Four days until I begin teaching a college class. I am looking forward to it; the two weeks at the beginning of this past semester merely whetted my appetite for public humiliation and corporal punishment the dispensation of education.

This weekend I will re-open the class.eccesignum.org subdomain and make available to the public all of my/our lecture notes and resources. If some little po-dunk place like MIT can do it , then so can I.

Not me this time. Today I spent several hours helping a couple’a friends move into their new house just up the street. Yesterday I helped a couple’a other friends pack for their upcoming move to the apartment upstairs from me. Therefore, this weekend I have consumed much pizza and beer, and inhaled enough dust to…umm… hurt something which is endangered by dust.

Nearly forgot to mention the most importantest reason I rebuilt the Flash Photo Album ( viddy well, droogies ): Christmas present for Mom this year was a narrated walkthrough of the trip I made to India three years ago.

Well, thank the dark lemur-headed gods that THAT is over. 2003, I mean.

I work close to the river, so I see it practically every day. And I almost always have my camera with me. Therefore I have decided to begin a project which has been floating around in my head for a long, long time: A series of photos of the river , one a day, for a year. This, in part, has driven me to completely re-create the Flash photo album; providing for some easier navigation, dramatically simplifying the creation of new photo projects, and allowing for greater flexibility in the display of the photos.

Well, what really drove me to re-do the Flash application is, I hate hate hate making thumbnails.

I should also mention that this project is inspired in part by the Daily Oliver .

There you have it. The Kendall class starts on January 12, the same day my free time ends. I am working like mad to complete the rebuild of the Yoga Studio site before then.

With ten days to go until Christmas I have resigned myself to buying little if anything useful for anyone. Therefore I am going for “neat” or “meaningful” instead. Photo galleries for the family, and the code for said photo galleries for the online community.

The big rush is that in three weeks I begin teaching a class at Kendall, and that will eat up all, and I mean ALL, of my free until the end of April. The game is being taken off the back burner and being put back in the fridge. Any coding I want to do will have to happen at work. Heh.

In case this is my last post of the year, Happy Holidays!!

11:30pm. Still coding. Could have maybe been done earlier, but I went to yoga practice after work, then watched The Italian Job. Now in front of the computer for another fun-filled night. Last night ended at 1:00 this morning. I believe I should hit 40 hours some time tomorrow afternoon.

I am so burned out that I have become used to it and now I feel kind of good. William James wrote an essay called The Energies of Man , in which he posited that the more of X we do, the greater the capacity for X we create within ourselves, which allows us to do more of X. I am starting to understand what he meant.

Too bad the catalyst was work.

Here it is, 10:00pm, and I am home sitting in front of my new 21″ flat-screen monitor (wooHoo!), taking a break from working. Yep: In one of those odd moments of convergence, I am working under pressure of a holiday deadline. Just like being in the retail business again. After all these years… Last Thursday I worked until midnight. Looks like the same thing tonight. And tomorrow, and Thursday… and Friday. And maybe Sunday.

I made the decision a couple of years ago that work would never again interfere with the martial arts classes . This has largely held true; the only time work EVER takes precedence over class is when a deadline is jeopardized through my own actions; i.e. almost never. Once in a month of blue moon Sundays. The upshot of that is, class becomes a three-hour break in a crushingly long day.

Class is also what keeps me from going all Skynet on the human race.

So how about a little informal poll here: What keeps you sane in an insane world?

It is my sad duty to inform you, my readers, that Timeline is a steaming pile of poo. Let me ruin it for you:

The surfer and the cute chick live. The professor lives. The French guy dies. The British are being assisted by an evil scientist from the present day. The professor and the Hot Scottish Guy (who also lives, but stays in the past) blow up the English fortress with gunpowder made by the professor as part of a bargain to keep from being run through by the English lord. The sarcophagus with the portrait of a one-eared lord? It has the Hot Scottish Guy and the Cute French Girl in it.

The cliches run rampant like… like… cliches at a college Renaissance festival.

The best actors were the trebuchets.

You have been warned.

Apparently some crazy person went and made a documentary about They Might Be Giants . Grand Rapidians can see it at the UICA pretty much any evening before the end of the year. That is all.

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.