Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Category: Life

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!

Spam [n+1]: The Progression

John Winkelman

People who have recently sent me spam:

Angleworms H. Admonishment
Contradistinction K. Luria
Legations P. Moderates
Dismays Q. Ava
Persecuting Q. Fought
Lugosi D. Teammates
Implicit T. Doorstepping
Reformed J. Industrialize
Vacuously S. Callously
Questionnaire K. Spaniel
Hick K. Parodying

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.

The Man, Showing His Love

John Winkelman

President Bush will be visiting my humble city today. He will be speaking this afternoon at the Ford Fieldhouse of Grand Rapids Community College.

In order to keep those who Love him at an adoring distance, the local constabulary will be shutting down a fairly large chunk of the center of downtown Grand Rapids. After all, we wouldn’t want his adoring fans to return the Love which Bush has shown us for the past three and a half years.

What I want to know is, if everyone Loves Bush so much, why shut down the freeway while his motorcade is traveling from the airport to the center of town. Wouldn’t it have been much easier for him to just catch a helicopter in? Or is Bush trying to show us Midwestern rural folk how much Love he has for us by parading around town in a Love-proof limousine surrounded by secret service agents?

I think now would be a good time to take a quick vacation out to the lake. After all, downtown would be an overly stimulating place to be if one of our friends from overseas decides to drop in and spread some Love around.

In case that happens – or if this post is misinterpreted to be a slam on Bush for being an arrogant, useless idiot (or something else equally silly) and I am arrested for it – well, it’s been good talking at you.

Wow. So much Love in the air. Duck and cover.

Road Commission Blues

John Winkelman

One day at the job was pretty much like any other: Show up, wake up, look at the map, prep the truck, head out, get the counters from the day before, come back, reset the counters, go to lunch, set out the counters, come in, go home.

The truck was kind of cool. Huge, in the way only a mid-70s Suburban could be. Orange like a traffic cone. Indestructible. Ugly. Perfect.

Our first day out we got stuck on a gravel road when we turned on the on the job light, and left it on through lunch and drained the battery dry.

Once we spent the day doing truck maintenance and discovered that we didn’t know where the oil dipstick was. There were several dipsticks, and they all came up covered with the same brown-ish fluid. It wasn’t until a week later that we figured out that the one dip-stick we had been looking at, which said the truck was all full-up with oil, was actually the power steering fluid dipstick, which was telling us that the power steering fluid was turning into taffy. When we actually found the oil dipstick it was dry as a bone, and probably had been for the entire summer. The truck was running just fine.

Then there was the day I got stuck in the ditch.

After the first couple of weeks on the job Phil and I realized that there was no way we could fill up a 40 hour week with the work we were given, so we began to take long lunches. These would usually start around 11:30, and run until 2 or so. We had no cell-phones, no CB radio, no way of contacting Road Commission Central without actually driving back. And they had no way of tracking our whereabouts.

In 1990 Jackson County was full of small parks, as often or not on the shore of a small lake which might be surrounded by small houses and specked with large people in tiny bathing suits. Over the course of the summer we found all of them. It didn’t matter where we were at the start of the day. Come 11:00 the map would come out and we would debate the plusses and minuses of driving all the way across the county to find beautiful women in bikinis, or a place suitably up-wind of a farm, or the border of Ted Nugent’s property. Try as we might, we never saw one of the Nuge’s black panthers. He was probably lying about them.

More as time allows.