Month: May 2002

Poetic Justice, Kung Fu Style

John Winkelman

This past Saturday was the Midland Open Martial Arts Tournament, hosted by Sifu Henry Chung and his students. Eight of us from Master Lee’s class attended, and between us we brought home, I think, fifteen medals in forms and sparring.

During the past two tournaments Rick — our senior student– and I have been attempting to perform a Broadsword vs. Spear set, and for various reasons have not been able. Two years ago a mis-communication found me at lunch when the two-person forms event was held, and last year I zigged when I should have zagged and caught a spear in the eye.

So this year Rick and I sorted out all of the possible contingencies (if one of us loses a weapon segue to an empty handed form; if one of us is hurt that person determines if we continue or stop, based on number of limbs remaining; etc.). Well, it all worked, because not only did we take first place in our division, but about halfway through the form I chopped the tip off of the spear. The same spear which stuck me last year.

So, as Zathras said, at least there is symmetry.

The rest of the weekend found me wandering around trying to find the most comfortable patch of grass in town for a nap. I found a good one, but it is my secret.

Putting My Ducks In a Row

John Winkelman

So I realized on Tuesday that this weekend is Memorial Day weekend, which means I have a kung fu tournament to attend on Saturday. That means a lot of work, umm, today and tomorrow. This year will be the year I redeem myself for getting hurt last year and being at lunch during an event the year before.

Also, I have finished creating the Infinitely Extensible XML/XSL/XHTML Weblog Template System. Not all I need is a content mamagement screen or two and this puppy will be ready to bundle up and offer as freeware/something for my clients… should I ever have any clients… should my current job go sour…

Well, it was a spiffy thing to figure out, and undoubtedly the most useful thing I have created since I started in this line of work.

In two weeks is the BIG kung fu demonstration at the Grand Rapids Arts Festival 2002 (1:00pm on Saturday, June 8 at the adult involvement stage). The day after, I am off for a week of vacation in sunny Richmond, Virginia, in the care and keeping of a beautiful woman.

Sometimes life is goooooooood.

A Brief Interlude

John Winkelman

ES.O has a new look, obviously. Vertical rows of squares get old in a hurry. I like the aesthetic, but something like that needs to be more subdued, or made so blatant that nothing else exists on the page. As the saying goes, too much is too much, but way too much is just right.

I spent a lot of time over the weekend reading, and writing, and thinking. Much of it was random and uncoordinated (like this site!) but I think I came to some realizations about the nature of cause and effect. The way I understand Nirvana (from the Buddhist perspective) is that to achieve Nirvana is to escape from the cycle of birth and death, cause and effect. But is it possible to even conceive of such a state?

Here is an excerpt from an email I recently sent to someone very close to me:

“…I have been writing a lot, trying to stay sane during all of this insanity. One of the side effects of keeping a journal is that you tend to get a lot of free psychoanalysis: I did this. Why did I do this? How does that make me feel? What does that feeling remind me of? How does that make me feel? What does that feeling remind me of? How does that make me feel?”

And so it goes. The next major changes to this site will (hopefully) be completely invisible to you-all, as I am working on rolling my own extensible XML-driven web logging application. In theory simple, but in practice… a whole lotta work.

I Live…Again

John Winkelman

I have my life back. The giant time-and-energy-sucking project was handed off yesterday, so I rewarded myself by spending the entire day playing around with Flash MX. The drawing API is a thing of wonder and beauty. Using the mutated Rose trigonometry formula from my first Flash 5 showpiece I created this thing , of which I am rather proud.

Received a notice from Amazon that they are processing my order for A New Kind of Science. I suspect that there will be a great many things in it which will be the basis for a great many future Flash experiments. If reading the book doesn’t make me so smart I transcend the flesh I may post a few.

The Tuva Appreciation Post

John Winkelman

So I have spent all of this week listening to the extraordinary music of two bands from Tuva, deep in the steppes of Russia: Huun Huur Tu and Ya-Kha. Of the two, Yat-Kha is my favorite, they bill themselves as “Tuvan punk” … sort of. Imagine the polytonal throat-singing generally associated with Tibetan Buddhist chanting, then add traditional east European music, with the occasional electric guitar or synthesizer. But heck: Don’t just take my word for it; you can hear it at CDNOW .

In other news, I have learned some more things about XSLT which will make the maintenance of this site even easier than I thought. This may allow for breaking the XML into individual pieces, one per journal entry, thus making it possible to bookmark, save, and send each individual entry.

I am nearly finished with Blood Meridian . The writing is beautiful, but the subject is so terribly ugly. I feel a sustained sense of awe while reading it.

The Post-Apocalyptic 1800s

John Winkelman

Have finished Son of the Morning Star. Now working on Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I am 60 pages into this beautiful, hellish book, and I know, I just KNOW, that when I finish I will wish I had never read it, so I could discover it, again, for the first time. Consider this excerpt, in which a group of men are traveling through the southwestern desert:

“That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses’ trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlightning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunderheads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geography was not stone but fear.”

Again, when I re-create my book page, I will post a small review.

Putting Away Childish Things

John Winkelman

Well, it’s official. I just put up a placeholder/redirect page at www.eccesignum.com , directing wayward surfers here. I had es.com for two years, through six major and numerous minor iterations. From Photoshop crimes through amazing cross-browser Javascript hacks, to building serious Cascading Style Sheet mojo, to Flash experiments, to this: a full dynamic website.

All that stuff is gone. I have a lot of it stored locally, but I doubt if I will post it, except perhaps in another year or so when I am feeling nostalgic.

In another year no-one will bother to browser-check for Netscape 4, except in the most rabidly conservative shops. If I were my own boss, providing NS4 compatibility would automatically raise the cost of a project by 25%. Just to make the page work. To make it look good would add another 25% to both the cost and the time necessary to complete the project. Dammit!

But that is all water under the bridge. My next two projects for es.o: a content management system, and a fully functioning Flash version, using the same XML you are currently viewing.