Matt Hackmann

MattHackmann

The thoughts and goings-on of some programmer dad.

It's Artastic!

There was one week a month or so ago when I churned out a crap ton of art. Then I stopped. Not sure why, but here are some of the fruits of that (and other) endeavors.

[gallery=May 2009 Art][/gallery]

There you have it. Enjoy!

It's Naturiffic!

Punny titles aside, I have made more than one allusion to my walking sessions. Currently my graph is telling me that I had a pretty crappy week last week, but that's not what we're here to discuss.

The Pathfinder Parkway has been my preferred walking path of choice for the weekends as it removes me from all the loud roads and reminds me of the lengthy walks I took to the bank in Winter Park via the Cady Way Trail. The Pathfinder runs right along the Caney River, Bartlesville's local body of poisoned water, but it does provide that "nature" feel. But, I could throw words at you all day and not get the point across, so queue up the photo gallery!

[gallery=Pathfinder Parkway][/gallery]

Okay, so it has it's downsides. Arguably the most annoying part is the dozen or so oil pumps, but it's amazing the crap I've spotted along this trail. I will, perhaps, update again with more pictures later as these just barely scratch the surface.

More Billboard Fun

I was on another one of my afternoon walks, shooting to get in my 10,000 steps for the day, when I ran into yet another billboard that struck me an odd way. As can be seen above, it depicts Mr. Monopoly jumping out of Hell, presumably after having used his "Get Out of Hell Free" card. Their illegal use of the Hasbro icon notwithstanding, this brings up some interesting notions.

The sign insinuates that you've already BEEN to Hell (you can't get out of something you're not in). This means that you are some sort of terrible person, probably a child molester or some one who talks at the theater. This notion of leaving Hell kind of makes "eternal punishment" seem a little less eternal. But, let's play by their rules and assume for a bit that Hell is indeed an escapable place so we can extrapolate further.

Anybody who is mildly familiar with Monopoly knows that when you land in jail there are three ways of getting out: get our of jail free card, roll doubles, or pay $50. Applying these rules to our great Hell-break scheme - as these seem to be the rules we're playing by - there are now other ways with which to escape eternal damnation. If you've got some extra cash, just be sure to be buried with some tenners or, if you're not, play it like a game of chance, bring some dice and pray to God that you get doubles (remember, you get three throws). Suddenly, your chances of escaping Hell are looking pretty sweet.

Now that we have traversed the psychology cleverly hidden in this image, we can finally extract it's true message: Hell is for poor people.

Azusa 'Anzunyan' Nakano

The second in a series of K-ON! inspired sketches.

Inked in Illustrator, colored in Photoshop

Walking for Cash

As I'd briefly touched upon in an earlier post, my place of employ is currently having a little fitness competition: can you walk 10,000 steps a day for 75 days? If you reach the grand and glorious total of 750,000, you are awarded two free days of vacation. Everybody was provided with company branded pedometers to keep track of our steppings and left to our devices.

Now, I'm never one to turn down an opportunity to make money for nothing, so I'm doing my best to make a firm effort and accomplish this goal. If you take a look at the blog main page, you'll see that there is a graph with my current progress on this mission (assuming you're using an HTML5 compliant browser). As you may well notice, I'm a few thousand steps shy of my quota for this week (shame on myself).

Now, that's the boring part. The cool part (and the reason I'm posting) is the really the graph itself. Back in December I switched the site codebase over to HTML5. Now, this was mostly a change in semantics, using new tags such as

and
. I'd not done anything special with CSS3 or some of the newer, funner tags such as