Month: December 2005

House Photos I

John Winkelman

This is the first round of photos of my house. Enjoy!

My house, which sits on the North side of Innes street. It is hard to tell from the photo, but it sits pretty high up on a small hill. The floor of the basement is about even with the street.


The view west from my porch.


The view east from my porch.


The entryway. I didn’t paint the door.

Facing west into the living room. Note the absolutely beautiful trim and floors.

The dining room. The table came with the house. So did the chairs

The master bedroom. It is hard to get a shot of a large room from small doorway.

The bathroom. There is another one in the basement, which is actually a toilet sitting in a corner of the floor. Huh. Also, the bathroom currently does not have a door. I didn’t even notice until I had been living here for about a week.

Looking toward the south-east from my office.

Looking down on the garage from the north window of the library/second bedroom.

My attic. Those chairs are left over from two owners ago. And so is…

…the Swinging Disco Love Nook! This photo barely does the attic justice. The area around the dormer window has a built-in waterbed frame and its own lights and electric outlets. This photo is from me, laying on my back and shooting up at the ceiling above the waterbed frame.

And this is the view from the attic window, looking down at my car. It is hard to tell from the photo, but I the attic window is close to thirty feet above street level. I have a fantastic view.

So there you have it: The first round of photos. I am almost finished unpacking, and now I need to start Buying Stuff. Like furniture. I will continue to post photos as Chez Winkelman continues to evolve.

Flash 8 Stress Test

John Winkelman

This is my most recent Flash 8 experiment. I used it to see what some of the possible limits of rendering might be; specifically, multiple levels of alpha transparency rendering over a complex background.

It works like this: A .jpg (the background) and a .png with alpha transparency (a Green Floating Chad Head) are loaded at runtime. I copy the .jpg and the Chad Head into Bitmap objects, then run a simple math algorithm to copy 100 instances of the Chad Head onto the background, then clone that bitmap onto the one which is displayed in the Flash player. This combines two concepts known as blitting and double buffering, which help to speed up otherwise lengthy and/or processor-intensive rendering jobs.

SkaBoom, 100 objects moving at a high rate of speed with, in effect, 100 levels of alpha transparency displayed at once. All combined into a single 480 pixel square bitmap.

Thanks to the folks over at Bit-101’s forums for help with some of the new functionality.

Click to launch the Flash 8 stress test.

Last

John Winkelman

Right now I am sitting in room 429 at Kendall College of Art and Design, waiting for my next appointment. The way it works is this: All of my students handed in their final projects at the end of the day this past Wednesday; it being the last day of classes for the semester. Over the weekend I graded those assignments, and today I am meeting individually with all of my students, telling them what their final grades are, why they got the grades they did, and offering advice for the upcoming semesters and years.

The lowest grade is a C, and the highest is an A, with the curve tending toward the higher end of the spectrum.

I should be home by 8:00.

This has been the busiest four months in recent memory. More than that: I don’t remember being this busy since the heady days of working at the bookstore during the Christmas season. It has been that long.

So I have a little free time for the next month. Time to work on the house. I still am not finished unpacking. I am stuck in the apartment-dweller’s mode of “I can’t unpack until I know where EVERYTHING goes”, which stems from having severely restricted living space. I actually have all kinds of room now, so I need to finish unpacking, and then worry about where everything goes.

And I am putting together the list of the items I need to buy, and the attributes of the house which I want to change. First thing: a new bed. The box-spring for my bed will not fit up the stairs. And I damaged the mattress in the process of moving. So instead of spending my first night in luxury in my new warm bedroom, I spent it sleeping on the floor on a pile of blankets.

Next: washer and dryer. Last time I went to a laundromat someone tried to sell me something he said was crack, but which turned out to be macadamia nuts. Where the hell did he get macadamia nuts in this town? Crack would have been cheaper.

And things to do to the house:
-eaves and drainpipes, to keep me from dying when I walk on an icy sidewalk
-replace the front (concrete) steps with something newer, which maybe has more right angles, and fewer slopes. For that matter, replace the whole of the sidewalk around my house.
-plant a tree
-finish the attic. Turn it into something like a large office/library.
-finish bricking my enemies into the wall of the basement.

Being a homeowner is nothing but workworkwork.