Category: Life

Moderate Update

John Winkelman

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?

Stalking the Wild Nostalgia

John Winkelman

Back when I was a kid growing up on the farm I discovered a natualist author by the name of Euell Gibbons. He wrote books – informed by his own life experiences and necessities – about how to survive and thrive by eating wild food. Many of his plants and animals were native to southern Michigan so one spring, book in hand, I set out to provide for my family.

Just to put things in perspective, our farm was pretty stable, and if there was one thing we didn’t lack, it was food. I probably had more steak by the time I graduated from high-school than most people have during their entire lives.

I immediately discovered two things.

First, timing is everything. There are no acorns in May. There are no fiddlehead ferns in September. Day-lilies were edible last week. This week they have the texture of cardboard.

Two: a hungry Oakie (as Gibbons described himself) will eat things that a well-fed farm boy will not. Possum. May apple. Any of a number of mushrooms. Eel.

That is not to say that there were not a few successes. Sassafras tea is one of the most wondrous good drinks in all the world, especially with a spoonful of brown sugar thrown in. Crayfish are damn yummy, if much smaller in Michigan than in, say, Louisiana. Frog legs brought purpose to the deaths of the bullfrogs we shot full of BBs every summer. Day-lily pods cooked in butter taste much like green beans, but I imagine a sufficient quantity of butter will make most anything taste like green beans. Mulberries, strawberries, blackberries, gooseberries, raspberries, cherries, apples…I didn’t need a book to figure them out. Likewise, bluegills. Never got around to asking the neighbor who trapped rattlesnakes for MSU if he would send us over some meat some time.

On my desk in front of me sits the 1974 Field Guide edition of Stalking the Wild Asparagus. It is green, and beat up, and Euell Gibbons, chewing on a leafy twig of something, grins from the cover. Leafing through it, I found a note which said the following: “Tried the pods. If you are hungry they would fill the empty space. Pg 130.” Page 130 start a four-page description of the culinary joys of milkweed. I never got around to trying that one.

A few years ago several of Gibbons’ books were reprinted. Stalking the Wild Asparagus and Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, the two with which I am familiar, are fantastic reads, even if you never in your life plan to eat anything which doesn’t come out of a can.

As an amusing side note, take a look at what Amazon.com recommends in their “Customers interested in XXX may also be interested in:” section. By gum, foragers are just not to be trusted.

Four Days

John Winkelman

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.

Movin’!

John Winkelman

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.

A New Project II

John Winkelman

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.

Zoom!

John Winkelman

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!!

zzzzzzzzz

John Winkelman

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.

Under-Appreciated

John Winkelman

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?

Bleh

John Winkelman

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.