Immanentize the Empathy
That didn’t take as long as I thought it would.
Photos from the Festival 2005 performance are up at Master Lee’s website. Once again, many thanks to Anisa for offering her superb photography skills.
Photos from the Midland Open Martial Arts Tournament will be posted later in the week.
Enjoy!
Yesterday was my 36th birthday. I was going to post something about the goings-on of previous June 5ths in the history of the world, but due to apocalyptic thunderstorms I was without power until after 11:00pm.
My weekend had two high points: The first was on Saturday, when Master Lee’s school performed downtown at Festival. The amazing Anisa did her usual brilliant job as our official/unofficial class photographer. The photos will be posted to Master Lee’s site later this week.
For me, the best part of the demonstration was when Master Lee’s nine-year-old grandson, Ethan, performed a solo version of Gung Li Chuan, one of our basic forms. In the photos Master Lee is standing behind Ethan, face absolutely glowing with pride.
Then yesterday my girlfriend Paula, and the afore-mentioned Anisa, and Anisa’s boyfriend Geoffrey cooked an amazing dinner (fish, asparagus, couscous, tiramisu) to help me celebrate while the thunder and lightning and wind and rain and hail raged outside. Bock bought me a bottle of rum, and my parents called to say Hi Happy Birthday
Good food, good friends, a loving family, and a numerically interesting birthday. Could life possibly get any better?
I just regretfully informed Team n3kk1d that I will not be joining them in the MS-150 this year. Too much to do, and not enough time in which to do it.
This Saturday I and many of my classmates will journey to Midland to compete in the Midland Open Martial Arts Tournament. This will be our fifth(?) year competing, I think.
Next Saturday from 1:00 to 2:00 PM our school will perform at the 2005 Grand Rapids Arts Festival. We have been doing this for about as long as I have been a student.
It comes down to this: If I have time to train for a bike rally, then I have time to train for a kung fu performance.
The design for es.o is slowly coming together. At this rate, I should be ready for the 2006 May 1st Re-Boot.
After going almost 40 hours without looking at a computer, I turn this one on and within two minutes of surfing come across Overheard in New York , which immediately sucked up an hour of my life and made me giggle like a fool.
I have been too busy spending time with a beautiful woman to post much over the past couple of weeks. Or rather, my creative energy has been directed elsewhere. So now seems a good time to make some changes.
Sometime in the next few days ES.O will go down for a little while as I switch over to a more robust, feature-rich content management system; probably TextPattern. So: New look, new functionality, and new purpose. I freelance now, so the front page will be more professional…whatever that means.
Rather than try to retro-fit all of this old content into the new framework I will probably take all of this stuff and shuffle it over to a subdomain; something like archives.eccesignum.org, or the like. Regardless, it will be linked from the new site.
When, exactly? You will know when you see it.
10:45pm. I have just finished grading my Kendall students. There will by laughter and tears, joy and pain, sunshine and rain. I have free time again.
I give it two weeks. Then I will begin to miss teaching.
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday dear Gautama
Happy Birthday to you!
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.
Well, it looks like my days as a Gentleman of Leisure are coming to an end. Starting Monday I am back to somewhat regular work hours, albeit this time as a contractor rather than a full-time employee. No more soap operas. No more sleeping in until noon. No more spending the entire day in my pajamas.
So it is appropriate that I hereby announce the release of Whirling Vector Shapes of Doom v1.0 . This is the first game I have completed in eighteen years. The last one was a dungeon crawl written in BASIC on a Commodore-64.
Having reached every milestone I set myself for this release I already see room for a dozen improvements, and I have ideas for the creation of another dozen games.
Stay tuned!
Reading: The Milagro Beanfield War
Drinking: Caol Ila 18-year single malt Scotch whiskey
Playing Flying Vector Objects of Doom (beta)