Ecce Sigum

Category: Life

  • Semi-Regular Update Number 1

    This is my first general update post in a very long time. I’m trying to get back in the habit of releasing these things once in a while. Here goes…

    Writing

    This month is “30 in 30”, a sort of smaller scale, unofficial NaNoWriMo. Our local writing group, WriteOnGR, is participating and people are pounding out the words. Me? Not so much. I have 1,500 words of a short story. I think it has potential, but between all my other pursuits I doubt I’ll have time to get to 30,000 this month. Still, 1,072 words a day for a month is a lot easier than 1,667 a day in November.

    For NaNoWriMo 2014 I wrote a dozen short stories, or parts thereof. I think four of them have potential, so I am editing them into first-draft shape, preparatory to sending them out to some first readers. I hope to get at least one more short story completed this month, for a total of six to edit, re-write, re-write again, and begin shopping around for publication.

    I also still have the 75% (55,000 words) of a novel I completed back in November 2013. I have maybe 25,000 words to go to reach the end, and it requires some substantial edits to get it ready for publication. That will keep me busy for the rest of the winter and spring, at least.

    Publishing

    Things are busy at Caffeinated Press. Our first publication, Brewed Awakenings I, hits the shelves in a couple of weeks and we are scrambling to reserve venues for the release events. We are looking at space on the southeast side of town, downtown, and on the lakeshore – likely Holland or Grand Haven. All this will happen in early March.

    Martial Arts

    The kung fu and tai chi classes are going great! The energy level is high so far this year and everyone is focused and working hard. We have several new students who are enjoying the classes so far.

    The second session of the “Chi Kung for Seniors” class just started at Saint Andrew’s Episcopal. We have about half a dozen participants, down significantly from the last session. I expect enrollment will pick up again in Spring.

    Our Chinese New Year dinner is coming up in a couple of weeks, at the Blue Ginger Asian Kitchen. We will be celebrating the year of the Sheep. I am looking forward to it; almost everyone I know is over and done with the Year of the Horse.

    Reading

    I have several stacks of books to plow through. Right now I think I am Subterranean Press‘s #1 customer. I have at least two dozen of their titles I have not read yet. Add to that the pile of books I picked up at ConFusion 2015, and I probably have enough to last me the rest of the year. Will that stop me from buying more books as money and interest coincide? I think not! On top of all that are the books by authors who attended ConFusion, which I picked up to read just to get an idea of Who’s Who in the fantasy and science fiction world. Because of ConFusion most of my reading so far this year has been genre fiction – Mary Robinette Kowal, Saladin Ahmed, Wesley Chu, Karen Lord, et al. I also read Jim Harrison‘s newest book, The Big Seven. It wasn’t his best, but mediocre Harrison is still better than just about anything else out there. I also burned through Dynamics of Faith, by Paul Tillich, for the monthly-ish Thinking About Stuff get-together. Quite remarkable depth of though for such a small book.

    Life

    Every month brings me a little closer to paying off my house, and every month brings another improvement or repair which need time and money. Right now the list includes, but is not limited to: replacing all of the storm doors and windows; re-insulate my house; water-proofing the floor and walls of my old, old basement; re-landscaping the front of my property and replacing the retaining wall; finishing the attic to make it a full living space; replacing the garage door and door opener; replace the timber retaining wall in the back yard; re-grade the yard to channel water runoff away from the base of my house. This will be an ongoing project.

    Work is work. KPMG is treating me well; the work is satisfactory and my co-workers are amazing. We move into a new office in a few weeks. I will post pictures when we are settled in.

  • Time Keeps On

    Over four months after my last entry here, I find time for another one.

    Life got busy for me right at the beginning of May. Master Lee went on vacation, visiting his students in Vietnam and Australia, so class suddenly became much busier. This continued right up through Memorial Day and into the Festival of the Arts performance. I turned 43 on June 5, and took the next week off from work. Spent a few days exploring Traverse City, then suddenly started a new relationship with a beautiful, amazing woman. This led directly to me being involved in a summer solstice celebration, where I collaborate with some people to project Flash visuals (fire, water, evolving plants, snowflakes) on the side of a barn and silo. Right after that, a big project kicked off at work, and that has kept me pretty busy since then.

    The work has been interesting. It is a PhoneGap project, using a lot of HTML5/CSS3/jQuery and associated technologies. We used an in-house MVC platform, which was a first for me (using MVC, that is), so I had to negotiate quite a learning curve. Also learned a tremendous amount about jQuery Deferreds, hardware-accelerated CSS animations, custom event listeners, and how the MVC stack keeps disparate parts of an app in synch. I discovered how frustrating it can be to debug mobile applications. The Dalvik Debug Monitor, as good as it is generally, does tend to crash with irritating frequency. Fortunately, 90% of debugging can be done in a desktop browser. But holy cow, can that last 10% be frustrating.

    Okay; enough of this for now. When I have time I will post a list of the specific issues I came across, and how I solved them.

  • On Walking to Work

    For most of my career as a developer – say, nine of the past twelve years – I have lived within two miles of my workplace. Cybernet, BBK/PeopleDesign and now, Cynergy. On heavy traffic days it is actually faster for me to walk to work than to drive. Even on good days, driving saves me, at best, ten minutes in each direction. When weather permits, I ride my bike.

    But I like best to walk. Especially in the morning, when the city is still waking up. The best days are in the cold parts of the year when the sun is just hitting the tops of the highest trees and buildings. Those are also the days when I walk home after dark.

    Biking is more efficient, certainly, but – weather aside – I trust the drivers on the road less than during brighter parts of the year. There are fewer bikers from November through March, so drivers are even less aware of them (us) than usual. I can then choose to slalom quickly on the streets, slowly on the sidewalk, or just walk.

    Currently I am exactly a mile and a half from work. The walk takes a little less than half an hour each way. Call it a total of fifty minutes a day, for three miles. Fifteen miles a week, and slightly over four hours. Sometimes I will stop for coffee at MadCap or the Grand Central Market. On the way home, I will often swing by the library. Sometimes I will stop back at the Grand Central Market for a sandwich.

    The smell of the city changes from block to block and from month to month. In the summer, the city smells green and steamy. In the winter, earth and smoke. Currently, in the morning the scent trail goes something like this: leaves, earth, bread baking, pavement, car exhaust, bus fumes, cigarette smoke, concrete, pancakes, coffee, river, and occasionally hops from one of the local breweries. Each day is unique as a fingerprint.

    This is the last work day of the year. Since i started this job on August 22, I have driven to work exactly twice. Call it 18 weeks. Or 17, when holidays are removed. So 17 weeks, five work-days a week, three miles a day. 255 miles. Or in my Subaru, a full tank of gas. Extrapolate it out and it is around 750 miles a year of using alternate transportation.

    And the best part is that I feel more connected with Grand Rapids than I have in years. Working in front of a computer for 8+ hours a day, even in an office full of good people, is kind of alienating. Walking brings me back to earth.

  • Exploring the Primal Blueprint

    For about eight months now I have been following a diet and lifestyle plan called the Primal Blueprint. It has many dedicated followers and fervent advocates. Actually, rather than “follow” I would say I fly in loose formation with the Blueprint. I have my lapses – being only human, and living around the corner from one of the best bakeries in the city. Still – my health and fitness levels are much improved, and despite the occasional bag of potato chips for dinner, things continue to improve on a gradual and manageable trajectory. I can fit into clothes that last buttoned in my early 30s, if not earlier. My weight hasn’t been this low, I think, since I began building websites for a living.

    I have never been one to follow “a diet”. The path that took me to where I am now follows:

    Back in 2007 my brother, his future wife and I road-tripped to Louisiana to visit our dad and spend some time wandering around Mardi Gras. We had a splendid old time, ate tremendous amounts of really good food, and got to enjoy New Orleans when it was bearably hot and humid. Every day brought a new delicacy, and it being Mardi Gras time, we went through at least one full King Cake every day. Add to that all the deep-fried southern delicacies, gallons of beer from the Abita Springs brewery less than a mile from Dad’s house, and, well, a lot more of me came back from vacation than started out.

    I didn’t really feel like I had gained weight. My clothes were tight, and I had to let out my belts a notch, but I told myself it was just the winter hibernation metabolism doing its thing. I bought a bathroom scale, found out I weighed around 205 pounds. It didn’t seem like such a big deal; as a martial arts instructor I work out a lot; up to fifteen hours a week in class, plus all my personal training. Still, 205 seemed kind of high.

    Thinking back through the list of food on the vacation, talking to my girlfriend, I realized I couldn’t name a single vegetable I had eaten, other than those in the buckets of gumbo or chili, or french fries, or onion rings. That made me feel kind of queasy.

    I immediately drove to the store and bought a car-load of fresh (-ish; they were from a grocery store) vegetables and fruit, and started packing bowls of chopped up tomatoes and avocado for lunch at work. This represented a big change from my usual habit of ordering a sandwich nearly as big as my head from the amazing kitchen at Founders Brewing Company, which at the time was one floor down from where I worked. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the weight began dropping off. For a while, it seemed like every other day I would weigh myself and I would have lost another pound. By the beginning of May I was approaching 190. That was when the Fulton Street Farmer’s Market opened for the year. Suddenly I had vegetables in abundance.

    At about that same time my girlfriend put herself on a restricted diet, which cut out all refined sugar, corn syrup and wheat gluten. Have you ever tried going out to eat, or buying common snack foods, without getting at least one of those three ingredients? Not easy at all. Here is where I had to begin adding new tools to my intellectual toolkit. Namely, cooking. A random bowl of raw vegetables is perfectly acceptable for a lunch for one, but when it comes to full meals with a significant other, it quickly gets old.

    Between the internet and my girlfriend’s stash of vegetarian and vegan cookbooks, we built up a reasonable repertoire of yummy recipes. For me, the weight continued to fall. I got down below 190 for the first time in who knows how long. Finally, I stabilized around 185, with one noticeable dip down close to 180 during a serious bout of the flu.

    Life was good. Then I got complacent. Then the weight started creeping back, a pound at a time. Work- and life- related stress made things worse. Over the next year and a half I returned to 195, where my weight stabilized, though a hard weekend of pizza and beer could bring it back up close to 200. And here I stayed until roughly February 2011.

    As is usual at the turning of the lunar new year, I had made a few goals for myself. Not resolutions in the sense that I wanted to accomplish this and that and the other thing. More like, these few important things in my life, I want to do a little better. Of course my weight was one of those things.

    I don’t remember how I discovered Mark’s Daily Apple, but I had been reading it for a few months. He seemed to really know what he was talking about, and backed up everything with scientific research (from actual scientists, no less!), statistics, and anecdotal evidence from himself and others of a similar mind-set. And his website is the hub of a community of happy, healthy, motivated people.

    Anyway: Chinese New Year came and went, it was now the Year of the Rabbit. And I read the story of the Unconquerable Dave. Take a minute to read this one. It is really something.

    Re-inspired, I cut way back on the grains and legumes, and ramped up the meat and veggies. Again, the weight started coming off; more slowly this time, but also more steadily. 190 came and went, then 185. Then I got laid off, and my weight stabilized at 185. More free time meant more time to prepare good food, but it also means more time to eat. Took me a little while to find the right balance. I got the food figured out, and the weight started to come off again, still slowly and manageably. Unlike in 2007, I this time I noticed my energy level increasing, as well as the quality of my sleep, and my overall sense of strength and well-being. I don’t know exactly what I did differently this time. Possibly less sugar.

    So here I am now. My weight is now stable around 175. I have had to replace most of my wardrobe; three bags of large clothes off to Goodwill, and a small stash of 36″-waist pants for the holidays. I have a new job, and I walk or bike one and a half miles to work every day, carrying an 18 pound backpack. The fresh vegetables are becoming scarce, so I will have to start buying supermarket produce again for the first time in six months. I still indulge in the occasional snack food or pizza, but usually only on the weekends, and always in smaller quantities than before.

    So: What do I think of the Primal Blueprint? Here is a list.

    1. The food side of the PB was surprisingly easy to stick to, up to about 80%. Cutting out starchy root vegetables, legumes, and grains seriously impacts dining out. So I prefer to show moderation, even in moderation. Having said that, knowing that I got such great results even while not being super-strict gives me more respect for the PB.

    2. The exercise/lifestyle aspect of PB – move slowly a lot, sprint occasionally, lift heavy things, get lots of sleep – fits in well with the current phase of my life. Martial arts and the PB complement each other nicely. The most difficult part is “get lots of sleep”.

    3. The online community is great! Lots of support from the commenters and posters in the forums. Given the lifestyles of many of the PB aficionados, it feels like a distributed tribe.

    4. The information on the site is well documented. Sisson is very good at backing up everything he says with references for people who want to do more research on their own.

    So I feel comfortable advocating the Primal Blueprint. It worked for me. A few of my friends have tried it out, and have had great results. I haven’t felt this healthy since I was in my late 20s. If any of my half-dozen or so readers have tried this, post a comment! I am interested in hearing your story.

  • Toys Become Tools

    Back in March Seth Godin wrote that he was happy that some of the common web technologies appear to be, in the opinion of the cognoscenti, “dead”. Dead, in this case, meaning supplanted by the myriad shiny new toys available to anyone with the appropriate budget and bandwidth. Now that the shine has worn off of “weblogs”, for instance, they can once again be made repositories of information. Useful, instead of cool.

    I had never really thought about it, but he is absolutely right. Social media – Facebook, Twitter, and the like – have slurped up the attention bandwidth which once made Movable Type and the like profitable ventures. Your cat photos get posted on Facebook. Other peoples’ cat photos get posted on a Tumblr page. Add captions and upload it to I Can Has Cheezburger, and now everyone can play with your cat. (quick question: do you ever bother to pay attention to who creates individual LOLcats at ICHC?)

    Kevin Kelly once said that the older a technology is, the more likely it is to remain useful*. Axes have been around at least as long as Homo sapiens, and levers probably even longer. And while the physical representation of an old-but-useful technology may evolve (c.f. axe -> saw -> chainsaw -> lightsaber), it seldom does away with the need which drove the original discovery. Actually, that may be the only event which would completely kill off a piece of technology – the ultimate solution to the problem which prompted its invention. When there is no longer anything which can be improved by the application of percussive force, the hammer will finally disappear.

    * “old” technology is not synonymous with “dead” technology.

  • Welcome to Ecce Signum, version 6

    Welcome back, everyone! Life has been interesting over here at es.o, It is something of a long story – which I will get to in a moment – but it has a positive ending.

    Back in early June one of the sites I maintain got hacked. It was my own fault; an old install of Textpattern, the updating of which I had let fall by the wayside, coupled with not updating my admin passwords nearly as often as I should. In any event, I found myself in a position where the site needed to be rebuilt from the ground up in a week. Three hours of putzing around with TextPattern convinced me that it wouldn’t happen there. So I bit my lip and created a new site over at Drupal Gardens. I say “bit my lip” because Drupal and I have had, at best, a problematic relationship, which probably contributed tangentially to my summer of unemployment.

    Anyway.

    Four days later, and the site was up and running again. There was some goofiness surrounding the email and the use of CNAME records, but that got sorted within a day.

    Fast forward to the beginning of August, 2011. www.eccesignum.org/, running on the exact same setup as the other site, got hacked. It wasn't taken down, but the content management area was rendered unusable. Essentially my site became Read Only. This was not as traumatic as it sounds; when the other site went down, I immediately backed up everything on my own site, just in case. And, though the admin area of es.o no longer worked, I could still get into the database and pull down all of the blog posts, images, Flash files, archives, the whole shebang.

    I set up a new site at Drupal Gardens and started building a new site. I knew I wanted it to be a blog, and I knew I wanted it to go all the way back to the beginning. Herein lay the first challenge.

    I have been running this blog in one form or another since December 2001. Earlier than that, actually, but those files are long gone (I think. I still have some floppy disks to look through).

    When I first started, it was completely static HTML. If I wanted to add a blog entry, I had to update it in raw code.

    Next came a simple framework of PHP includes, but I was still writing each entry as raw code.

    Then I built an XML parser, and set up a simple system of linking different chunks of content together.

    Then I built a content management system which used XML, XSLT, and a minimal amount of PHP to build the files.

    Then I archived all that, and moved over to using TextPattern, round about version 3, I think. That was in 2005.

    And now, here I am. www.eccesignum.org/ is running on an install of Drupal 7, hosted at Drupal Gardens.

    There are currently something over 710 blog posts. Entering them was no small task. Es.o has been through so many evolutions that there was no way to just do a bulk import. So I want through every blog post, one at a time, and copy-and-pasted the source code into the new site. Then I went through and uploaded all of the old images and Flash movies to either this site or Flickr, and linked everything back together, Then I took a pass through all of the posts looking for any cross-links, and re-linked them so they all go to the appropriate place on the new site. Actually, that last bit is an ongoing process.

    Again, while a huge amount of work – probably 50 hours over the past seven weeks – it was not traumatic. I got to read the entirety of my blog, from beginning to end, one post at a time. I revisited old Flash experiments, and felt moments of the excitement I felt when posting my first experiments in Flash 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. All the work angst, put in perspective. Of the twelve years I have been a web developer, I have been blogging for ten.

    My plan, at the moment, is to be a little more consistent with the writing. No more two-month gaps. The route to the new job takes me through the center of town, either walking or biking, so I will be able to re-connect with Grand Rapids in a way that I haven’t done in about a decade. Also expect to see more technical posts of the “It took me hours to figure this out. Here is a cheat sheet so the same thing doesn’t happen to you” variety.

    Starting, of course, with what to look out for when transferring an old site to Drupal Gardens.

    Thanks for visiting!

  • Four Weeks Later

    So here I am, unemployed for a month. Just got word that earlier today, four more people were let go by my former employer. So that is five of us, pounding the pavement, chasing after the almighty dollar. I have had some luck; got some contract work early on, and meeting with some folks over the next couple of weeks. I still haven’t finished the paperwork for unemployment; psychologically, it feels like that would be acknowledging something I don’t quite want to acknowledge yet.

    In my free time I have been reading a lot, and spending more time with my girlfriend, and taking care of things around the house. My days have been surprisingly full, actually, and it makes me wonder how I ever managed while I was working 45-60 hours a week. In the last ten days I think I have got a full eight hours of sleep at least three times. Last time I did that was, umm…college, I think, when sleeping in until 1 in the afternoon on a Tuesday was a point of pride.

    The one serious project I have completed so far has been to move the website for From the Heart Yoga over to Drupal Gardens. That’s right; the CMS which caused me such grief over the past year is now my go-to solution for almost any standard website I might be called upon to build. I actually learned a few interesting technical things, which will be the subject of upcoming blog posts of the “I had to figure this out for myself; here are my notes so you don’t have to” type.

    Other than the lack of health insurance, I would/could comfortably do this for a long time. Except…

    Except…

    There are a lot of other people out there who are also unemployed, or under-employed, and who do not have the prospects I do, and to whom I feel obligated. I have a lot of friends who are hurting right now, and, if I can’t actually get them back on their feet, I feel that I should get myself back up and running so that I am in a better position to help them if the need should arise. What kind of friend would I be if I have the opportunity to help someone else, and deliberately put myself in a position where I can’t?

    Yeah, having time to think has definitely broadened my horizons.

  • The Psychology of the Freshly Unemployed

    Here it is, five days in. I picked up a couple of hours of contract work yesterday, which was nice. Trying to get my head into the game today. The constant rain makes me want to go back to bed. I have a couple of dozen projects which are half-completed, several of which I could get done by the end of the week. I have a few new skill sets I need to work on (mobile web, Android app development, AIR development, augmented reality), but I can feel myself beginning to succumb to option paralysis.

    My instincts tell me I am still a full-time worker, and that I am home during the late morning hours means I am either on vacation or this is the weekend. This triggers my “I’ve done enough work this week” reflex, which makes it more difficult to want to spend time in front of the computer. Another oddity is that I am unemployed, but everyone in my peer group is working right now. I am out of synch with the greater part of my life.

    Today I am cleaning up my house; clearing off surfaces and removing distractions. Every space can be put to use as a place to think, or meditate, or reflect. Or play. I have discovered that the TV show NUMB3RS is surprisingly inspiring, mostly because the obsessive-compulsive geek part of me can identify with Charlie Eppes.

    I also applied for unemployment yesterday, which was the first work-related thing in the past week which has felt “real”. If I have the numbers figured correctly – and it’s a big “if” – unemployment should cover all of my expenses for the next few months, which means I will have time to learn some new skills and do some serious networking. Suddenly being a contractor/freelancer is a lot more appealing. Two years ago this would have been devastating. Now it is kind of invigorating.

  • My Toolkit

    I spent my tax returns this year on a new laptop. Specifically, a 16″ Sony Vaio, with a 1.73 GHz Intel I7 processor, 4 gigs of ram, a 500GB hard drive, and a mobile video card with 1Gb of onboard RAM, pushing a display with 1920×1080 full HD resolution. My desktop PC, a stupendous bad-ass of a gaming/development rig, is about five years old. In fact, it was the first thing I bought when I started my recent ex-job. While still a fine machine, it is not so good for freelancing or contract work as I can’t take it with me to different job sites. Now that I am between jobs, it seems appropriate that I spend my suddenly available time setting up the new machine as a money-making tool. At worst, I hope to make enough money with it to pay for it.

    The great thing about the type of development I do is that all of the tools I need are free. So here they are, roughly categorized:

    General Web Development
    Notepad++ – my favorite text editor. Been using it for about six years, since Bock turned me on to it.
    I.E. Tester – Tool which allows users to test their web sites in multiple versions of Internet Explorer. You can see how your work looks in seven(!) different versions of IE, if you choose.
    FileZilla – easy-to-use FTP client
    XAMPP – one-click installer for an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.
    Drupal Gardens – A web host which specializes in Drupal 7. Basic accounts are free, but full-featured, and make great test environments.

    Flash
    Adobe Flex SDK – open-source compiler for Flash and Flex projects
    Adobe AIR SDK – Tool kit for developing AIR applications
    Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit – specialized tool for advanced image manipulation

    Mobile
    Eclipse – Java development environment
    Android SDK – bundle of tools for developing and testing applications for Android phones
    Appcelerator Titanium – Andy turned me on to this one; it’s a tool kit for developing mobile and desktop applications.

    Artistic and Media
    Miro Video Converter – easily converts video files between multiple different formats. Especially useful for web-based video.
    Audacity Audio Editor – great tool for editing and manipulating sound files
    Picasa – Photo storage, cataloging, and editing
    GIMP – open-source Graphics program, in the same family as Photoshop
    Blender – 3d model creation, animation, and exporting
    Processing – Java-based tool for creating abstract art. Can also be used to create Java applications
    Inform 7 – The Inform system is used to create text adventure games (think Zork, or Leather Goddesses from Phobos) using natural language both to create the games and play them.
    Photosynth – awesome tool which can stitch photographs together into a 3d model or scene.
    Google Earth Google’s virtual model of the Earth
    Flickr – Where I keep all of my photos. 16,000 and increasing every day.

    Writing, Management, Documentation
    Google Docs – If you have a gmail account, you get this for free. Word processing, spreadsheet, and much more.
    Open Office – Free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.

    I will update this list as I discover new or alternate tools.

  • Day 2

    …it’s not that I’m worried about finding work, or making money. It’s more a sense of bewilderment. Though I have expected this day for over a year, and have been preparing things for the eventuality, actually walking through that door was a bit of a shock. I have abruptly gone from too much to do in too little time, to the opposite – all the time in the world, and no clue what I am going to do with it. Not having the pressure of a restricted schedule makes lessens the drive to make efficient use of any given moment.

    Back at the beginning of the year I made a list of about thirty chores and small jobs which could reasonably be accomplished in about fifteen minutes. Given two hours of free time a day, fifteen minutes is a lot of time. With sixteen hours or more a day, yeah, fifteen minutes is fifteen minutes.

    This is the third job in 23 years from which I have been let go. The first one was a produce factory in Eaton Rapids. I was a green-season employee, took a sick day, and was fired the next day. A couple of years later I spent a few weeks working as a landscaper. Started fun, ended badly when the company went out of business. Such is life.

    I think my first act will be to spend a week clearing my head. Next week I will start making decisions.