Category: Life

Auspicious Numbers

John Winkelman

So. 2005 A.D. 2005 is an interesting number, in that it is the product of two primes: 401 x 5. Each of the digits in 2005 is a prime. And the sum of all of the digits (2 + 0 + 0 + 5) is itself a prime (7).

I will turn 36 this year. 36 is a perfect square, 6 x 6. Or if you want to break it down further, 2 x 2 x 3 x 3. Or, 2^² x 3^². A perfect square which is the product of two perfect squares.

Right now, according to the Chinese calendar, the Year of the Monkey is winding down. According to Master Lee, Monkey years are always chaotic and rough on everyone stuck in them. This past year was no exception. And there is the obvious joke about a Chimp being re-elected in the year of the Monkey.

The upcoming year, the Year of the Rooster (chicken, cock, etc) can be seen as the year of recovering from the year of the Monkey. Since the Rooster is my birth sign, I am filled with optimism.

Happy 2005.

366

John Winkelman

sunset-2004

I just posted the last picture to the River Project. 366 photos, selected from something over a thousand taken over the course of the year.

I started the year with an Olympus D-510, and on March 16 switched over to a Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ10 .

The total collection of un-edited photos, used and unused, fills 4 CDs.

The 366 photos on the website take up 33.6 megabytes.

The XML data file for the gallery is just under 15k.

The Flash Photo Gallery has been completely revised three times over the course of the project.

I think now I will take a short break. Perhaps I will continue to add to the project, but it will be more informal and definitely not every day.

Thanks you for all of the support, encouragement and suggestions over the past year.

And… Happy New Year.

Karma and Such

John Winkelman

So my previous post has attracted a lot of attention. Apparently the ex-CEO of Cybernet (and his family) had quite a colorful past, and angered/hurt a lot of people. But O, the stories that are coming out of it all.

Sic Semper Tyrannis.

On a happier note, I just came across a photo gallery by a fella in Alaska named Norio Matsumoto. The photos are absolutely beautiful, and the gallery itself is brilliantly executed in Flash.

I really should get off my ass and do better work.

CompuGlobalHyperMegaPost

John Winkelman

I just finished grading all of the final projects for the Kendall class. Everyone passed. An equal number of “a”s and “d”s, with a fairly balanced distribution of everything in between.

Work is getting busy again, and the first free afternoon I had, after the end of the semester, I stayed at the studio until after 7pm. Same exact thing happened at the end of last semester: “John has free time again. Let’s load him up with long hours and uncompensated irritation.”

Seems like that happened at the end of last year, too. Now that I have been out of retail for a few years, and have stopped hating the holidays to the core of my being, projects at work seem to fall into a pattern of mad scrambling to complete projects by the end of the year. A deadline, I might add, which is completely arbitrary and has no bearing on the actual needs of the clients; just some sense of finishing out the year with a clean slate.

Now I have four weeks of free Monday and Wednesday evenings. Winter Semester 2005 starts on Monday, January 13, In celebration I stayed in bed until eleven this morning, then lounged around my apartment in my pyjamas, reading a science fiction novel. Almost five hours in a row just sitting in a Comfy Chair. My back is quite sore, but I wouldn’t trade that time for all the [=commodity] in [=location]

One of the bright lights of the past couple of weeks has been the constant news updates regarding the crash-and-burn of CyberNet Engineering. While working there I was quite vocal with my criticizing, and now just about everyone I know will, at some point in a conversation, say So: Wow! CyberNet! . That kind of thing is still funny.

A month or so before I quit CyberNet I asked for a raise. I was just coming off of a couple of 80 hour weeks and my sense of humor had pretty much bottomed out. The head of the web development department told me No, because it wouldn’t be appropriate . So I went over his head. Sent an email to Krista Kotlarz, the wife of the now-dearly-departed Barton Watson.

She called me into a meeting, and, while sitting behind a desk which was worth more than I had made in six months of employment at CNE, called me a prima donna for asking for a raise.

When I finally quit, though I was the only front-end developer on staff, they didn’t try to keep me because I had been branded a “troublemaker”.

Thus the continued sense of schadenfreude. In another couple of days I will post an aggregation of all of the links I can find related to the CyberNet scandal, in as close to chronological order as I can make them.

Bearing in mind the fact that days and months and years are arbitrarily assigned divisions of the 24-hour planetary rotation cycle, I will be glad when this year is over.

The Man Show, c. 1870

John Winkelman

While using it to help one of my cow-orkers discover the fate of a colony of bats in her hometown, Google led me to an interesting and amusing site called The Journal of Manly Arts. No, this is not a sex magazine; rather a collection of articles about “European and Colonial Combatives, 1776 – 1914”; the supposition there being that fighting (as opposed to dueling) became a Gentlemanly thing around the time of the American Revolution, and became, well, kind of beside the point once Europe began to eat itself 140 years later.

Most of what I read was not new to me. All of the arts – quarterstaffs, various forms of boxing, Savate , I have heard of, if not actually seen in person. There was one, however, which stopped me for a moment: purring . Two contestants stand facing one another and, not to overcomplicate things, kick the bajeezus out of each others’ shins. Last one to give up wins. Apparently this fine tradition was abandoned in the late 1800s, although it is still seen today in schoolyards throughout the country.

Oh: And should the opportunity arise, never get in a fight in pre-Revolutionary Virginia :

I would advise you when You do fight Not to act like Tygers and Bears as these Virginians do – Biting one anothers Lips and Noses off, and gowging one another – that is, thrusting out one anothers Eyes, and kicking one another on the Cods, to the Great damage of many a Poor Woman…