Labors of Love

John Winkelman

Yesterday evening I had a meeting with John of Argos Bookstore, in which we discussed the whats and whys and wherefores of creating an Argos Bookstore website. This is something we have been talking about, off and on, for most of the summer so far. Now it looks like it will be moving forward.

The meeting was my first experience using free wireless internet access in a cafe. I haven’t yet made up my mind about the whole thing. On the one hand, very convenient. On the other, Kava House had (at that time) bandwidth and connectivity issues, and I had a serious bout of the jitters with visions of spilling my iced mocha into the keyboard of a very expensive laptop computer.

John and I talked for almost two hours, and came up with some exciting ideas about what would go into the site, and how we could present it as a small community, specifically focused portal and repository of certain aspects of Grand Rapids history. In the process of this meeting I also discovered that John is yet another member of the over-educated, under-employed segment of Grand Rapids, from which I seem to draw so many of my friends.

Discussing the fee for building the site was a little awkward. I said “I’ll do it for free!” He said “We gotta pay you!” In the end we worked out some of the details for a trade-type arrangement.

Once the work begins I will throw regular updates up here. I hope things begin soon, as the school year begins at the end of this month and from that point on, until the end of April, my time will once again belong to everyone except me.

McCarthy and Harrison

John Winkelman

Stopped by the bookstore on the way home from work. Intended to grab No Country for Old Men and leave, but there next to it on the new release shelf was The Summer He Didn’t Die by Jim Harrison. Of course, I couldn’t pass that up, especially seeing as how they were both discounted.

I haven’t read Harrison in several years. The last of his novels I picked up was The Road Home about seven years ago. More recently was The Beast God Forgot to Invent, a collection of novellas. I like Harrison’s shorter works more than his novels, so finding the new book was quite a treat.

The new Harry Potter book was quite good. I won’t say better than I expected because I expected it to be good. J.K. Rowling is consistently doing a very good job of both changing the tone of her novels as the protagonists age, and improving the quality and complexity of her writing. It will be interesting to see where she goes after the next (and last) Harry Potter.

Design-ish

John Winkelman

When I launched the new version of this site a couple of months ago, completely unstyled and undesigned, Bock warned me that I would never get around to actually designing the thing now that I had the ability to display content. Well, it seems he was almost right.

The color palette comes from the photo at the top of the page, which was taken at the Frederik Meijer Gardens back in early March of this year. The butterfly is a, er, Heliconius Hecale…? Damn. I seem to have misplaced the information guide from the exhibit. Anyway, the colors displayed on the site are all captured from the above photograph, a technique which I first used on the From the Heart Yoga website three years and one version ago. It sure is a lot easier to come up with a good palette this way, instead of endless hours with color swatches.

In other news I recently accepted an offer to become a member of the Waterfall Productions team, so starting next week I will be back to being an employee. Less freedom, but a much steadier paycheck. Which is a good thing to have right now, because I have decided that it is time to buy a house. When, where and how, I will post as I answer those questions for myself.

Latest News From My Bookshelf

John Winkelman

A couple of hour ago I finished reading Olympos, which exceeded my expectations by a wide margin. The great thing about reading Dan Simmons in general, and this book in particular, is the great sense of the joy of writing which comes out of his work.

Next on the stack, and probably done by morning, is H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, by Michel Houellebecq.

As everyone in the universe knows, the latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, went on sale this morning at midnight. I waited until 4:30 in the afternoon to pick up my copy from Argos Books, along with a boxed set of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson, and The Sterile Cukoo, the first book by John Nichols, whose The Milagro Beanfield War I read back in June.

And this should keep me busy for the rest of the weekend, up to Tuesday, when Cormac McCarthy’s newest book, No Country for Old Men, will hit the shelves.

Mmmmmm…books.

Words of Wisdom

John Winkelman

In the few fragments that remain of [Roger Fenwick’s] own story, he records that he learned but three things in two years at Oxford. The first, on which he placed the greatest value, was that “Yea” might be turned into “Nay” and vice versa if a sufficient quantity of wordage was applied to the matter. The second was that in any argument, the victor is always right, and the third that though the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword speaks louder and stronger at any given moment.

Leonard Wibberly, The Mouse That Roared

Tamagotchi Tutorial

John Winkelman

In my pursuit of learning Actionscript 2.0 I am working my way through a tutorial created by the excellent and brilliant Colin Moock. To wit, I am creating a Tamagotchi.

You remember Tamagotchi. They are/were the little keychain pets which you had to feed and play with and clean up after and allow to grow and evolve and eventually go to the Land Where Tamagotchi Are Eternally Blessed. Apparently, as with all things Japanese and electronic, there is a sizable internet subculture around electronic pets. I actually found a few built in Flash including Godzilla and Charles Manson, but you can go looking for the CM one your own damn selves.

Hmmmmmm…yep.

Anyway, when I am done creating my little Tamagotchi I will post it for your Viewing Pleasure.

New Week, New Books

John Winkelman

Well, once again I was distracted from Dark Age Ahead by another book. Several, in fact.

The first is Made in Detroit by Paul Clemmens, which has not yet been published but I got my hands on an uncorrected galley. When it is finally released I highly recommend grabbing a copy.

Next, the latest edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern arrived on Monday. This one came packaged with a comb.

And today I picked up Olympos by Dan Simmons, a book for which I have been waiting for about a year. I will post more after I read it, which should hopefully be sometime this weekend.

At work my first game project is beginning to ramp up, so I have been learning/brushing up on, in no particular order, Actionscript 2.0, UML, Use Case Scenarios, and software engineering. This should keep me happily busy until Oh, about February.

Me and You and A Dog Named Boo

John Winkelman

Things are kind of slow at Steelcase right now, so I am working from home. I haven’t done this in months; not since the 6-week vacation between jobs back in February and early March. Much to my surprise, I am being fairly productive. So far, I have worked out some of the data structure-and-flow issues in a SAP training game; I have installed TextPattern for one client, and am piecing together the logic for the secure client login for another client.

I find I have a difficult decision ahead of me: Ferris State University wants to hire me to teach a Game User Interface Design class during the Fall semester. On the one hand, HELL YEAH!!! On the other, my plate is already pretty full, and what with the Web Design class at Kendall College taking up most of my (otherwise) free time, I would be so busy that I would never see my girlfriend.

I suppose I could just stop sleeping. Again.

On a lighter note, Paula and I saw Star Wars on Sunday. The special effects were fantastic. So much so, that I occasionally forgot that there were people in the movie, too. Overall, I thought SW3 was better than SW1 or SW2, simply because the dialogue was much improved (but still not good by any stretch of the imagination). “Younglings”? Please! What are you, Lucas, a 12-year-old Star Wars fan fiction writer?

After a brief detour through A Game of Thrones, I have picked up Dark Age Ahead again. Check this out:

Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor. Someone has aptly called self-imposed isolation a fortress mentality. [Karen] Armstrong describes it as a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit, always seeking to know more and to extend areas of competence and control of the environment, to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Finally!

John Winkelman

On a whim I stopped by George R. R. Martin’s site, and discovered that At Long Last, after untold decades of feverish expectations, A Feast for Crows is moving into production. For fans of the fantasy genre, this is indeed big news, as the third book in the series (Feast is the fourth) was published in October of 2000.

As for when it will hit the shelves—as near as I can tell, sometime between late July and December of this year. Use the intervening time to read the rest of the series.