Just thought I ought to leave a quick note to say I'll be gone until the 28th, on my Crowduck Trip. I'll get back in touch with you afterwards. In contrast, here's a guy who definitely needs to leave the internet behind when he goes on a vacation.
http://www.abulsme.com/trip/2002q4/RV2002Q4D@.html
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
1,000
I generally go to bed late during the summer: 0300 or later. I try not to go past 0400, because then I wake up way too late. I think I've written about that before here.
-Wednesday night. I was getting a late start into bed. After finishing my journal entry around 4, I went out into the living room where Micah was watching a movie and watched that for about fifteen minutes, for no reason. Then I went to bed. I made to go to sleep. It was hot. I turned over whenever it got too much to bear, and changed positions trying to get comfortable. The minutes crept by, like a person trying to find his way out of a desert. At 0523 I started counting, but not sheep, for no really good reason. I hit 100, then 200. When I was about to 450 I decided that if I got to 1,000 I would give it up as hopeless.
-And I did. So I walked outside and watched the early morning. I was too late to catch the sunrise, but the air was cool and humid and windy; I wasn't wearing a shirt, and it made my skin wake up and pay attention to how great a morning it was. I walked up the street, stood under the locust tree that's there in someone's yard. Mrs Rielac, a lady up the street who I used to see while biking to Building, was out walking her dog like she always does. She told me it was cooler this morning than last night, and moved on to tend some plants for a neighbor, I suppose. A middle-aged guy jogged by: "Morn'n'." I started walking back toward our house. Another guy, letting his dog out, said, "What are you doing up so early?" I told him, "I couldn't get to sleep, so I decided to call it an early morning instead of a late night." I sat on Mom's car's trunk. There were birds all over, but I couldn't see very many of them. Slowly I started noticing more of them. One danced around under an aspen for a little while. Lots of them flew overhead from out of sight to out of sight in another direction; I wished I could do the same, unconcernedly and naturally going from any place to any other place through the air almost instantly. Instead I just had to watch a couple pigeons establishing a pecking order atop a power line. A lady walked by a couple times - went around the block. She said it was a beautiful morning for sitting out here and watching. Couldn't agree more. Are all mornings like this? Are all mornings this great? I'm going to find out. Maybe I'll even change from my summer 0300 ways.
Here's what I've been waiting to write.
I'm still finding it kind of hard to believe that I'll be going off to Grinnell in less than a month. I know I will, but it just seems pretty impossible. I mean, I've been in Cincinnati for 18 years; how could anything different possibly exist even? It's similarly weird to think of living in a different house; this is the only one I've ever known, and though it sucks, it's familiar. Here I am about to be thrown into some situation that I know next to nothing about. In Iowa, 400 miles away from where I've been my whole life. I recently found out that, in a poll, Americans voted Iowa the state they'd very least like to be exiled to. What have I gotten myself into? Well, it'll all be fine in the end, but until then, I'm finding it hard to believe. I guess that wasn't as coherent as I intially thought it was going to be, when I started writing. Oh well.
-Wednesday night. I was getting a late start into bed. After finishing my journal entry around 4, I went out into the living room where Micah was watching a movie and watched that for about fifteen minutes, for no reason. Then I went to bed. I made to go to sleep. It was hot. I turned over whenever it got too much to bear, and changed positions trying to get comfortable. The minutes crept by, like a person trying to find his way out of a desert. At 0523 I started counting, but not sheep, for no really good reason. I hit 100, then 200. When I was about to 450 I decided that if I got to 1,000 I would give it up as hopeless.
-And I did. So I walked outside and watched the early morning. I was too late to catch the sunrise, but the air was cool and humid and windy; I wasn't wearing a shirt, and it made my skin wake up and pay attention to how great a morning it was. I walked up the street, stood under the locust tree that's there in someone's yard. Mrs Rielac, a lady up the street who I used to see while biking to Building, was out walking her dog like she always does. She told me it was cooler this morning than last night, and moved on to tend some plants for a neighbor, I suppose. A middle-aged guy jogged by: "Morn'n'." I started walking back toward our house. Another guy, letting his dog out, said, "What are you doing up so early?" I told him, "I couldn't get to sleep, so I decided to call it an early morning instead of a late night." I sat on Mom's car's trunk. There were birds all over, but I couldn't see very many of them. Slowly I started noticing more of them. One danced around under an aspen for a little while. Lots of them flew overhead from out of sight to out of sight in another direction; I wished I could do the same, unconcernedly and naturally going from any place to any other place through the air almost instantly. Instead I just had to watch a couple pigeons establishing a pecking order atop a power line. A lady walked by a couple times - went around the block. She said it was a beautiful morning for sitting out here and watching. Couldn't agree more. Are all mornings like this? Are all mornings this great? I'm going to find out. Maybe I'll even change from my summer 0300 ways.
Here's what I've been waiting to write.
I'm still finding it kind of hard to believe that I'll be going off to Grinnell in less than a month. I know I will, but it just seems pretty impossible. I mean, I've been in Cincinnati for 18 years; how could anything different possibly exist even? It's similarly weird to think of living in a different house; this is the only one I've ever known, and though it sucks, it's familiar. Here I am about to be thrown into some situation that I know next to nothing about. In Iowa, 400 miles away from where I've been my whole life. I recently found out that, in a poll, Americans voted Iowa the state they'd very least like to be exiled to. What have I gotten myself into? Well, it'll all be fine in the end, but until then, I'm finding it hard to believe. I guess that wasn't as coherent as I intially thought it was going to be, when I started writing. Oh well.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
I have no idea why I am unable to assign a title to this entry.
Well, let's start with the fonts. Fonts are abstruse; I'll forgive you if you skip right on down to the next paragraph, but I'm going to write this one anyhow. As you can see if you've been scrupulously paying attention to the thread, I've now had some help as to figuring out how to market a font. Paul D. Hunt and I swapped a few e-mails. I finished kerning just tonight - hopefully (I don't think I can think of any more pairs) - and tomorrow I'll hit the AutoHinting button, which I'm not sure what that does, but apparently you're supposed to do it. And then I'll fire off an e-mail to either Veer or MyFonts - I haven't decided which yet - and see if I can get this thing sellin'. Within not too long, I hope, I'll have enough money to upgrade from TypeTool to FontLab, and then I can make my fonts quicker and better and sell them even faster. As soon as I get FontLab, I'm going to expand Newt to encompass Latin-Extended and Greek, and then I'll use the handy feature where its encoding system actually WORKS to do the same with Cyril; I'll also be including Cyrillic and Cyrillic-Extended.
-You have reached the next paragraph, wherein I write about a krokay game that Matt, Aaron, and I had a few days ago on the 5th. I had previously scoped out Melody Park, which is a few hundred yards from Aaron's house, and decided that it was perfect for a krokay game. It's located in a deep depression behind the houses on Melody Street. Technically its name is Brentwood Park, but Aaron says that even the people who live on the street across the park from Melody Street, where there's a sign that says Brentwood Park, call it Melody Park. Melody is a cul-de-sac, but there's a little outshoot from the sidewalk that runs between two houses' fenced yards. Then it turns into a steep and extraordinarily tall staircase. It reminds me of the staircase in The Worms of Kukumlima, which is a book that no one has read, even though it's a spectacular children's book. I think Daniel Pinkwater is probably the best kids' author around. His scenes are more evocative than those of, I would say, any other author I've read, even "serious", "grown-up" ones. I've felt like I was there watching the action unfold in other books, but in Pinkwater's, I feel like I'm there actually actively taking part in the action. As you're descending the staircase watch out for that low branch. (Aaron hit it.)
-There was even more challenging, fun krokay terrain than I'd thought. They had dug up a tennis court that was absolutely covered with graffiti. Melody Park does have the distinction of being the most graffitied park I know of. They graffitied the picnic table, trash can, and even several of the trees. The crater left by the tennis court is an interesting, relentlessly sticky mud with ground-up bricks mixed into it. I put two wickets in the crater. I also put two in between pairs of trees, some at the edge of a creek, and the turn wickets on a little incidental slope. We got off to a flying start, and we all pretty much stayed neck-and-neck. The turn wickets were what got us all. It was easy enough to get through going down, but there was nowhere to position yourself going back up after you hit the stake, so you just had to hope you got lucky. Aaron was fired out through the wicket after about fifteen turns, Matt after twenty, and I after twenty-five. Of course, that meant that Aaron became poison and came back and killed both of us. It was his first win, though, so I'm willing to let him go this time. Afterwards, we all took Matt's car to Skyline, and didn't have enough to pay, so Matt took Aaron to work before he was late, and then brought some more money to foot the rest of the bill.
-I've been practicing parkour. Note: a parkour-doing person is called a traceur. I found Whitaker's playground. It has a jungle gym that isn't much, but it's still enough to practice on, and to bulk up a bit. I did 13 pull-ups the other day, which was good. I'm also doing an ab exercise that I came up with: I hang upside down and then crunch upward. I'm sure someone else has done these before, but I came up with them independently, so I don't know what they're called, and I just call them bar-ups. I've also been jumping around like a mad squirrel and, for all that, sustaining surprisingly few injuries. The only one was that I fell down on some bars a few days ago and hit my shinbone, but it's still very intact. Collateral damage. Whenever I do something fun, such as jump over a sofa or something, and then ask Dad if he can do anything akin to it, he always answers that he doesn't care to because he's done a risk-benefit analysis and can find no benefit that outweighs the risk. And as such, I haven't seen him do anything physical purely for the fun of it for years, except when we portaged to Ritchie Lake a couple years ago, and when we took a bike trip a few months ago. Even the bike trip he treated more like a chore. He's paralyzed by risk, having no conception of fun through exertion and even danger. Wonder how long it's been since he got an adrenaline rush because of something he himself did. Decades. I like to do stuff that I enjoy without being frozen by considerations of consequences. Which is not to say that I ignore consequences completely - I stay safe, because I enjoy being in one piece - just that I don't let them control me.
I was going to blog something else, but I'll leave it for next entry.
Well, let's start with the fonts. Fonts are abstruse; I'll forgive you if you skip right on down to the next paragraph, but I'm going to write this one anyhow. As you can see if you've been scrupulously paying attention to the thread, I've now had some help as to figuring out how to market a font. Paul D. Hunt and I swapped a few e-mails. I finished kerning just tonight - hopefully (I don't think I can think of any more pairs) - and tomorrow I'll hit the AutoHinting button, which I'm not sure what that does, but apparently you're supposed to do it. And then I'll fire off an e-mail to either Veer or MyFonts - I haven't decided which yet - and see if I can get this thing sellin'. Within not too long, I hope, I'll have enough money to upgrade from TypeTool to FontLab, and then I can make my fonts quicker and better and sell them even faster. As soon as I get FontLab, I'm going to expand Newt to encompass Latin-Extended and Greek, and then I'll use the handy feature where its encoding system actually WORKS to do the same with Cyril; I'll also be including Cyrillic and Cyrillic-Extended.
-You have reached the next paragraph, wherein I write about a krokay game that Matt, Aaron, and I had a few days ago on the 5th. I had previously scoped out Melody Park, which is a few hundred yards from Aaron's house, and decided that it was perfect for a krokay game. It's located in a deep depression behind the houses on Melody Street. Technically its name is Brentwood Park, but Aaron says that even the people who live on the street across the park from Melody Street, where there's a sign that says Brentwood Park, call it Melody Park. Melody is a cul-de-sac, but there's a little outshoot from the sidewalk that runs between two houses' fenced yards. Then it turns into a steep and extraordinarily tall staircase. It reminds me of the staircase in The Worms of Kukumlima, which is a book that no one has read, even though it's a spectacular children's book. I think Daniel Pinkwater is probably the best kids' author around. His scenes are more evocative than those of, I would say, any other author I've read, even "serious", "grown-up" ones. I've felt like I was there watching the action unfold in other books, but in Pinkwater's, I feel like I'm there actually actively taking part in the action. As you're descending the staircase watch out for that low branch. (Aaron hit it.)
-There was even more challenging, fun krokay terrain than I'd thought. They had dug up a tennis court that was absolutely covered with graffiti. Melody Park does have the distinction of being the most graffitied park I know of. They graffitied the picnic table, trash can, and even several of the trees. The crater left by the tennis court is an interesting, relentlessly sticky mud with ground-up bricks mixed into it. I put two wickets in the crater. I also put two in between pairs of trees, some at the edge of a creek, and the turn wickets on a little incidental slope. We got off to a flying start, and we all pretty much stayed neck-and-neck. The turn wickets were what got us all. It was easy enough to get through going down, but there was nowhere to position yourself going back up after you hit the stake, so you just had to hope you got lucky. Aaron was fired out through the wicket after about fifteen turns, Matt after twenty, and I after twenty-five. Of course, that meant that Aaron became poison and came back and killed both of us. It was his first win, though, so I'm willing to let him go this time. Afterwards, we all took Matt's car to Skyline, and didn't have enough to pay, so Matt took Aaron to work before he was late, and then brought some more money to foot the rest of the bill.
-I've been practicing parkour. Note: a parkour-doing person is called a traceur. I found Whitaker's playground. It has a jungle gym that isn't much, but it's still enough to practice on, and to bulk up a bit. I did 13 pull-ups the other day, which was good. I'm also doing an ab exercise that I came up with: I hang upside down and then crunch upward. I'm sure someone else has done these before, but I came up with them independently, so I don't know what they're called, and I just call them bar-ups. I've also been jumping around like a mad squirrel and, for all that, sustaining surprisingly few injuries. The only one was that I fell down on some bars a few days ago and hit my shinbone, but it's still very intact. Collateral damage. Whenever I do something fun, such as jump over a sofa or something, and then ask Dad if he can do anything akin to it, he always answers that he doesn't care to because he's done a risk-benefit analysis and can find no benefit that outweighs the risk. And as such, I haven't seen him do anything physical purely for the fun of it for years, except when we portaged to Ritchie Lake a couple years ago, and when we took a bike trip a few months ago. Even the bike trip he treated more like a chore. He's paralyzed by risk, having no conception of fun through exertion and even danger. Wonder how long it's been since he got an adrenaline rush because of something he himself did. Decades. I like to do stuff that I enjoy without being frozen by considerations of consequences. Which is not to say that I ignore consequences completely - I stay safe, because I enjoy being in one piece - just that I don't let them control me.
I was going to blog something else, but I'll leave it for next entry.
Friday, July 6, 2007
Summer: What is it
Really, all I hoped to do was get a job this summer. I want to help finance my college education. I really do. I mean, Mom and Dad can afford it, but it's still not something that comes cheap, and any help I can offer is important, just shy of indispensable. So, here's what happened. I went and interviewed for the job at Hillman; the interview went very nicely. I even got a request for a drug test, which I took as a sign that they'd pretty much decided to hire me. Why spend however much it costs to get a drug test analyzed if you're not going to hire the person? I waited a few days after the test; then, Αλήθεια called me and said it had gone through all fine, and what dates had I said I was going to be on vacation? I called up Grandma and asked. The 16th to the 28th. Then I called Αλήθεια back up and told her. She consulted her manager, then called me back. With the infinite diplomacy you must have to learn if you're in HR, she told me: "I talked with my manager, and he wants to go ahead and pass on bringing you on for the summer." It took me a moment to realize she had just said I wasn't getting the job. I tried to get her to change her mind: hopeless from the start, but I thought I could get her to recant if I reminded her that I would definitely come back for the winter season, when I have a month off of school. It didn't work. So, I didn't get a summer job: at this point, it's way too late to turn in any other applications. Αλήθεια has said that I should definitely call back during the winter, but that her manager just doesn't think it would be effective to bring me on for two weeks of work, two weeks of vacation, then two weeks of work (for vacation, it would be about four weeks straight that I could work, and then I would also be trained for the following summer). Dad asked a couple days later whether there was any chance that I would be hired if I forsook Crowduck. There probably was, but I look forward to Crowduck all year; I'm not going to just erase it. "Well, there you go. Yeh makes yer choices," he said.
-So now I have to try to make money off my fonts, having no other real source to get money from. I should be able to get a reasonable amount of money for them, but as yet no one has responded to the question I left on Typophile. And another guy just bumped his thread ahead of mine. He's sure persistent with that Agamemnon font. It's not a terrible font (though it was at the start), but he just writes so many questions about it on the thread that everyone except Eben Sorkin has mostly given up responding to them. I'll wait until tomorrow, then bump mine back up, because my financial fate rests more or less on it. I really want to sell Newt! And get a more high-end font-making program with the money! These things are expensive, man. The industry standard program costs like $650. I have a watered-down basic version of it, which I can trade in for credit towards that sum, but then I still have to pay $550. I wonder if any Typophile people will find their way to my blog now because I've mentioned Typophile stuff. Doubtful. Because I haven't had my question answered, I still don't know the first thing about marketing a font. The first thing, in my mind, is "How much money might I be able to make off of it?" Because I feel like a mooch, and even if you say I'm not, Mom, really I still am, even if I couldn't help it.
-I'm going to write another entry tomorrow, I think. Or sometime soon.
-So now I have to try to make money off my fonts, having no other real source to get money from. I should be able to get a reasonable amount of money for them, but as yet no one has responded to the question I left on Typophile. And another guy just bumped his thread ahead of mine. He's sure persistent with that Agamemnon font. It's not a terrible font (though it was at the start), but he just writes so many questions about it on the thread that everyone except Eben Sorkin has mostly given up responding to them. I'll wait until tomorrow, then bump mine back up, because my financial fate rests more or less on it. I really want to sell Newt! And get a more high-end font-making program with the money! These things are expensive, man. The industry standard program costs like $650. I have a watered-down basic version of it, which I can trade in for credit towards that sum, but then I still have to pay $550. I wonder if any Typophile people will find their way to my blog now because I've mentioned Typophile stuff. Doubtful. Because I haven't had my question answered, I still don't know the first thing about marketing a font. The first thing, in my mind, is "How much money might I be able to make off of it?" Because I feel like a mooch, and even if you say I'm not, Mom, really I still am, even if I couldn't help it.
-I'm going to write another entry tomorrow, I think. Or sometime soon.
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