.

Yay! My first footpaw! This took 4 hours of sculpting, and is nearly done - I then need to sculpt the bottom and then get it ready for moulding and casting. The toes are each about the size of the Gryphon toy, and are going to be murrrrly once made in silicone. Anyone ready to preorder? ^^

Note: I don't find footpaws sexually arousing, unlike a certain sea dragoness - but I love making things for them. So here we are :)

Varka

Yay, I finally went ahead and registered a livejournal... Hooray for me :)

I shall be posting more information and interesting tidbits from my daily life as time goes on - I actually joined because I thought it'd make it easier for people to see the fun stuff, rather than me just posting it to individual people on Messengers.

That said, enjoy! It's the beginning of a new era for me - the era of public communication :)