Tag: work

Flash in the Can, Part 1: Outwitting Fate

John Winkelman

Awoke at 3:00am from a restless three hours to get a jump on the day. Left Grand Rapids around 3:30 in rental car (a Mazda) made necessary by the sudden death of my Saturn (stabbed in the back with an SUV). Hit the highway out of town and headed East.

First part of the trip was uneventful. Saw many interesting things, such as tail-lights, head-lights and…pavement. Passed within a few miles of the Ryan Lee ancestral home. Learned many interesting things about Ryan. Drank coffee concentrate to stay awake.

I-69 turned into I-94, and I-94 turned into 401 as we crossed the border. Passed USA-side toll gate with no difficulty. Bridge over the border was beautiful, with a false dawn turning the eastern horizon a opalescent gray. Stopped to present bona-fides at Canadian bridge.

Canadian gate was guarded by something much like a Marine, complete with buzz-cut, piercing blue eyes, and a bullet-proof vest. Proof of American citizenship was demanded. We each handed over our Michigan drivers’ licenses. Dialogue follows:

Guard: I need to see proof of American Citizenship.
Me: Like what?
Guard: Birth Certificate or Passport
Me: Here’s my passport.
Ryan: Here’s my social security card.
Guard: That does me no good.
Ryan: That’s all I have.
Guard: Where are you going?
Me: Toronto.
Guard: Why?
Me: Conference for work.
Guard: For how long?
Me: Until Tuesday.
Guard: Pretty long for a conference. What kind of conference?
Me: Web development.
Guard: What’s that?
Ryan: You ever look at the internet and see animations and —
Guard No! Do you have any alcohol or firearms?
Me: No —
Guard: Dead bodies in the trunk or weapons of Mass Destruction.
Me. Um… no.
Guard: Where did you say you were going?
Me Toron —
Guard: For what?
Ryan: A conf —
Guard: WHO ARE YOU REALLY?????
Me: …
Guard: I need to see proof of American Citizenship.
Ryan: But —
Guard: I can order you to turn around and not come back until you have proof.
Me: b-b-b-but—
Ryan: Why—?
Guard: All right. Go ahead. If I see you again, I’ll kill you.
Me. Thank you sir.

Silenced reigned for the next few miles. The eastern sky slowly turned blue.

A word about the stretch of 401/402/whatever between the Michigan border and the ‘burbs of Toronto: Nothing there

7:00am: We are below a quarter tank. Time to think about refueling. Take the first exit with a “petrol” sign. Find the gas station. Closed. Hit the highway again. Find another exit promising “petrol”. Find, I kid you not, an “Esso” station with old-style, static-electricity generating metal pumps. Closed. Hit the road again. Realize that we haven’t seen a living human being since crossing the border. Suspect zombie activity. Hit yet another exit. Find yet another gas station closed. Notice that the highway is kind of a pink, fleshy color. Voice hypothesis that the highway is made out of zombies. Realize I am working on three hours of sleep in the last 48 and no food in the last 12.

7:45am: Heading into a glowing ball of fire the apparent size of a prize-winning pumpkin. Ryan has been pushing the car for the last several miles. We see a sign for London and make jokes about a wrong turn. Find (finally!) a working gas station and real live humans! We re-fill the car and warn them of encroaching horde of zombies. When asked what they look like, we reply that we didn’t actually see them, so they must be Ninja zombies.

Back on the road. Hit the outskirts of human civilization. Make the mistake of not placing blind faith in Google Maps and end up back in zombie territory. Retrace our steps and rediscover civilization. Enter Toronto. Again fall from grace with Google maps and find ourselves in a Grand Rapids-esque endless loop of one-way streets. Increase speed to build up centrifugal force necessary to fling us in the right direction. Finally find the Hilton. Find a spot in the bottom of the parking garage, among the rats and albino alligators. Head to exit. Door is locked. Walk up ramp. Find another exit. Door is locked. Walk up another level. Find another exit. Open.

At this point the fates relented and the day achieved a semblance of normality. We were about an hour and a half late, so upon throwing stuff in our hotel rooms we headed for our respective seminars.

Notes on the conference itself will come later.

All People Are Critics. Some Are More Critical Than Others

John Winkelman

Today I wrote my first movie review.

One of the big, ongoing projects at work is development on Spout.com, a movie discovery and discussion website. Several of my friends are regulars, so I finally bowed to peer pressure and created an account for myself. My user name is “Grasshopper”.

The first thing I did was to rate all of the movies I had seen. Simple enough to do — find the movie, and assign it a number between one and five. Before I knew it, I had rated over five hundred movies, and I am now up over a thousand. And that isn’t even counting all of the TV series and individual television episodes which can be rated; those would probably push me into the 2,000 range.

Normally I try not to shill for the projects I work on, but this time something unexpected happened: I had fun. I went through and found movies I hadn’t thought about in twenty years or more. Some of them were good, many more were mediocre or bad. Some of them made me feel quite nostalgic, accompanied by an odd sense of deja-vu wherein I could remember where I was and what I was doing when I watched the movie. Poltergeist with my brother and step-brother in Louisiana. Robocop with my brother, at home laying on the living room floor. The Crow with friends immediately after I returned from Russia. Star Wars with my Mom and brother in a movie theater in Jackson. The Razor’s Edge, sitting home surrounded by stacks of books.

Martial Arts is the only film genre I watch with a seriously critical eye, and I watch a lot of martial arts films. If I post a review of which I am particularly proud I will announce it here. In the meantime, browse around and see if you rediscover any old favorites.

Back Again

John Winkelman

Chaos, contrary to what you might think, is easily predictable. If many different areas of my life have a tendency towards instability, they will all become complicated at once.

Take my computer. The old one died a month ago. This is the first thing I am doing on my new machine. The build process went something like this:

-buy computer parts
-build computer
-install Windows XP, 64-bit edition
-install wrong drivers
-format hard drive
-install Windows XP, 64-bit edition
-install is corrupt
-format hard drive
-install Windows XP, 64-bit edition
-find 64-bit drivers
-discover that USB wireless adapter has no 64-bit drivers
-discover that antivirus and personal firewall software for 64-bit machine are rare and expensive
-format hard drive
-install Windows XP, 32-bit edition
-stare in confusion at notice that windows can’t find CD drive in the middle of Windows installing from CD drive
-format hard drive
-install Windows XP, 32-bit edition
-stare in confusion at notice that windows can’t find CD drive in the middle of Windows installing from CD drive
-copy files form CD to USB Flash drive, which now somehow is the D: drive
-stare in confusion at notice that windows can’t find USB drive that is says is now my D: drive
-format hard drive
-copy Windows install CD to new 4-gig USB Flash drive
-change boot order to USB FIRST
-install windows XP, 32-bit edition from USB drive
-stare in confusion at notice that Windows can’t find USB drive etc. etc.
-cross fingers and hit Enter
-stare in confusion as Windows finishes installing
-install drivers
-install Oblivion
-bask in the awesomeness that is Oblivion on a 64-bit, dual-core, 2GHz Athlon running 2Gb of RAM and a 512Mb NVidia video card

whew

Also, I started a new job at the beginning of the month. After a year and a half away, I am back at BBK Studio in its new, more developer-friendly iteration.

Funny old world, innit?

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.

Gaming and Surfing

John Winkelman

As I dive deeper into the theory and structure of the training courses, I realize that a lot of basic usability features of web pages and applications map closely to the features of adventure games which we consider vital and part of “good gameplay”.

Consider personal inventory. You are in a small room. You are wearing a backpack which contains a coil of rope and some food . Compare this to any of the numerous checkout screens at Amazon.com. Your shopping cart is used in the same way: You put something in it, and while you move from page to page (room to room) the things you put in the cart stay in the cart. They are available for you to use whenever you need them.

Consider navigation. In an adventure game it is considered poor form to put the player in a room from which there is no escape. By “no escape” I mean that the player character is alive and well, but cannot backtrack and cannot go forward. The only way out is to restore a saved game or manually restart the game (play with the game rather than within the game). This is analogous to hitting a page in a website where there are no navigation elements and the only way to move to a different part of the site is to hit the web browser’s “back” button (restore a saved game) or type a new URL in the address bar (restart the game).

I am sure there are many more parallels, but these seemed to be the obvious ones.

Shut That Thing Off and go Outside

John Winkelman

Where have I been? Walking around outside taking pictures in the warmest weather since early November. When not enjoying the sunshine, I have been spending my time doing contract work at the Steelcase University .

So far the life of a contract worker is treating me well. I am immersed in challenging work with extremely talented people and I am my own boss.

Though I could potentially be buried in Steelcase work for a good long time I have just joined Business Networking International , with the idea that I should not have all of my eggs in one basket, businesswise. I was kind of wary when I first heard of it, but when I went to a meeting as a visitor I walked out with the cards of half a dozen people who needed some web work done.

Does all this mean I will be too busy to have fun? Hell No! I will try to keep my hours down to ~30 a week, once I get settled into the new schedule. And, hopefully, a fair bit of that will be done from home, or from various cafes and bars with wireless internet connections.

I have begun work on Whirling Vector Shapes of Doom, version 2. Updated graphics, tweaks to the gameplay, and optimization to smooth out the animations. And maybe some sound.

The web design class at Kendall College is sliding into the crazy last weeks of the semester. I have not made any of my students cry yet, but I still have a month to turn up the heat.

Yeah… life is good.

Quitting Work: First Impressions

John Winkelman

It has been ten days since I walked out of my former place of employment. The deep-down sleep deprivation is wearing off, and some of my friends have commented that I look “younger”. I certainly feel better than I have in a long time. I guess I didn’t realize exactly how poisonous stress is until I removed the major source.

So what have I been doing? Reading. Writing. Watching movies. A little coding and a lot of working out. Already people are finding out that I am “on the market”, so to speak, and the requests for web work are beginning to trickle in.

I have more time to prepare for the Kendall class, so my students are getting a better education, or at least more precise beatings.

I have made no long-term plans. I intend to make no long-term plans until the beginning of summer, at the earliest. The next four months are for me to try to regain all those things I lost over the past fifteen years of too much work packed into too little time.

Me.stay();

John Winkelman

So I will be at work for a little while longer. The boss and I had a long talk after work today, and it put things in perspective. Enough perspective, anyway, that I will not just up and quit without having another job lined up.

You will notice, however, that I did not say I am not interested in finding another job. Time to start fleshing out my resumé.

So here is the question: From where comes the dissonance? Is it my personal life invading work, or work invading my personal life? Does the line need to be re-drawn in a more permanent color?

Time will tell.