Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Category: Life

Re-BOOT!!!1!

John Winkelman

Weeellll I thought es.o was looking a little dusty. Originally I planned to get the new look up on May 1 to coincide with the ReBoot , but for various reasons that just didn’t happen.

The background photo is from a few months ago , and the colors used in the design are taken from the photo. Mr. Bock offered much design advice after seeing my original concept, which would have hurt your eyes and killed your computer. If you are looking at this page on a PC, and you are using any flavor of Internet Explorer, Shame On You! Go download Mozilla or FireFox and you will see the beauty which is translucent backgrounds.

So where have I been? A brief recap: The Kendall class ended at the end of April. All of my students passed, there were more As than Ds. Several of the projects completely blew me away. For the next few months my time is my own, then in September I go back to teaching. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Class.

Much time and emotional energy went to assisting Cliff and those around him, through what was absolutely a trying, scary few weeks.

Any free time in addition to all of this was taken up by work, or recovering from work. This past Friday a major project launched; one in which I had to wield mojo as I have never before wielded mojo: Discovering Design . Normally I don’t post Day Job projects here, but this is one I of which I am quite proud. The posts I made about The Brain a few weeks back? What I learned there went in here.

Last and MOST IMPORTANT, I have been training hard in Master Lee’s class . We have a tournament in a couple of weeks, and the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts show a week after that. This year the show will take place on my birthday. My 35th birthday. I can think of no better gift.

As miscellaneous addendum, the news of the world around us has kept me rather depressed. I made the grievous tactical error of watching The Video last week. The non-Hollywood-ized violence, the everyday banality of the decapitation, as if it were no more important to the participants than the butchering of a pig, gave me nightmares. I grew up near a slaughterhouse, and what was on The Video could have happened, with a slight cast change, therein.

What next? Sleep. Sleep and maybe playing around a little with game development. Bock is working on one, and it kind of whetted my appetite for that kind of thing.

More as time and energy allow.

Profiting from Spam II

John Winkelman

People who have recently sent me spam:

Cohesion Q. Stepped
Mathematician H. Melva
Pastimes E. Yea
Northeastern M. Temporizes
Armaments B. Bodyguards
Disposable O. Craftsmanship
Despairingly L. Hooky

Way I see it, putting these names in my blog will bring search engines to me, particularly those seekers of Mathematician Bodyguards and Northeastern Hooky. A win-win situation, if ever there was one!

The Rules

John Winkelman

I have an unwritten (and unfortunately generally unenforced) rule in all of the classes I teach: don’t be late. For every minute you are late, you owe me a push-up. Five minutes late equals 5 pushups. Half an hour late, 30 pushups. An easy one-to-one relationship.

But lately I have been thinking that this is not quite right. Somehow it makes me out to be the bad guy. Well, that and the fact that 30 pushups for being half an hour late is not nearly enough pushups. It isn’t MY fault that YOU are late. So I have come up with a plan which will pit my students against one another and thus leave them too disorganized for any sort of uprising:

The first student who is late to class will immediately start doing pushups. He/she will continue to do pushups until another student walks into class. Then student 2 will take over for student one, doing pushups. When another student (3) walks in, 3 will take over for two, who will then join the rest of the class.

The last late student will do pushups for the rest of the class period. Good ones. All the way down, touch the chest, all the way up. No fewer than 30 in any one minute.

Suffering for Art

John Winkelman

Yesterday I forgot to bring my camera with me to work, so after the evening Kendall class I drove to the Fulton Street bridge over the Grand River and took a few low-light photos.

The way my camera (Olympus D-510) works is, if I shut of the flash and the ambient light is insufficient for a normal photo, the camera leaves the shutter open for longer than usual. This has two effects: more light hits the sensor, and I have to hold veeerrrrryyy still to avoid blurring the shot. Usually I just brace the camera on something.

Last night was abominably cold. I got out of my car and immediately my nose began to run. I braced the camera on the metal railing on the bridge, and as I was lining up my shot, eye to the viewfinder, I touched the tip of my nose to the rail.

Anyone who has ever licked a flagpole in the middle of winter can appreciate my situation.

There is no visible damage, but today the end of my nose feels sore and raw. So I hope you are enjoying all of those photos. They sure don’t come easy.

Happy New Year!

John Winkelman

This past Thursday was the first day of the lunar new year, the Year of the Monkey. Today Master Lee and the rest of our kung fu school participated in festivities at the East Garden Buffet. There was much good food and much good cameraderie. Master Lee gave new swords to all of the instructors, and one of the instructors, Nancy, gave me a matted photo of me performing a tai chi sword routine at the edge of a lake.

So now I have a great photo of myself, and another sword for my collection. At last count I have eight tai chi swords, one kung fu sword, a kwan dao, a fan, an axe and four daggers.

I am approaching the last new pages of the Goya book. At first it bothered me a little that so much of the first half says nothing about Goya himself. On reflection I realize that Connell wrote the book so that at each stage of his subject’s life, the focus is on that which was most important or influential. And what was most influential to Goya’s life was not always Goya.

Whiling Away the Days

John Winkelman

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.

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?