All great change in America begins at the dinner table.
Work in a different era
As much as I like to play with technology, I often feel like I belong to a different era. I’m sure that’s in part because I only have a limited and overly positive view of times past, but I think there’s something else to it, too.
A few days ago, I went to work with one of my clients. He’s an older man who’s on the tail end of a successful career, still ambitious enough to be developing a small but growing internet business.
“Ken, my boy!” he greeted me. We worked on a number of issues and improvements concerning his web site. No stress. We were working together. I made money; he got what he needed; everyone came out better.
Afterward we went out to lunch across the street at a small restaurant and antique store. The ladies’ Red Hat Club was there chattering away. It’s a small town. Everyone seems to know, and be on good terms with, everyone else.
Churchill
Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.
B a 133t w3b HaX0r
An [Advent calendar for web programming geeks][1].
[1]: http://24ways.org/
Crashes!
Well, it turns out this page was crashing for my mom and Helen; both on Mac OS 10.3 using Safari. I thought it might be the Greek text via Unicode below, but it turns out it was the [graphic of Jack (below)][1] which I’d saved from Apple’s Preview! Bad JPEG. Hmph. Well, it’s fixed now. FYI.
[1]: http://php.kpmartin.com/wordpress/#post-4
I got a goat
My mom is cool. For Christmas, she donated a [dairy goat][1] in our name via [Samaritan’s Purse][2]. It will supply milk, butter, and cheese, and the “surplus can be sold to pay for other essentials like medicine and schooling”. Very cool.
[1]: http://www.samaritanspurse.org/gift/catalog/viewPrd.asp?idproduct=36
[2]: http://www.samaritanspurse.org/
Kong was cool
Helen and I got a rare movie date, and went to see *[King Kong][1]*. One of us wanted to; the other kindly agreed. We both left impressed. Very well done. Stunning visually. Sometimes a bit much on the modern gooey/buggy creepiness for me, but that’s just the way things are done nowadays for some reason, and it wasn’t too bad. There was definitely a *Lord of the Rings* feel to parts of it, visually.
We saw it on a super-mega-deluxe-biggie-sized screen. We were up a little closer than usual to the screen, which I normally wouldn’t like, but in this case I did. The screen was so big I had to turn my head to see different things, like really being outside. They also had the super-wizza sound system, but the whole surround sound thing just doesn’t add to the picture in general for me. Except for the very deep bass, which isn’t directional and adds a lot, most of it is just distracting to me; like it’s trying so hard to seem real that it screams fake. (My apologies to all you aspiring soundscape artists out there.)
Casting and acting was brilliant. The filling out of the story was very good. My arm will bear the bruises of Helen’s anxiety for a while.
[1]: http://www.kingkongmovie.com/home.html
Those links I promised
Hello fellow MacLaurin Greek students! Here’s a round-up of some links. The first one is the Greek New Testament I’d mentioned in our last class.
– [Greek New Testament PDF][1]
– Mounce’s site: [teknia.com][2]
– [Perseus][3] – Greek reference material. A little complicated.
The following line should actually appear in Greek letters. Please let me know using comments (below).
κυριος ιησους χριστος
Oh, and by the way, guess what I [got for Christmas][4]!
[See you all in January!][5]
[1]: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tayl0010/ntest.pdf
[2]: http://www.teknia.com/index.php?page=home
[3]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0155
[4]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3438051133/
[5]: http://www.maclaurin.org/courses.php
Christmas treat
Here’s #3 on Christmas morning a couple of years ago. It’s a [QuickTime][3] video and you can download a [large file][1] or [small file][2], depending on how fast your internet connection is. “Goodness goodness gracious!”
[1]: http://kpmartin.com/Media/thankful.jack.mov
[2]: http://kpmartin.com/Media/thankful.jack.small.mov
[3]: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
The old site is (almost) dead
I’ll be transitioning to this WordPress driven site over the next weeks. You can find the old stuff [here][1]. It will just be a lot easier and more fun to have a simpler interface. Hopefully that means I can post more content and think less about the code. We’ll see. :)
[1]: http://www.kpmartin.com/old.lasso