Category: Life

The Status of My Status

John Winkelman

I have been too busy spending time with a beautiful woman to post much over the past couple of weeks. Or rather, my creative energy has been directed elsewhere. So now seems a good time to make some changes.

Sometime in the next few days ES.O will go down for a little while as I switch over to a more robust, feature-rich content management system; probably TextPattern. So: New look, new functionality, and new purpose. I freelance now, so the front page will be more professional…whatever that means.

Rather than try to retro-fit all of this old content into the new framework I will probably take all of this stuff and shuffle it over to a subdomain; something like archives.eccesignum.org, or the like. Regardless, it will be linked from the new site.

When, exactly? You will know when you see it.

Shut That Thing Off and go Outside

John Winkelman

Where have I been? Walking around outside taking pictures in the warmest weather since early November. When not enjoying the sunshine, I have been spending my time doing contract work at the Steelcase University .

So far the life of a contract worker is treating me well. I am immersed in challenging work with extremely talented people and I am my own boss.

Though I could potentially be buried in Steelcase work for a good long time I have just joined Business Networking International , with the idea that I should not have all of my eggs in one basket, businesswise. I was kind of wary when I first heard of it, but when I went to a meeting as a visitor I walked out with the cards of half a dozen people who needed some web work done.

Does all this mean I will be too busy to have fun? Hell No! I will try to keep my hours down to ~30 a week, once I get settled into the new schedule. And, hopefully, a fair bit of that will be done from home, or from various cafes and bars with wireless internet connections.

I have begun work on Whirling Vector Shapes of Doom, version 2. Updated graphics, tweaks to the gameplay, and optimization to smooth out the animations. And maybe some sound.

The web design class at Kendall College is sliding into the crazy last weeks of the semester. I have not made any of my students cry yet, but I still have a month to turn up the heat.

Yeah… life is good.

Back to Work

John Winkelman

Well, it looks like my days as a Gentleman of Leisure are coming to an end. Starting Monday I am back to somewhat regular work hours, albeit this time as a contractor rather than a full-time employee. No more soap operas. No more sleeping in until noon. No more spending the entire day in my pajamas.

So it is appropriate that I hereby announce the release of Whirling Vector Shapes of Doom v1.0 . This is the first game I have completed in eighteen years. The last one was a dungeon crawl written in BASIC on a Commodore-64.

Having reached every milestone I set myself for this release I already see room for a dozen improvements, and I have ideas for the creation of another dozen games.

Stay tuned!

Quitting Work: First Impressions

John Winkelman

It has been ten days since I walked out of my former place of employment. The deep-down sleep deprivation is wearing off, and some of my friends have commented that I look “younger”. I certainly feel better than I have in a long time. I guess I didn’t realize exactly how poisonous stress is until I removed the major source.

So what have I been doing? Reading. Writing. Watching movies. A little coding and a lot of working out. Already people are finding out that I am “on the market”, so to speak, and the requests for web work are beginning to trickle in.

I have more time to prepare for the Kendall class, so my students are getting a better education, or at least more precise beatings.

I have made no long-term plans. I intend to make no long-term plans until the beginning of summer, at the earliest. The next four months are for me to try to regain all those things I lost over the past fifteen years of too much work packed into too little time.