Shakespearean Morning

A whole new day. My day yesterday didn't end till 7:00pm. After an offsite meeting with university collaborators I worked at home for another couple of hours on presentation enhancements. I'll probably find that the group didn't keep them in for the presentation this morning, which happens in about 10 minutes. This group is a bit like a bunch of high school kids all going every which way on off-topic rants, spontaneous out-in-left-field charts and pet projects that get injected into the plan.

Meanwhile I've got other stuff to do as well, not to mention bureaucratic stuff.

But for now, I'll be happy to get a cup of tea and dial into this morning's presentations and hear what goes down, to provide my input later. So a short entry this morning, without substance, signifying nothing.

Chicago - Indeed Windy

The miniVacation worked out well. Minor annoyances here and there, but a couple of days in the Windy City are complete. Got a haircut back to super-short while there, which is a good thing to do when winds are blowing strongly. No fuss, no muss. What is a muss anyway?

But, even with some rain late in day 2, we missed most of it. Saw some art, hunted endlessly for food, and enjoyed the architecture. Hint - downtown Chicago, in the loop - there are no restaurants among the huge office towers. Office workers don't eat. Sure there are chain places galore, but that's hardly eating. And almost no pubs! Can you believe that. Only found one little one in the basement of a place. Go figure. Up in Lincoln Park and Old Town though, there are many good options that aren't chains. I don't now how people eat in those plastic coated, processed food places all the time.

Anyway, I'm back and I see flashing lights and warnings all over the place. I'm sure I have a thousand emails (actually,just peeked - 131). So I'd better jump in. More deep thoughts tomorrow.

-Researchinator holding things together.

Half Way Thru

The week's almost half over - given my Thurs/Fri in Chicago for an extra long weekend.
I have a few things weighing on my mind. My SO's bday (hi!) What to get!? And work related stuff. The continued existence of our research group is still uncertain. University collaborations that are progressing, but unsustainable if we don't get budget information soon. And new collaborative conversations with some folk in SEAsia who might be helpful in my research. I'd rather do it here, but resource issues might preclude that.

I was also looking into some British commuting yesterday. If I join my SO on a UK biz trip in midsummer, it is an opportunity to spend some serious time at the archives in Kew, one of my favourite places to hang out. The issue is transit times between the place we will be and where I want to go - looks like over an hour each way to get to Kew and back. Might be able to do something with half train, half taxi or something. Time is more important than money in that case. Could rent a car, but it would be more annoying to have to deal with traffic, parking and gas. If we were further out, it wouldn't be so bad.

My python coding had a bit of a breakthru yesterday. I had some global vs. local variable referencing challenges, but I seemed to get around them okay finally. Next I want to do some socket programming. Hoping to keep current in my knowledge, and perhaps use the skills for coding some oceanographic research and simulation. :)

Well, my tea is made and email awaits. Onward...

Seems like Summer

How quickly things change. Scroll back to hear of snowy, grey days just recently, and here we were in Montreal for a couple of days in sunny warm days. It's too hot, we were fond of saying occasionally in jest.

A nice visit to that city, lots of walking through favourite areas. Up the side of the mountain, snow remains under trees. In the city streets it could be July. A visit to Schwartz's is always good. An Italian meal on St. Denis. A Boréal in a pub.

This morning the work looms again. Some interesting things to see on email no doubt. Results of the lofty plan voting to come up with something reachy and challenging - I suspect this is where the system starts to bog down. As we pick some watered down oceanographic research topic (pun!) and then erode morale as people get assigned to it, either without deference for their current deliverables, or excluding some of those who contributed. Perhaps we'll figure out how to avoid that... but I'm skeptical.

Taking a couple of days off this week for a jaunt up to Chicago. These long weekend vacations are a great way to enhance the quality of life. Consider it dear reader. You can do the traditional thing, where you work like a dog for weeks then have a brief work-forgetting week or two of vacation, then you're back to the day-in, day-out slog... or you can make every other weekend a long weekend, occasionally a four-day weekend, and for months at a time have a more leisurely life. A better choice, no?

Hmmm, don't I have a conference call about to start...

Pond Day

I guess this is officially pond day - waking up this morning I could see the pond finally,as that big heat-sink of ice finally succumbed to the warmth overnight to allow the snow on top to melt. A warm lead into the weekend, so we should hopefully see it melt too, and I can then do the big cleanout job and get the fish out into it. Not sure if they will all survive, but at least they will be free of the basement.

I went to a lecture last night on open source software. Not particularly interesting as the speaker seemed to basically sum up the obvious. Not a lot of original content in the presentation. Basically said here's where it is just now. No kidding. He even seemed to be uncertain of some of the big name open-source driven applications out in web land. The audience seemed to enjoy the chatty session - actually the one's who saw themselves as gurus (almost without exception irrelevant folk). It becomes more about performance than constructive participation.

Virtual Friday today for me - tomorrow we will drive off for a weekend with some friends and family in Montreal, Canada. Should be nice - it's an oft-visited destination for us, and the weather is STILL looking spectacular. (Checking again... yes, still looks good).

So, emails await, but a lingering migraine from yesterday doesn't do me any favours. Yesterday was pretty good, the night before's headache left me for the day, and then came back in early evening. Hopefully it will again give me a break for the day.

Oh What a Night

A migraine night last night - it was a long one. I had one of my classic 3 O'clock onset migraines and it persisted through the night. A Tylenol 3 this morning finally put it to bed (I hope, could be that the codeine just has masked it, and it will be back in an hour or so). Usually it's about 14hours, so I expected it to be gone during the night, but I was awake to hear my hourly watch chime for every beep from 3:03am onward. Could really use a few more hours of sleep.

But, hey, I dozed a bit after the Ty3, perhaps 7:30 to 8:00, and I'm even in the office for 9:00 this morning, with a sea of oceanographic research waiting for me. What will be in my inbox this morning? I'm hoping a reply from India on a query I made yesterday to some colleagues there. There's a chance they could collaborate on my understaffed er, mollusk research.

I should say something about my research just now. I have a couple of projects - neither is mine, in that they were going before I joined this company, but I've picked them up and ran with them. The first one is mollusk research, which I have to push, because the founder of the research bailed before I joined, and the remaining free staff have no skills to own, communicate and push on the topic. It has merits for sure, and should (in a perfect world) have about 8 people behind it, rather than one manager and an unfocussed researcher with only ancillary skills, and the odd student that flows through.

The other project is the shark project - it has a skilled researcher behind it and driving it, but he's rather communication averse, and tends toward isolationism as he pushes the work forward.

I really need to grow this group to have some reasonable impact, but there are political forces in Europe (one specific normally insignificant corner of Europe) where some sort of national culture of passive aggressive behaviour results in a bizarre combination of friendly to your face, cancel your program-behind-your-back. They also focus on the shiny surface of projects without tackling anything with any depth.

I've also notice that they all must subscribe to "Oceanographic Monthly" because I notice an uncanny ability to pick their projects from the table of contents. Any nifty new oceanographic gadget or trend, and they are working on it a month or two later, though never really 'getting' it.

Oh well, let them spin their webs and chase their tails.

I should point out that I'm really not much of an Oceanography fan, myself. I'm much more interested in say, cartography. But this gig pays well, and I can do a decent job of it, and lots of the skills overlap. But I'd really rather drop the mollusks and be making some decent high volume maps. I'm much more about consumer markets and things that people use hands on. The mollusk stuff is all hidden in a back room somewhere - er, under the ocean I mean. I'm much more interested in stuff that people interact with, and where a good understanding of that behaviour pays off well. I don't get that in the oceanography space.

Oh these decoy words I'll have to publish a legend some day. :)

Very Late Morning

It's very late in the morning -well, better known as early afternoon. But a conf call to start the day set me back - I actually had to listen rather than type. Lots of oceanographers from around the world. Today we discussed the lofty project ideas and the process to generate them from all hands. There seems to be some recognition of the overlap (there's a lot of that). But I'm still a bit skeptical that something strong will come out of it- rather than something 'committee-based' idea, watered down and weak.

Does vision have to come from a single person, one might wonder? I think it is improved by the socialization phase. To really catch on, I think vision needs a champion who has some charisma. I tend to have inverse charisma. I propose new ideas and everyone thinks they came up with the idea themselves. :(

But in some groups I've led, I have had comments from people about my contribution to vision. Must be some value added.

It's frustrating to see that your vision is accurate - if I had a nickel for every idea I launched that died in the death throws of a big company, or due to lack of funding, only to see the concept pop up as a fresh new idea 5 years later...
I get tired of saying "hey, I launched of that 5 years ago!" Actually it's more often 9 or 10 years ago. Electric eels? That was me. Fish shaped like stars? Been there too.

In my old research group in 1995-2001 we prototyped all the cool Oceanographic stuff, and then here we are a decade later and someone introduces a virtually identical product as some cool new idea. In some cases the old oceanographic company has patents on the ideas, but has probably lost track of the fact that that IP exists and is being infringed right and left.

I know personally that a patent I originated is being infringed by another company that makes, er, sea horses. I patented illuminated 'sea horses' that only light up when it's dark. Yet that feature is being put into all sorts of sea horses, dolphins and tuna these days. Oh well, I'm not about to call the old firm (now a competitor) and tell them to go after those infringers. They'll have to chase that down themselves.

Anyway, back to my email backlog.

Monday morning, and I have a scheduled call where oceanographers from around the world will call in to discuss a research program or two. This is an idea from the oceanography senior director. He envisages round table chats about projects with lots of banter and push-back, the assumption being that ideas get stronger with lots of that. But mostly, he is used to working on single location projects where they did lots of that, and he found it rewarding. The downside of that is that these are bigger projects, which are dispersed around different locations with different cultures, and just because there is a room full of Americans (transplanted or otherwise) in a room on one leg of the call who are talking a lot doesn't make it a round-table banter.

In fact, these projects have been progressing on their own, and have been shared many times, and when someone has a mature project that has been going for a long time, there's nothing worse than someone who wants to tear it apart from first principles... every week. One might assume that there is some rigour in it by now, and perhaps at this point the delivery results are a good measure of it's success.

Anyway, I'm all for research that meets tough tests of its validity, but creativity also needs a bit of freedom to chase an idea without over management as well. The balance, always finding the balance.

This weekend I pulled up Final Cut Express (uh-oh, more google bait). Interesting stuff, but more on that at some point.

Warm Office

Okay, it is spring, and the snow is severely reduced - though there is another winter storm trying to get going for the weekend, it sounds like it will melt on impact, so should just be wet and not too annoying.

But last night, after attending an evening event, I came home and immediately commented that the house felt a bit cool. The thermostat indicated that it was indeed one degree low. (I know, I'm some sort of crazy human thermometer). I noted that the furnace seemed to be running it's ventor, but not heating, so I went down to look and quickly realized that the hot surface igniter was not glowing.

ASIDE: Okay - Google probably led you here based on that last phrase, you're probably looking for a solution to a furnace problem. Here's another bait phrase: York Stellar. That's the brand of my furnace - not a particularly stellar unit. Read on, and you'll see that I was able to fix it. Just an ancillary benefit to being a research scientist and indeed, a people manager. Sure, I lost my screwdriver for about 10minutes, but hey, I got it done.

Anyway, back to the story, I was able to spark up the furnace with a candle-lighter - I know - "never try to light a furnace by hand" and I would echo that. Particularly true if you are totally in the dark and are unaware of how the gas valve works on the furnace, or unaware of the cycle of operation. But if you are thoroughly trained in the minutiae of furnace operation through years of impromptu repairs, you can do it pretty easily and know how to do so safely. So I warmed the house up nicely before bed, then turned it off, and it still wasn't too bad by the time we got up.

Someone clearly screwed up at the igniter factory - those things are supposed to die on a Saturday evening in February - thereby ensuring that you can't get a replacement for about 36 hours. I managed to get one first thing this morning when the parts place conveniently about a 2minute drive from my place, opened up. For $60 it was pretty painless. I'm sure it would have been a good $400 to call someone. Whew.

So let's say I'm up $340. I think we need to go out for a nice meal tonight.

On the work front in the field of, er, Oceanography, our research group's big invention project is progressing. A bunch of ideas were submitted and we all get to vote now. The problem is that of the 10's of proposals submitted several of them are essentially the same. So, which one do you vote for? If the perpetrators of the project were thinking, they would say "all these are treated as one project" and thus get a better sense of the interest. Hopefully they will combine the votes for those. Then again, if so many people come up with the same "lofty" idea, it might not be that original. I mean there are probably other big multinational oceanography firms that are aware of that as a big opportunity.

We all get five votes - we'll see where this leads us - and I'll give you, dear reader, some sense of the outcome as it comes together. How much do you want to bet it gets messed up in the final stages, and turns into a mish-mash of weak ideas and a "designed by committee" lame-ass project. Or maybe something really cool and risk taking. Yeah.

Honey on Toast with my Tea

Ah, the luxury of working at home. I have a mid morning meeting which means going in to the office in the opposite direction is hardly appropriate. Hence, I'm working from home this morning. I occasionally grab a quick standing bowl of cereal, and even less often I make a cup of tea to bring in the car with me (particularly if there is reason to believe the drive in will be slow -e.g. bad weather).

But to sit at home and enjoy a leisurely cup of tea while getting onto my morning email is a nice luxury. And on to my morning blogging too I guess.

I've been hoping there were other blogs around from people working in the various corners of science and engineering. While I managed to find several, they all seemed to be a couple of years idle. I'll have to do a bit more searching. Hey - if you are one such blogger - pls do post a comment with your coordinates. I'd enjoy reading about other experiences.

Lots of blogs about workplaces seem to be venting vehicles - that is, rather negative. Hopefully I go beyond the little snipes at coworkers etc., and I'll endeavor to explore other issues of the research workplace.

Today is a University visit, to chat with a research partner there. Doing collaborative research is sometimes positive, sometimes not. I've some work that moves like molasses, mostly due to earlier under-management on our end. But also due to some lack-luster students and loose direction from prof/partners.

My project in question this morning is going pretty good though. It's a small one, but it is already providing more info than some of my employees deliver in a year.

Well, more tea perhaps.

Spring Spawns New Research

Hey, there was a crocus in bloom in our garden when I got home yesterday. There is probably about a litre of snow left in that part of the lawn. Of course there is still a good 2m of snow along my side yard, so it's still going to take a while.

But that's fine - we usually get a nice solid rain that brings it down. I'm eager for our pond to be re-exposed so that I can move the fish out of the basement and into nature again, where they can feed on mosquito larvae and other things that crawl around the pond. I probably under-fed them last year - ie almost not at all. It was probably fine in the spring, but by summer, I suspect there were fewer larvae etc. to eat. But they did pretty well - it's a decent ecosystem with a stream and a small collecting pond and plants and all sorts of stuff. They really liked chewing on the plant roots it seems as well. Of course, their young didn't stand much of a chance.

One of the fish - Sidney Koiman - cost me about $10, though the others were all around 20 cents. I'm hoping he puts on some poundage and can add some interest to the pond. There are two light coloured ones, three orange ones and two dark ones. One of the dark ones is larger even than Sidney. I'll keep a running tab on the blog here perhaps with the fish-count over the spring and summer.

My other bit of research planned, now that the snow is retreating from the record snowfall year, is to do some snail tracking. I'm going to wrangle me up some snails, and paint numbers on their backs, then release them recording their release locations and see where they end up when I do some searching later on. Hmmmm, I wonder what the lifespan of a snail is anyway.

On to real research in, er, Oceanography. I have a pile of lofty research ideas in front of me, and I have to go through them and rank them. I think my criteria will be something like creativity/innovation (or maybe those two should be separate), relevance to our, uh, oceanography industry/biz, and what else. I guess loftiness - reachiness. Something like that. There are some real jokes in there, as well as some that are just ordinary projects. Not sure how many are worth of the goals of the exercise. I'm sure I'll blog more on this process later.

Does Research Work?

Driving in today I thought a bit about the role of research in a big company - it's something I've always pondered, and half-wonder about writing something some day on how research happens, and what makes it work, when it really does work. Illustrations from the real world will be the key

So how does research work really? I mean there are a bunch of values that companies get out of research - in no particular order, and probably not exhaustively,

1. Future Biz: Creates path forward for products


2. Int & Ext Perception:Creates a sense of a forward looking company


3. Join the Club: Allows company to participate in a ecosystem of research - ie with prominent institutes and universities


4. Investor Cred: Balance sheets are expected to show 10-15% research spending


5. Inertia: We've always had a research group


6. Pals: Powerful cronies in the organization like the role/prestige


7. PR: you can make press announcements about big advances that add to your corp image even if they are impractical and never get to market


8. Sales Support: Buy one of these, and here's a demo of what it will do for you in 10years from now. (You'll already be familiar with the platform).
   

In my field, er, oceanography, I see elements of all that stuff. We had two research groups. I think one of them was around to address reason "future biz", and had a bit of "join the club" and "PR". The other group was mainly about "Join the club", "Inertia" and "PR".

Now that we're merged, it's hard to say what the new organization is or will be. Will we dick around in ocean and wave our banner, or come up with next generation oceanography products and help our firm be a leading oceanography firm. I see more 'power' in the the latter group is influencing the direction more than the former, so I suspect the Club, Intertia and PR points will continue to drive the business, while future biz will be a bit of a struggle.

There's always a struggle to get buy-in from product groups to see value in the research. We have been doing better than most - in that we tend to get buy-in on the idea before we get too far into the research. But now, I think we have both that barrier and some new philosophical barriers as well.

But the biggest barrier continues to be my lack of budget info and growth of my team of researchers beyond the pitiful two that I have currently. Ugh.

Spring Monday

This weekend felt like the first real weekend of spring, warmer temperatures and even an opportunity for a walk. Bumped into lots of old acquaintances over the weekend - kind of highlights both that people are getting out again after such a crazy winter, and you can see them on the streets. Walked 10.2 km according to 'mapMyRun'.

After the flurry of activity last week to wrap up our big research idea submissions, I have to face a flurry of emails on both how that went, and other pressing work. Meanwhile, we live in limbo about our ongoing existence. We're a research team in a hotbed of other companies doing, er, Oceanography. It makes sense that we are here, and that we have a strong presence. The real, true research here is minimal, giving us the opportunity to get the best and brightest. Most R&D here is really r&D these days... or even _&D.

I also noticed I got a patent payment this past week - a chunk of cash for the filing of a patent. Not much left after taxes, but a few hundred bucks that will cover the stuff I bought in a flurry of catch-up purchases last week - a hub, some software and a tablet. Thinking that the extra cash should go to something interesting, since it's not like I have some pressing debt or anything - it spawned some thoughts about what would actually improve my quality of life. As a reasonably affluent, thoughtful, healthy western-hemisphere person, I eat well, and enjoy good wine and unusual food - so it's not like another fancy meal will make a difference. It's also not like working towards changing my car to a nicer, more modern one will make a difference - sure it will drive better than my now 9 year old one, but that's mostly paint and sound.

To make an impact on quality of life, it needs to be something that makes me feel more actualized. Expands my horizons in some way. Perhaps adds some capability. Hey - maybe more language courses. I'd love to improve my Japanese more, but there seems to be a wall to getting beyond level 3 in this city - nowhere to go. My german has wasted away to almost nothing - and I do have German human interactions.... though I find Japanese food and culture more interesting. Well, more thought required there.

On to the email that awaits.

Hey Technorati

Don't mind me - just tagging the old blog onto the technorati site with this bit of html...

Technorati Profile

Tea Selection Improves - Film at Eleven

Hey - I just realized that old jokey cliché from the 70's is obsolete on a couple of levels. The term 'film' is very dated, especially in the context of television news. The 'at eleven' part is also passé given 24 hour news station moment-to-moment feeding frenzies.

I'm happy to say that we've been without cable for a good 7 years now - wow! That sure added up fast!

Well K is back from her bizTrip to Germany and brought me a small selection of suitably British teas from Heathrow on her way through, so I'll enjoy me some tea that was sitting in England this time yesterday... well, a couple hours earlier perhaps.

Today is the submission day for the big research thing that we're doing. I'll be interested to see the email this morning as Europe has been up for a few hours of critiquing. I see the Americans waking up too, as those fade-in-fade-out Outlook announcements appear briefly on the corner of my screen. I avert my eyes to avoid the brain activity that would be launched upon seeing anything specific.

I see I also have a 3hr block of time for training on a tool that looks like a page or two of pull-down lists. As well, we had a session on the tool yesterday introducing the background, and including a brief look at the tool. Why someone would follow that up with a 3hr block of time for 'training' I don't know.

Anyway, I like to write every day, and blogging gives me some more narrative practice than technical writing does. But the future looking research work has a bit of a sense of futility behind it. At this point in my career, I've done a couple of decades of exploring and postulating in science, and one tends to think as one writes - the deadwood in the decision making towers would never sign up to something that involves risk, vision and lofty goals. And of course, they never do.

Most innovation comes from one to three people who are given (or take) a bit of time to chase something down that is intriguing. And it doesn't happen in Academia either. And usually, if asked later, they will tell the story about some element they were exploring that if their bosses had found out about what they were working on, it would have been quashed.

I've got a few of those projects in mind - but currently lack the confirmed longevity to launch them. I'll continue to bide my time for now.

Challenging Week

The week is challenging not in the oft-used sense of the word. Our research organization - spread around the world - is challenging itself to come up with a big idea. This means a grass-roots process to propose ideas, and watching that happen is quite interesting in itself. I'm skeptical that a suitably lofty proposal will come about, but I'm enjoying the process by which a group of people - all highly trained world leaders in their field - propose ideas for research.

Collaborative tools like wiki's, blogs, and fora work in some respects, but email - and I suppose IM would work well, maybe better. It turns out that a wiki and email work well together. But I think a wiki with embedded IM might be the ultimate collaborative combo. Anyway, the challenge wraps up this week, and no doubt my morning email is full of discussion.

My evening was full of tablet exploration. I bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet. I tried it first on my PC at work, then brought it home to my macbook and big monitor. Well, what a great experience. If you've googled your way to this page due to the product names above - I've found it to work great (Mac OSX 4.x) And I was using it with GIMP . It felt great and I was able to do some sketching and calligraphic scrawling. Flipping the pen over and having GIMP understand to swap foreground and background didn't work (thought it does on the PC). But I found the integrated ink stuff in OSX to be fun too - with handwriting recognition... which I turned off shortly, but played with for composing an email etc.

A friend recommends trying Inkscape - but I haven't tracked it down yet. Sounds interesting too. It's interesting to discover new drawing techniques while on GIMP. There is the obvious pen size and shape stuff. But playing with opacity made it seem like a nice precise ink brush - doing precisely thinned washes. That is very nice.

I'm sure I'll develop some interesting new sketching styles with a few more hours on it.

Well, let's see how that email looks... Oh yeah - lots going on. :(

Guywires Required

If you stand outside for any length of time you may need some infrastructure to keep you steady. It's been a windy 24hours. As the temp creeps above zero, the melting occurs as if under a hairdryer. A corner of my basement could be dryer, but at least the melt is happening.

Listening to the Zimbabwe thing on the news lately, I think about how some things never change, and wonder why. Perhaps this one will be different,but in many ways these situations are intractable. Your a murderous dictator, you get really old, and have sham elections. But can you be a dictator socking money away in swiss bank accounts and gold bars under your bed, and not own a TV or know about the outside world. Can you really get into your 70's or 80's and not have heard of Ceausescu, Pol Pot, Marcos, Noriega, Hitler, Saddam Hussein etc... I guess they always figure they can pull it off. Then again Amin lived until 2003 in Saudi Arabia, never answering for his crimes, so perhaps there is a precedent.

Some day, dictators will better realize when their jig is up - but I guess by that time they know the writing is on the wall that their back will be up against it soon. The only exit strategy is usually to find a friendly, similarly oppressive regime to take you on. Then, of course, there is your staff and flunkies which face repercussions for things they did to win your favour. Trying to duck out on them is pretty tough sometimes. Their only escape is to run for it to Argentina (well, those days are probably gone) or shoot for a pardon in exchange for testimony.

The movies like to make us think there is some justice in the world, but of course there are a lot of German names in South America, attesting to the ability of some to escape. Hell, there are lot around the US, UK and Russia as everyone snapped up the snazziest Nazi specialists following the war.

I think of that song that was out around the end of the last millenium with the "right here, right now," and "watching the world wake up from history" lines. There was some optimism and enthusiasm of the period that was captured then that made you, well, me, think it might just be possible. Can everyone be so stupid for so long? At some point even a dictator must look in a mirror and think - "Oh, crap, this can't end well."

Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives.

-Researchinator adjusts his fedora

The Fog Rolls In

With the warming temperatures, and some rain, the air is well saturated, and the fog is blanketing us. An afternoon off yesterday - mostly time on the computer. Ordered a tablet for home as well. I'm inspired to begin drawing more again, and it would be fun to be able to do something innovative and interesting in that area. My few mouse-based drawing explorations were explored over the years. They were okay for their uses, but I'm very constrained with such approach.

I also wanted to get live webcam capability set up for home monitoring applications. But, heck it's more wannado stuff.

Well conference call this am. Best get onto it.

-Researchinator makes foghorn sounds over the office dividers