Ecce Sigum

Author: John Winkelman

  • Ignis Fatuus

    After numerous false starts the computer is finally up and running. I was without a steady home PC for over a month, and in that time I rediscovered things I had forgotten about. Like girls. And books. And friends.

    The rudiments of the first Project Gutenberg, uh, project are up at the PG subdomain . The first and only completely marked up text is Tartuffe.

    A surprising number of the available PG texts are Russian in origin; Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, et.al. Probably because the type of person who would spend several weeks typing an eight hundred page novel into a text editor is the type of person who would get a kick out of reading that novel in its original language. I am not that hard-core, but I do like to get into the spirit of things, so this evening while I was on the phone with a beautiful woman I cooked up a big mess o’ borscht. My recipe is as follows, in descending order of volume of ingredients: water, beets, potatoes, onion, celery, carrot, salt, Tabasco. The precise proportions don’t really matter. In this borscht is a lot like gumbo. As long as you have beets, pretty much everything else is done to taste. The Tabasco is in place of the more traditional vinegar, and it compliments the deep red of the soup nicely.

    For those of you who think I am now a communist or something, let me assure you that the only Marx I follow has a New York accent.

    On a less irreverent note, I added a new photo page, currently linked in at the bottom of the navigation. All pics were taken with an Olympus D-550 set to take low-light pictures. Slow shutter speeds and fast motion blurs.

  • Back In 10 Minutes

    The new computer is up and running, and I am ironing out the last few bugs. Things are more complicated than they really need to be.

    Since I am quite busy and don’t want my *checks stats page* six readers to be bored, here are a couple of pages full of stuff to read:

    http://www.textism.com – the weblog of an expatriate Canadian now living in French wine country. Although I probably would not enjoy his company for long he does write a wonderful web-log.

    http://www.mcsweeneys.net – the official site for Timothy McSweeney’s magazine. All of the writing in here is humorous, quirky, and very good. In particular check out the lists page , which can cause a work slowdown of unprecedented proportions.

    I also put up the abstract-in-progress of my work on the Project Gutenberg stuff, and I will have a project subdomain up by the end of the week. I have a feeling this project will eventually be huge.

  • The Genius of Marketing

    Items offered to me, at a Substantial Discount, in my Amazon.com Gold Box:

    An Iron
    A Digimon Action Figure
    Baby Jockey Light Blue Boxer Short Set
    Collector’s Edition Anodized 11-inch Griddle w/ Non-Stick Finish
    LabTech Computer Speakers
    Cordless Phone with Call Waiting, Ivory
    Amelie on DVD
    5 1/2 – quart Round French Oven, Blue
    3 – quart Cast-Iron Indoor – Outdoor Cooker Combo
    Baby Sweet Jacket, Pant, and Hat set

    Possible conclusions drawn about myself, based on contents of preceding list:

    I have children.
    I watch French movies.
    I cook.
    I will play with something labeled “action figure” when it is clearly a “doll”.
    I require call waiting.
    I own a computer.
    I construct pancakes with a radius less than 5.5 inches.
    I require multiple hardware options when making a Grilled Cheese Sandwich.
    I collect aluminum cookware.
    I cook French children.
    I am susceptible to impulse purchases.

    Some of these conclusion would be accurate. I’m not telling you which ones.

  • My Eyes Are Bleeding

    Started and finished marking up Tartuffe over the weekend. Took me about five hours. In prose the structure of the individual line is important so every single line had to have a start tag and an end tag. Translation: chapped eyes. An 800k document took me two hours, and a 120k (pre-markup) document took me five.

    Here are links to Tartuffe and The Club of Queer Trades . Also, here is the XML Schema I am working on for Project Gutenberg.

    I am also working on an abstract/explanation/tutorial on marking up PG texts in XML based on the afore-mentioned Schema. This will be insanely dull and opaque and of interest only to the kind of people who are willing to spend hours at a time converting an electronic version of a hundred-year-old book into a different electronic version of a hundred-year-old book.

    And thus do I pass my time as I wait for the world to end.

  • Dead Souls

    I recently finished marking up Nikolai Gogols Dead Souls . For those of you who suddenly think I am a Satanist or something, the explanation is as follows: Nikolai Gogol , a Russian writer who lived in the early part of the nineteenth century, wrote a book called Dead Souls . Project Gutenberg has made available a plain-text version of the book, and I have taken that plain text and marked it up as XML, in the hope that one of these days I will have a formatted, readable, printable version up on ES.O.

    Marking up Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades took about an hour. This one took about two. At this rate, a book a week is not only possible, but easy, relaxing and rewarding; and it makes me wonder why the HTML Writers Guild has done nothing since early 2000.

    Since my inquiries have generated no replies from the folks at the HTML Writer’s Guild I must assume I am on my own on this project. When I get the new computer up and running I will slap together a couple of stylesheets for the marked-up texts, and perhaps bundle them off to the people who run Project Gutenberg.

    In the meantime, make yourself a rock band .

  • Soon, Very Soon

    Just got word that the new computer is on its way. Should be here next week. Intel p4 2.53GHz; 100gig hard drive; 512mB of high-speed RAM; 40x12x48 CDR/W drive; screaming case with a power supply which can be used to jump-start a car.

    And I will use it to check my email. But I will check my email faster and better than anyone else on the planet.

  • Games and Such

    I pimp Orisinal on an almost-weekly basis, to keep my readers entertained when I am not regularly posting to my journal. For those of you who think Orisinal is too Cute, I have two new ones:

    The Mystery of Time and Space is a graphic adventure in Flash, highly reminescent of the old Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure. And Triglax is an astounding, Diablo-esque game done entirely in Dynamic HTML! Now THAT is some serious mojo!

    I am flexing my Flash muscles a little, and soon Bock and I should have a rudimentary working draft of Battlefish up and ready for testing. Stay tuned!

  • Half a Lifetime

    What kind of hometown is Springport, you ask? Lets see… Village population ~700; township (36 square miles) population in the neighborhood of 3,000. Pretty much all woods and farms. One golf course (used to be a field), one race track (used to be a field). When neighboring town Eaton Rapids had its homecoming earlier this month, the theme was “Hillbilly Week”, so all of the Eaton Rapids folk dressed up like Springport folk.

    Big rivals Concord shut out Springport at the homecoming game on Friday. I stuck around until the end of the third quarter, when it was obvious that Springport couldn’t possibly win. The crowd held some familiar faces, people I hadn’t seen in around fifteen years, who were in town for the same reason I was.

    The fifteen-year-class reunion took place at the Hotel Tavern in Springport. Of the original 67 members of the Class of 1987, perhaps eighteen participated. I didn’t mind; everyone who showed up was genuinely interested in the fate and doings of the others, some of whom were in town from as far away as Massachusetts.

    To make a long story short, no-one is dead, no-one is in prison, some people are happy, some are sad, and some of the girls I never paid attention to in high school are now stunningly beautiful women. The three men who were at the bar all looked pretty much like they did fifteen years ago. Different hairlines, but the same faces.

    As the evening progressed I felt recurring waves of vertigo and deja vu, memories of the same people in the same configuration, sitting at cafeteria tables, eating cafeteria food, talking the same talk at a smaller magnitude. Specific images and conversations stick in my mind: Meredith talking about her six children. Jane talking about her husband. The deep sadness in Keri’s eyes. Rusty’s pony-tail stuck through the back of his baseball cap. The angel in Nikki and the devil in Kelly. After the initial drinking binge a comfortable melancholy settled in, and for the first time in years, or ever, we just sat and talked. I finally let my high-school demons go five years ago, so this was a reunion of old friends.

    We plan to get together in five years, same time, same place, and talk about what has gone before, and what is to come. Twenty years is a long time.

  • Notes from the Deep Fields

    The new computer isn’t in yet. I suspect the labor disputes among the dock-workers on the West coast have something to do with that. Not having a computer at home means going back to work at night and working on my site when no-one else is around. The new re-build you see before you is the result. The old design wasted too much real-estate.

    Today I will be attending the Homecoming game at my old high school . I haven’t seen one of those in… oh, about fifteen years. Coincidentally, this was to be the weekend of the fifteenth reunion of the Class of 1987, but due to lack of interest, it was downgraded to “hanging out in a bar after the game”.

    Played around a little with the Flash MX Drawing API again last night, and here is the result .

  • Poetry of Motion II

    Grasp the Bird’s Tail
    Phoenix Facing the Sun
    Carry the Tiger to the Mountain
    White Crane Swallow’s the Sword
    Holding the Moon
    Lion Open’s its Mouth
    Wise Cat Catches the Rat
    Playing the Guitar
    Parting the Wild Horses Mane