Category: Life

Books and Blank Stares

John Winkelman

Something woke me up at around 4:00 this morning. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I got out of bed, worked out for an hour or so, then sat down to do a little work on version 2.1.0.4.6.9b of the Flash Photo Album application. This will be, I think, the fifth time in the past year that I have started to rebuild it. I won’t bother posting a date when it will be ready because, frankly, I just don’t know.

Last night after teaching the Kendall class (in which nobody cried) I stopped out to the local book merchant and picked up the new Neal Stephenson book, The System of the World. It looks quite beautiful on my bookshelf next to the first two volumes of the Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver and The Confusion . It was my intention to only pick up the one book but I stopped past the remainder tables and there, in their shiny hardcover glory, were Baudolino and The Collected What If? , which brings together What If? and What If?2. So much for saving money. So much for sleep.

Me.stay();

John Winkelman

So I will be at work for a little while longer. The boss and I had a long talk after work today, and it put things in perspective. Enough perspective, anyway, that I will not just up and quit without having another job lined up.

You will notice, however, that I did not say I am not interested in finding another job. Time to start fleshing out my resumé.

So here is the question: From where comes the dissonance? Is it my personal life invading work, or work invading my personal life? Does the line need to be re-drawn in a more permanent color?

Time will tell.

Another Day Older and Deeper in Debt

John Winkelman

Today I am/was/will be absolutely buried under work at my day job, so I cut the Kendall class a little short. To make up for this I gave my students their first homework assignment.

I got a few heartfelt (hah!) “Awwww”s about my workload, so I told them to use me as an object lesson, if any of them are insane enough to want make a career out of web development. Long hours, burnout, and the joy of watching project after project march off into IT Department oblivion, said I.

Well, honestly, whattayagonnado? It’s a living. It’s a steady paycheck. If you are not too burned out to care, you can learn something new with every project. And if you are too burned out, you will learn how long you can work without falling to pieces or killing your co-workers.

But you know…there are times when a week of rest feels more important than all the clients in the world.

Elite is 31337

John Winkelman

I was feeling bored nostalgic bored at work today so I spent some time browsing around the int0rw3b. As luck would have it, the first site I surfed to, The WikiPedia , had some interesting stuff in it. Specifically, a link to an entry on Harun al_Rashid . He was the Caliph in the Thousand Nights and a Night , and more recently he was the central character in issue 50 ( Ramadan ) of Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman comic book .

After looking up a few other random words I typed in “elite”. This returned a variety of possible results, one of which was subtitled “computer game”.

Could it be?!? YES! An entry on the greatest computer game of the 1980s!

Doing a Google search brought up a great BBC article on the people who created the game, all those years ago. I am still in the process of looking for good ports of the original to a PC platform. They are surprisingly, frustratingly, few and far between — although this one looks promising. I say “surprisingly” because there is nothing about the game that could not be easily done in Flash.

So if I don’t find any good results in the next few weeks, I guess I will have to quit my job and build it myself!

Another Day In the Life

John Winkelman

Yesterday was the first day of class at Kendall. This semester I have fifteen students, and all of them seem to be pretty With It. I also ran into some of my students from last semester, who are now learning the basics of Flash with Mr. Bock.

I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be spending practically every waking moment of the next three and a half months in front of one computer or another. This is not entirely a bad thing, as I have a great 21″ monitor at home, and at the college I have an Apple cinema display the size of a drive-in movie screen.

Yep. The only place I have sub-par equipment is at work, where I have a four year-old Dell laptop driving an ancient 21″ monitor, which has a refresh rate slightly slower than the overhead fluorescent lights. That means that the normally subliminally-fast flickers go into and out of phase with one another ever couple of seconds.

If that was too technical for you, try this: I spend eight to eleven hours a day staring into a slow, dim strobe light. Why I have not yet suffered a debilitating epileptic fit is anyone’s guess.

One Week and Counting

John Winkelman

Yep. That time of year, again.

Class starts in a week. Monday next will find me staring down the barrel of something over a dozen pairs of eyes, behind which will be brains capable of containing the sum total of all universes, just waiting to be filled with my wisdom.

Or beer.

The Class Pages have been updated to work with the content management system I use on the main site (i.e. this page). This will enable me to teach my class from the safety of my home, or the nearest bar with wireless access.

I have one more week of freedom, then four months of insanity.

O God.

On a more personal note, today is my Mother’s birthday. She is currently on vacation in the wilds of Canada, touring the Rocky Mountains ’round about Edmonton, in Alberta. Happy Birthday, Mom!1!!1!

On a less personal note, this is a picture of some blackberries:

blackberry

Mmmmmmm…..blackberries….

Free As In Gutenberg

John Winkelman

A couple of days ago I came across a few words strung together in an order which made them seem huge and full of portent: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Yes, I know…it’s the title of a Pink Floyd album. But it seemed too… I dunno… magnificent for a mere album title (my initial reaction was that I had it wrong, and that it was actually Jethro Tull).

Maybe, perhaps, the title of a poem or painting by William Blake? The Piper At the Gates of Dawn could have come from the same mystically animistic mind that brought us The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun

So I did a little digging. After several pages of Pink Floyd I came across an eBook of The Wind in the Willows; a book of which I have been aware for many years, but have not read. The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is the title of Chapter VII.

I read for a little while before noticing where I was: The Project Gutenberg site. Well, back in the day, I spent a lot of time there. Back in the day.

Some time in the last year, the PG people have got themselves a new domain, re-structured their site, and done a major re-design. The result is a fantastic place where whole days can be lost (and by lost I mean spent blissfully ) browsing, researching, and reading.

On a related note, The new semester at Kendall will be starting in a couple of weeks. Last semester I had my students create portfolio sites for their final projects. This year, I think they will take Project Gutenberg eTexts and turn them into online books.

I may have to do the same thing myself. Again.