DC: Triathlon, artwork, haitian corpus

DC Triathlon

Last week I signed up for the DC Triathlon! I'm pretty stoked about the event. I was originally planning to take on the olympic distance but, final exams and an over-extended period of R&R from training changed the plan. I'll be competing in the sprint distance, which should be good enough for me to gauge my level of fitness and adjust my training regiment for the rest of the summer going into the fall.

Artwork

Lately, I've been toying around with digital art software. LMMS is pretty sweet, it's a music mixing tool that comes with a fairly large selection of sound samples and instrument sound collections you can modify. It's pretty easy to figure out how to use the software after looking at the community samples.

I've also been playing around my bamboo-wacom tablet. It's not bad, I've been really impressed with how the GIMP integrates with the tablet and how much easier it is do work with art software given a better input device (than the mouse).

I've been spending a lot of time searching for photos of scenic vistas and exotic critters that I might try to interpret with a digital paint brush.

I'm looking into publishing the fruits of my labors on the blog. I've been developing some ideas about using entropy with art as a data set.

Haitian Corpus

The corpus I built for Crisisterp needs attention. I plan to use up a couple nights this week packaging it for release and distribution. I'll probably wait until next week before I start to tame the copyright free Bibles I wanted to include in the corpus - they're a bit of a mess. Somewhere around 40K sentences are in the Haitian bible that don't align to the English bible. I have a plan to attack this problem but it's going to require more time than I currently have available.