Something New

John Winkelman

Today I went to my second yoga class, ever. The first was last week.

This class is the first genuinely new thing I have started in about five years. Sure, I have had many new and unique experiences in that time, but none of those were pursuits; they were discrete events and experiences. Yoga is the kind of thing I will keep.

Because it is a new thing my ego took a little self-inflicted bruising. I am not used to not being good at what I do. No; that is not quite right. I am not used to not being accomplished at what I do.

So having come to terms with that and getting it out of the way, I am free to enjoy it. I like not having any authority. I like having the luxury of practice and contemplation.

I love just being a student again.

November Check-in

John Winkelman

Damn. Been so long since I updated this thing I almost forgot how to work the admin screens.

Two quick notes:

The over-talented and under-employed Bock has redesigned his site, so head on over and check it out. It is a beautiful thing.

Friend and classmate Craig Marks has written several articles for Martial Talk Magazine , and I have just finished converting the first to HTML for Master Lee’s website . Craig has done a superb job with the research, and the article should be an interesting read for practitioners of all styles of martial arts.

Some More Book Stuff

John Winkelman

Readers of McSweeney’s already know this: William Vollmann’s new book Rising Up and Rising Down will be released in a couple of weeks. I have read very little of Mr. Vollman’s work; before today, actually, no more than an excerpt of Rising in McSweeney’s 9.

So today I went out to Schuler Books and Music and picked up a copy of The Ice-Shirt. Using the first few chapters therein, and a quick re-read of the McSweeney’s excerpt, I will decide within the next week or so if owning Rising is worth $120.00. A 3,500 page, seven-volume treatise on violence, seventeen years in the making. It would be an awesome, monstrous thing to have in the house, but would I ever read it?

Only time will tell. Right now I have another new book to read, this one a third the length of Quicksilver, which I finished this past Saturday, and will review as time permits.

Some Book Stuff

John Winkelman

Thanks for the help everyone; the puppy was delicious.

Sunday’s book give-away went better than expected. Of the 220 or so books put out for relocation, over half were taken. The rest I am leaving in the window so visitors over the next couple of weeks can browse through them. Visiting Barnes and Noble was discouraging, as they are currently only buying Fiction hardcovers and paperbacks; so whatever is left over at (say) the end of November is going to the public library .

So as I was plowing my way through a breakfast of Donut Holes and Goldfish Crackers I glanced over at the pile of books and one in particular caught my eye: The Master of Petersburg by J.M. Coetzee. In hardcover.

I stared at it for a little while, wondering why that name seemed so familiar. So I looked him up on the internet.

Oh yeah. He just won the Nobel Prize for literature . Guess I’ll be keeping this one.

I opened it, wondering when the book was published, what it was about, etc., and discovered that it was a signed first edition. Hardcover. Nobel Laureate. Etc.

Let me say that again for all the search engines: A signed, first-edition copy of The Master of Petersburg, by the 2003 Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, J.M. Coetzee.

To all the people who stopped by on Sunday, I offer a heartfelt “Thank you”.

And a very quiet “Ha!”

On the Acquisition of Chinese Text

John Winkelman

My last few days at work have been filled with the thrills of non-Latin character sets; specifically, getting Chinese and Japanese text into an XML-driven flash movie. It was in interesting trip, so I figured I might as well publish my findings as an exploration.

One caveat: Doing this required the downloading of a lot of language packs, both from Microsoft (for Windows) and from Mozilla (for the Mozilla browser). Visiting any of the following sites will probably bring up “install language pack” dialogues, but since it is not certain that your browser(s) will be able to view the text, I have placed all non-Latin characters in images.

First I went to Babelfish and typed in Ecce Signum .

Hmmm. Apparently Babelfish doesn’t automatically do English-Latin-Chinese translations. Let’s try “behold the evidence”

Closer… let’s try one more: “witness the evidence”.

There we go! Now for the verification, I copied the Chinese text from Babelfish and went to Mandarin Tools ; specifically the Unicode Character Dictionary , and pasted the characters into the text field titled “Search By Character”, while making sure the select box to the left of the text box was set to “UTF-8”.

Apparently it doesn’t translate very well… but is appeared to be close enough. But now the characters were not of a good size to make images of. Printing the screen and resizing the image was, to say the least, not very good. So I whipped up a little web page to display the characters, while making VERY SURE that I saved the page as Unicode, and not ISO-8859-whatever. VERY IMPORTANT for the display of Unicode characters. So now I had this:

Hmmm… little squares where I once had Chinese characters… So I looked at the page in Mozilla anyway. This is what I saw:

Perfect! Now the hard part is over. The rest was simply taking another screen capture, isolating the text in the screen capture, turning the image into a .gif, making it black text on a transparent background, and importing it into Flash to do a Trace Bitmap.

Before-and-after of doing a Trace Bitmap in Flash.

So there it is: my first experience in making Flash play nice with non-Latin characters. I am sure there are many many ways to do this that are much more elegant, and I am sure I will discover them the day after this project launches. But right now, I am kind of happy with what I have.

The Great Book Give-Away

John Winkelman

That’s right. I’m weeding my library. This Sunday, October 26 2003, somewhere between 150 and 300 books will be free for the taking. Show up any time between 2:00 and 9:00 pm. Genres include, but are not limited to: science art religion languages philosophy Russian photography poetry literature misc beer design computers martial arts etc. There may also be some CDs in the mix.

There are only three rules:
[1] The books I am NOT giving away will be kept separate from the books I AM giving away. Stay away from the books I am NOT giving away.
[2] Some of you may be tempted to grab an armload of books and drive straight over to Barnes and Noble to sell them. If you do this I will kill you.
[3] This is a book GIVE AWAY , not a book SWAP . Don’t bring books of your own and try to get in on my action.

If there are any books remaining after the GiveAway, I will take them to Barnes and Noble and sell what I can. Any remaining after that will be donated to the Grand Rapids Public Library. Any profit made from the Selling of the Used Books will probably go into … MORE BOOKS. Or beer. Depends on how much I get.

Email me for directions, if you don’t already know where I live.

I :heart: Words

John Winkelman

Now that I am done with The Fountainhead I am plowing through Quicksilver . Sometimes I forget what a joy it is to read the work of someone who is deeply in love with the English language.

On that note, a particular word has wormed its way into my subconscious recently, and probably won’t let me go until I give it a good thinking-about:

Fix. Or, fixed. Probably because I hear it so much at work. “John, can you fix this?” “I fixed it yesterday.” “Fix it again.” “It’s still fixed.” “Then make it even more fixed.” “Consider it fixed.”

Fix can be used in several different confusing and contradictory, not to mention amusing ways:

Fixing a car means making something a little more perfect. Fixing a cat means making something a little less perfect. Fixing a deal means that it will go through according to agreed-upon rules. Fixing a bet means the exact opposite. Being in a fix is a Bad Thing. Getting your fix is a Good Thing. The Fixx was a band in the eighties is still around! Who’d’a thunk???.

So as you can see, when using this word it is important to be a precise as possible.

“Fixing something with pliers?”
“Yes. A boxing match.”

“Dad hurt himself golfing?”
“Dad fixed himself golfing.”

“I just fixed my cat.”
“Good for you.”
“…to the ceiling.”

…etc. In my next lecture I will meditate on the GeoSocioPantheoPolitical ramifications of the Co-option of Tradition in the Acceleration of Nostalgic Meta-Journalism.