Post-dated post, since all the cool kids are doing it
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Further cat developments
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Mama Cat did not escape during the night, so we took her in to the vet to be spayed this morning and brought her back home in the afternoon. The vet told us to keep her inside overnight before releasing her tomorrow. She's a beautiful cat but undersized; she was also pregnant again. No wonder she was desperate enough to go to the trap for food.

We'd decided to go on feeding her after release, because we'd grown quite fond of her. Sort of a Sherlock Holmes/Irene Adler thing. (Book version not TV/film version TYVM).

But then the cat-rescue lady who lent us the trap volunteered to take her on. This is excellent. I think she may still be young enough to be domesticated by somebody with more experience than Rey and I have. I'll miss having her around but I'll be glad to know she's being looked after. We had already looked for shelters and couldn't find anything suitable (plenty willing to take on feral kittens... near-adults, not so much) so this was a real stroke of luck.

Photos of Queen Mother and Princess Bilqis below the cut.
Read more...Collapse )

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I'm tempting fate by posting this...
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Tonight we finally trapped Mama Cat. Again. Tomorrow morning we find out whether my work on reinforcing the trap has made it a bit more escape-proof than the last time. If she hasn't escaped, we'll be taking her to the vet to get spayed, and then presumably release her again.

She took quite a bit of catching, and we only managed to get her after trapping both the local toms. (We caught Ginger Tom the other night but let him go again; hopefully he'll have less reason to hang around once Mama and Miss B have both had the operation.)

Mama Cat had figured out what the pressure plate was for, and had taken to lounging around in view of our kitchen window waiting for us to bait the trap so she could steal the food from it. In the end we tied a long string to the trigger and ran the other end back inside the house. When she started sniffing around the trap I hid behind the door and Rey watched out the window and let me know when to pull the string. (Which I did so hard I gave myself rope burn. Oh well.)

She seems a bit less wild than Dad Cat; I wonder if she might have been a pet at some point. I'm hoping that she might get a bit tamer with feeding, if she forgives us for the vet trip, but the main priority is just to make sure she doesn't have any more kittens.

Meanwhile, Miss B is growing fast. She's over 1.5 kg now, and looking more like a mini-cat and less like a kitten. She's been very sooky today, and I'm fine with that; the way the world is lately, having a snuggly feline is no bad thing.

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Cats update
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Bilqis' two sisters both found homes, and have been named Grue and Nightshade. Seems appropriate.

Miss B is settling in very nicely and has both of us (but especially me) under her paw. She has a Twitter account for those who want cute kitten photos and videos.

She is quite a talkative little lady, with a range of chirps and squawks as well as a very loud purr. She likes to squawk at me until I get the message and lie on my back; then she climbs onto my chest and sits there, kneading my throat and pawing my face (with slightly more claw than I'd prefer) and purring non-stop as I pet her. She will happily take several hours of this a day.

Just about anything can be repurposed as a cat toy, but she's very fond of her catnip mouse. She invented "fetch" without us having to do anything by way of training.

She's pretty easy-going about noise; she's living a few metres from where she was born, so I suppose it's a similar environment (but with less rain and better food). Takes a few minutes to get comfortable with new people, but then she'll ignore them or perhaps try for petting.

All in all, she seems to be a very sweet-natured little lady, and as far as I can tell, pretty happy.

We're still working on trapping her mother. After we got back from Christmas holidays we started over, leaving food out progressively closer to/further inside the cat trap. Eventually we had it all the way at the back of the trap, and somebody managed to steal the food without setting it off.

At that point we figured we'd just keep trying, since she had to slip up sooner or later. Next night she showed up again... and while she was still stalking around the trap looking deeply suspicious, Dad Cat went for the food and got himself trapped instead. Not really what we'd been trying for.

Unfortunately, we didn't have any good options for Dad Cat. As far as we could tell, he was a lifelong feral: no collar, no chip, and very hostile (not that being trapped would help anybody's mood).

Our vet wasn't willing to operate on a cat that wild, and I wasn't comfortable just releasing him; I love cats but I also know that roaming cats are a major killer of native birds and other animals. We weren't able to take on the job of trying to domesticate an adult feral, and nobody else volunteered to do so. So we ended up dropping him at the Lost Dogs' Home, feeling pretty rotten because it probably means euthanasia.

(Uncharitable thoughts about irresponsible people who don't desex their pets and leave the rest of us having to make shitty decisions about how to manage the consequences :-/ )

Plan for Mama (if we can ever catch her) is still to spay, release, and feed. Yes, this is inconsistent with Dad. I could offer rationalisations - without Dad around, there's a better chance of feeding her enough to cut down the predation. But if I'm to be honest, it's more emotive than that. She raised three lovely kittens, we took them away from her and I know how hard she searched for them; I feel guilty enough about that without adding to it. Plus, she has a certain guile and... gravitas...? that makes it hard not to respect her. I don't know if all that is a good reason to treat her differently, but it is what it is.

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what the hell, Duolingo?
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I've been listening to German music for a while (Rammstein, Die Ärzte, Einstürzende Neubauten etc.) and especially in the last six months with ASP. So I've been using Duolingo to learn beginner German so I can understand what I'm listening to.

Partly so I don't accidentally end up singing along to some modern equivalent of the Horst-Wessel Lied* but mostly because the lyrics are interesting!

Anyway, so, Duolingo works by translating (or occasionally repeating) sentences spoken by cute little cartoon people. Most of the sentences are mundane: how do I get to the train station, she is my wife**, etc. etc.

Then it started:Collapse )

All those and a few more available here. All these are genuine screenshots.

*Happy to say, this is not an issue. ASP's liner notes frequently include something along the lines of "Wir danken allen Rechten dafür, dass sie unsere Musik nicht mögen" which is roughly "we thank all right-wingers for not enjoying our music".
**Incidentally, German Duolingo seems to have a lot of queer couples. Not sure whether this is an intentional choice or just not bothering to micro-manage speaker gender for the relevant sentences, but either way, it's good!

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Newest member of the family
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Not going to post about politics just now (it's all horribly depressing, I have nothing to say that hasn't already been said better than I could.) Instead, something cheerful.

On November 1, Silverblue and Brandt (+ Velociraptor) came over to help us with our garden, which was getting *cough* slightly unkempt.

While pulling weeds, Silverblue made a discovery in an old compost bin:

thumb_IMG_0751_1024.jpg

Three tiny kittens, somewhere around three weeks old. We have a lot of roaming cats around, and evidently some feral mama had decided that this would be a good place to hide her babies.

They were much too young to be separated from their mama, so we weighed them, put them back, and hoped she'd keep them there. Unfortunately she was scared, so she took the babies away and hid them somewhere else - our neighbour thinks under his house. We put food out for her every so often, in the hope that she might come back, and she was happy enough to take the food.

Last Sunday, Rey looked out the back window and saw three not-quite-so-little scamps and their mother exploring our back yard. We tried to catch them but they bolted. At that point we borrowed a cat trap and baited it.

We checked just before bed on Sunday night - nothing.

Around five in the morning I woke up and went down to check the trap, and found this rather pretty black-and-white kitten: thumb_IMG_0800_1024.jpg

We set up the trap again on Monday night, and caught the remaining two. Rest of post cut for lots of pics.Collapse )

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Tinkering #2: The Play's The Thing
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So after yesterday's post I thought I'd extend it a little and test my code on a full-sized problem: casting Hamlet.

This helpful site lists the characters present in each scene, although you have to be a little careful - Claudius is also listed as "King", and Gertrude as "Queen". In some cases it just lists groups ("Assistants", "Clowns", etc.); for this work I've just assumed there are two of each, though you'd want to check that. This results in 39 parts.

I entered that data, along with some made-up numbers for how many lines each part has; the exact values don't matter too much, as long as there's enough info to distinguish between major and minor parts. I also tweaked it so that minor characters are assumed to have 5 lines each unless specified otherwise, which saves on data entry.

Unfortunately the demo license for AMPL doesn't allow me quite enough variables to solve this problem. (I could probably reformulate it to reduce it to one variable per part, plus a few extra, but that would be a bit messier.)

Not to fear, there's another option: NEOS. NEOS is a web service that allows anybody to submit optimisation jobs for free, without a size limitation... and it accepts AMPL format. Having tested and debugged my code on a smaller problem, I can then add the full Hamlet data and submit it to NEOS at this page.

I upload three files:

castingmodel.modCollapse )

hamlet.datCollapse )

Last, a commands file to tell NEOS what output I want:

casting_commands.txt:

solve;
display Casting;


I then enter my email address and click "submit". In a minute or two, NEOS shows me the results, which you can view for yourself, and also emails me a copy. (A result of "infeasible" would indicate that it's impossible to satisfy the problem as specified, either because of some inconsistency within the constraints or because there aren't enough actors.)

The output shows some information about the solution process, and at the bottom it gives the final casting:

Art: Guildenstern
Bea: Barnardo, Clown 2, English Ambassador, Player Queen, Reynaldo
Chris: Hamlet
Derek: Horatio, Player Lucianus
Eve: Doctor of Divinity, Fortinbras, Laertes Follower 2, Player King
Frank: Ophelia
Greg: Polonius
Hugh: Gertrude
Irene: Francisco, Gentleman, Lord2, Osric, Voltemand
Jo: Claudius
Kate: Clown 1, Rosencrantz
Luke: Laertes, Player Prologue
Meg: Captain, Cornelius, Laertes Follower 1, Lord 1, Sailor 2
Ned: Attendant 2, Ghost, Lucianus
Oli: Attendant 1, Guard, Marcellus, Messenger, Sailor 1

This looks pretty sensible overall: most actors either get one big part, or a bunch of small parts, and our choices for Hamlet and Laertes satisfy the fight training requirement.

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Tinkering: using AMPL/Gurobi to allocate parts in a play
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Now and then Rey and I do play readings with friends. Usually there are rather more roles than there are readers, so "one man in his time plays many parts", which works fine until you end up playing two roles in the same scene and having to have an extended conversation with yourself.

So you want to cast roles in a way that avoids that kind of overlap, and you probably also want to make sure the different readers each get a decent share of the lines. You could do this by hand, but since I'm currently teaching myself AMPL, I thought it'd be a fun challenge to program a solution.

AMPL (A Mathematical Programming Language) is similar to MiniZinc, which I posted about a while back: it's designed for specifying optimisation/constraint problems and then passing them to a solver of one's choice.

It's very much a declarative language: instead of giving the computer a set of steps to follow, you give it a set of requirements and then let it figure out how to satisfy those requirements. (This still feels like magic to me.)

AMPL and other optimisation languages usually take input in two parts: a "model" which is a generic description of the problem and requirements, and "data" which defines a specific instance of the problem.

So, here's some AMPL code:

The modelCollapse )
The data:Collapse )

In the unlikely event that anybody other than me actually wants to use this, you can download a free demo from AMPL (unlimited duration, restricts to about 300 variables i.e. number of actors x number of parts should be less than 300).

The demo comes bundled with a selection of top-notch and open-source commercial solvers, all free to use subject to that size restriction. By default it uses the MINOS solver, which is nice for generic nonlinear problems but doesn't handle integer constraints; since those are important here you'll want to use "options solver gurobi" (or cplex or xpress).

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Painting
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I know, four posts in one week!

I got together with some of my fellow gamers last weekend and we spent a couple of afternoons painting up our Pathfinder figures. It's been a while since I did any painting, so I'm a bit rusty; we had to throw out a lot of paints/glues/etc. Some pics of mine:

This is Nura, freshly undercoated. You can read more of her adventures here. In-game Nura has just hit level 3 and is pretty much broke, having blown most of her money buying spells from kobolds, but this version has a bigger wardrobe budget.

I picked this figure mostly because the clothes were a bit more interesting than what I normally see on female caster figures, which is either "generic robes" or "as little as possible". Perhaps not the most practical for tromping around dungeons, but Nura has magical cleaning spells and strong friends to do the heavy lifting.

Figure cleaned up and undercoated:

thumb_IMG_0381_1024.jpg

Base colours on:

thumb_IMG_0383_1024.jpg

(Looking back at the photo on the Reaper catalogue, apart from being consumed with envy for anybody who can paint that sort of detail on a 30mm figure, I note that I've interpreted her clothes a bit differently, as far as which bits are outer vs under layers etc. Oh well.)

Just after inking her skin:

thumb_IMG_0388_1024.jpg

seriously, the main thing I have learned in my time painting figures is INK ALL THE THINGS THEN INK THEM SOME MORE. I have no patience for painstaking highlighting; the right ink can really bring out details very quickly. At least, as long as the sculptor has done a good job in the first place; if the shape is bad, ink will emphasise that too.

Nura's dress, after highlighting/drybrushing:

thumb_IMG_0389_1024.jpg

...okay, so I'm not completely against highlighting, there's a time and a place for it, and the drape-y dress was a big part of why I bought this figure in the first place so it makes sense to put in some effort here.

The violet-magenta contrast is a bit stronger than I'd normally do for highlighting, but in this case I figure she's wearing something like shot silk. I realised halfway through painting that I didn't have any light blues to highlight the blue portion, so instead I mixed one of the darker ones with yellow for the green highlight you can see here; again, call it shot silk or mageweave or whatever.

Front-on, mostly finished:
thumb_IMG_0391_1024.jpg

And after doing the eyes. Usually I'd ink, then paint the sclera white, then dot the pupils with a felt-tip; this is really fiddly and often requires doing over and over. This time around, the ink gave enough contrast between her eyes and the shaded surrounds that I was able to skip the middle step and go straight to the dotting.

thumb_IMG_0393_1024.jpg

There are a few bits I want to touch up before I varnish, but I'm pretty pleased with how it's coming along so far.

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*poing poing poing*
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In which nice things happen to me at work.Collapse )

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