Studio One

Taking off today. Reading an old-school book on drawing with pencil. At the book's suggestion, decided to convert the guest bedroom into a "studio".

They say a north facing window is best. The guest bedroom is NW.

I'm very excited to drop back to some basics. I know I got ahead of myself. I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing as long as I don't get bogged down and quit.

I do the same with programming. I used to get upset with myself when going to back to a fundamental such as floating point arithmetic after hovering "high" in say something like "object oriented design patterns". I'd say to myself, "YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS."

Revisiting fundamentals, especially from different viewpoints, is healthy in my opinion. For floating point stuff, it's instructive to read R.W. Hamming's "Numerical Methods". It's also interesting to note that people were doing calculus before formal analysis of "the reals" was done... even though students always see a treatment of the number line first.

I don't think you can always understand fundamentals without diving in the water first. Maybe the Karate Kid just needed to get his butt whooped a couple times before having to paint houses and wax on and off.

In some sense the fundamentals are higher than the abstractions. Maybe encapsulation is not always the best thing. It's good to know what you are running with.

Okay... now I can tell I'm only blogging because I'm tired of moving crud and seeing the mess I've made!