Cold. Amazingly, bitterly, frightfully cold. The wind coming off the river causes tears and convulsions and physical pain, to a degree I have never before felt. My cheeks are raw and my nose feels bruised. And all this from ten minutes outside. The ducks, which were bravely venturing out from wherever it is ducks go when they don’t migrate, have disappeared. Probably sunk by an iceberg.

Next on the agenda is a chrome package for the photo album which will allow individual users of said application to style it in any manner they choose… within reason. Borders, margins, background colors, text colors, typefaces, thumbnails or no thumbnails…that sort of thing. I have come up with a method of doing it; now I need the time to actually DO IT.

The Web design class is going fantastically well. Yesterday I taught 14 students the basics of text manipulation, borders, and background colors. They got it in one. They be wicked smart.

In other news…

The Creatures in My Head has just turned 2 years old. A bizarre critter a day for 720 days.

The current issue of ThisIsAMagazine has some interesting stuff going on.

In the process of preparing materials for the Kendall class I have rediscovered a little of the joy of programming, which I lost over the past few months of hellish work. I have modified the Flash photo album to, when desirable, start at the end of a group of photos instead of the beginning. This is useful for when an album is updated regularly and the latest should be shown first, as in, say, the River Project . Next up: a method of “skinning” the album via XML. Perhaps sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Question for the week: Where in the workplace does the power reside?

Four days until I begin teaching a college class. I am looking forward to it; the two weeks at the beginning of this past semester merely whetted my appetite for public humiliation and corporal punishment the dispensation of education.

This weekend I will re-open the class.eccesignum.org subdomain and make available to the public all of my/our lecture notes and resources. If some little po-dunk place like MIT can do it , then so can I.

Not me this time. Today I spent several hours helping a couple’a friends move into their new house just up the street. Yesterday I helped a couple’a other friends pack for their upcoming move to the apartment upstairs from me. Therefore, this weekend I have consumed much pizza and beer, and inhaled enough dust to…umm… hurt something which is endangered by dust.

Nearly forgot to mention the most importantest reason I rebuilt the Flash Photo Album ( viddy well, droogies ): Christmas present for Mom this year was a narrated walkthrough of the trip I made to India three years ago.

Well, thank the dark lemur-headed gods that THAT is over. 2003, I mean.

I work close to the river, so I see it practically every day. And I almost always have my camera with me. Therefore I have decided to begin a project which has been floating around in my head for a long, long time: A series of photos of the river , one a day, for a year. This, in part, has driven me to completely re-create the Flash photo album; providing for some easier navigation, dramatically simplifying the creation of new photo projects, and allowing for greater flexibility in the display of the photos.

Well, what really drove me to re-do the Flash application is, I hate hate hate making thumbnails.

I should also mention that this project is inspired in part by the Daily Oliver .

There you have it. The Kendall class starts on January 12, the same day my free time ends. I am working like mad to complete the rebuild of the Yoga Studio site before then.

With ten days to go until Christmas I have resigned myself to buying little if anything useful for anyone. Therefore I am going for “neat” or “meaningful” instead. Photo galleries for the family, and the code for said photo galleries for the online community.

The big rush is that in three weeks I begin teaching a class at Kendall, and that will eat up all, and I mean ALL, of my free until the end of April. The game is being taken off the back burner and being put back in the fridge. Any coding I want to do will have to happen at work. Heh.

In case this is my last post of the year, Happy Holidays!!

11:30pm. Still coding. Could have maybe been done earlier, but I went to yoga practice after work, then watched The Italian Job. Now in front of the computer for another fun-filled night. Last night ended at 1:00 this morning. I believe I should hit 40 hours some time tomorrow afternoon.

I am so burned out that I have become used to it and now I feel kind of good. William James wrote an essay called The Energies of Man , in which he posited that the more of X we do, the greater the capacity for X we create within ourselves, which allows us to do more of X. I am starting to understand what he meant.

Too bad the catalyst was work.

Here it is, 10:00pm, and I am home sitting in front of my new 21″ flat-screen monitor (wooHoo!), taking a break from working. Yep: In one of those odd moments of convergence, I am working under pressure of a holiday deadline. Just like being in the retail business again. After all these years… Last Thursday I worked until midnight. Looks like the same thing tonight. And tomorrow, and Thursday… and Friday. And maybe Sunday.

I made the decision a couple of years ago that work would never again interfere with the martial arts classes . This has largely held true; the only time work EVER takes precedence over class is when a deadline is jeopardized through my own actions; i.e. almost never. Once in a month of blue moon Sundays. The upshot of that is, class becomes a three-hour break in a crushingly long day.

Class is also what keeps me from going all Skynet on the human race.

So how about a little informal poll here: What keeps you sane in an insane world?

It is my sad duty to inform you, my readers, that Timeline is a steaming pile of poo. Let me ruin it for you:

The surfer and the cute chick live. The professor lives. The French guy dies. The British are being assisted by an evil scientist from the present day. The professor and the Hot Scottish Guy (who also lives, but stays in the past) blow up the English fortress with gunpowder made by the professor as part of a bargain to keep from being run through by the English lord. The sarcophagus with the portrait of a one-eared lord? It has the Hot Scottish Guy and the Cute French Girl in it.

The cliches run rampant like… like… cliches at a college Renaissance festival.

The best actors were the trebuchets.

You have been warned.