Author Archives: Ted

Turner and the Sea

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I’d originally planned to do a sunset ride along the East Bay this Monday, but I was feeling stiff after the night dive, and was also aware that it was the last day of the Turner and the Sea exhibit at the Peabody Essex Museum. After checking the museum website to make sure they were open today, my mother and I headed north to see the exhibit.

While we were there, we saw their collection of nautical art, and Yin Yu Tang, an 18th century Chinese house, now relocated to Salem, and then it was time for the main exhibit.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was one of Britain’s premier artists around the turn of the 1800’s up until his death in 1851. He had an exceptional talent for use of light, and as his career progressed, his work became increasingly abstract, before abstract art came into vogue. This exhibit focused on his maritime work.

We both agreed that the exhibit was somewhat misleadingly named — yes, there were Turners there, but there were also a lot of other maritime painters represented — some were predecessors whose work inspired him, others were contemporaries inspired by him, and some were by contemporaries whose work inspired his competitive juices.

For me, the most impressive piece was Fishermen at Sea. It’s an oil painting of fishermen on the open ocean, with a full moon breaking through dark clouds, and transilluminating a breaking wave. Photographs don’t do it justice. The backlighting of the wave is superb, and in person, you can see the red glow of the fishermen’s charcoal fire. It’s a large painting, about 3 x 4 feet, and in person, you can see the details in the brush strokes. The photo I’ve linked to is somewhat greener than the actual picture.

The other standout is Battle of Trafalgar, painted at the request of the Prince of Wales (later George IV) as a companion piece to Loutherbourg’s The Glorious First of June. Both paintings are huge, taking up whole walls.

The exhibit ends with a bunch of his sketches and studies. When he died, he bequeathed many of his works to the British government, including many unfinished pieces and studies. Many of these are very abstract—some as a matter of style, and some possibly because they’re unfinished versions.

I enjoyed the the Turner exhibit and the standing exhibit of maritime art. There really is no substitute for getting close to a painting and being able to see the brush strokes, or being in the same room as a giant piece like the Battle of Trafalgar.

Dot

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My Aunt Dot died this morning. She was quite a character, and I’ll miss her.

Aunt Dot in June of 1981

Aunt Dot in June of 1981

Dot had a hard life. She married my Uncle Billy, and they only had a short time together before he died, leaving her a widow in her late twenties, with three small daughters. About a decade later, her oldest daughter, Susan, died a few days after Christmas, after being thrown from a horse.

Dot was a hard worker. She had help from Grandma and my Aunt Anne, her parents, and  her husband’s brothers (including my Dad), but she worked hard to raise her daughters, earn a living, and keep house. In later years, she’d talk about how she’d get up around 4 to clean house and then go on her way.  When she went for a walk, it was more of march– and you had to walk fast to keep up.

Dot was also very plain spoken. She could say the most outrageous things sometimes. Because of this, there was a tendency to joke about her.  I used to say she’d make a good sitcom character with only a little exaggeration. “I was up at four to wash and wax the floors and polish all the plumbing, and if they think I’m going to to…”

And yet, she was a heck of a lot of fun to have around. She’d had a lot of sadness in her life, yes, but she’d learned how to live with it nonetheless, and enjoy her life. She enjoyed trips to Rockport on the train with her friends, or walks to Castle Island with my mother.  When she moved to Georgia to be closer to her daughter Ruthie, life around here became a lot drabber.  I’ll miss her.

 

Bunny in the Back Yard

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Bunny

Rabbit in the back yard

This is one of a couple of rabbits I’ve seen in the yard this year. They’ve become quite brazen— I can get fairly close before they run away. I don’t mind when they eat the grass or the clover in the grass, but I’ve also seen them nibbling on the roses. Something’s also been eating the zinnias, but I can’t say for sure it’s the rabbits.

Concentration

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I’ve always loved game shows. One of the cool things about a vacation day or snow day in the winter was that I got to see my favorites. The ones that stick out in my memory were the original Match Game late in the afternoon (I remember being disappointed with the changes made for Match Game ’73, though in hindsight, the changes were for the best), Jeopardy, with Art Fleming around noon time, and my all time favorite, Concentration, in the mid morning.

I think a big part of my attraction to Concentration was the marvelous game board. Thirty numbers, all on rotating trilons, with one face for the number, one face for the prize, and one face for the puzzle piece. Each puzzle was a rebus, spelling out a phrase with pictures.

(Yes, it’s cheesy by today’s standards.)

I worked my way through several versions of the home game, but they were always unsatisfactory in one way — no rotating numbers. The puzzle was on a scroll of paper, with clear slots for removable number and prize cards. The game play was the same, but the game board was different.

Introducing Concentration

I’ve long wanted to build my own Concentration game. About twenty years ago, I tried building my own trilon-based game board, but after building all the trilons, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work.

About four years ago, I started building a version in HTML and JavaScript. I got as far as a game board and score board that worked—prizes were distributed randomly, it detected matches correctly, it handled “take” and “forfeit” properly, but the gameplay was clunky, it didn’t handle end of game well, there was no option to replay,  and it looked crummy. I was intent on duplicating the original look of the original game, but it was unfinished.

Last weekend, needing something I could demonstrate, I picked the project up again and polished it up. Now, with the power of CSS transforms and transitions, I finally have my rotating trilons. I’m now using jQuery in the script, which has simplified transitions between stages of the game. With downloadable fonts, specifically Open Sans, I’ve made the game look a lot nicer. And the game play between turns is a lot smoother.

Play Concentration here.

About the Game

My game uses the same game rules as the original game that ran on NBC from 1958 to 1973, not the later Classic Concentration version which some younger folks might be familiar with. There are thirty numbers, not twenty five, with some “Take One Gift” and “Forfeit One Gift” squares factored in. To guard against the “Forfeit” prizes, there are a couple of gag prizes as well.

There are currently five different puzzles; I plan to add more as I have time and can think of them—the structure of the script makes it very easy for me to add more puzzles. A while back I found “Rebus Font” which is a font made up from many of the symbols used on the original program.

Unlike the original, my puzzles are in color. The original producer, Norm Blumenthal, fought the switch to color, feeling that colored puzzles would give the solution away too fast. When NBC insisted on switching the show to color, he compromised by going to pink drawings on a maroon background.

At the moment, the game does not use responsive design; it works best on a desktop browser or iPad. This is the thing I intend to work on next. It also requires a recent browser that supports CSS transforms. I’ve discovered it doesn’t work properly in IE 11, but at the moment, I don’t have access to a machine to test it on. (UPDATE, February 2015: I’ve discovered the reason it doesn’t work in IE is because IE doesn’t currently support the “preserve-3D” transformation property. There are work-arounds, but I haven’t tried them yet.)

It currently doesn’t handle the “double wild” case, where one happens to pick a pair of matching Wild Cards; it should allow the selection of another set of prizes, but doesn’t.

I may add sound to the game; I have a recording of a trilon turning, but it needs cleanup.

One of the things that kind of surprises me (about myself) after the fact is that I’ve grown a little more willing to deviate from the look of the original. I guess that’s a sign of growth, or a willingness to make changes in service of a better result. In my original version, the scoreboard looked more like the original scoreboard, complete with serif based font, and the look of the Wild Cards. One of the things that had irritated me about the home games was that the Wild Card tiles didn’t look like the ones on television; in the original version, I created one that looked like the original. And yet… once I switched the prizes to Open Sans, the old style Wild Card stuck out like a sore thumb, so I changed them. Finally, I added a single player mode, so the user wouldn’t have to enter a pair of player names.

I hope you enjoy playing my version of Concentration.

Update September 24, 2021

I’ve replaced this version of the game with an entirely new one, using the Angular framework. The new version is written in Typescript, using newer ES6 features, and addresses several shortcomings of the version:

  • Responsive design
  • Handles the double-wild case
  • Handles duplicate prizes.
  • Animation when prizes are added to the scoreboard

Read about it here. I’m updating the links on this page to the new version, but if you’d like to compare versions, here they are:

Ted For Hire

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I had a feeling it wasn’t good when Mark, the president of the company, and Garry, my immediate boss asked to see me last Thursday. The company needed to cut back, and I was out of a job effective Friday. They stressed that it was nothing that I’d done, and that I was leaving on good terms. I asked if I could use them as references, and they enthusiastically agreed. (Mark, in fact, just posted several endorsements on my LinkedIn profile.)

So, where does that leave me? Looking for a job.

I’ve been a web developer for 14 years, writing HTML, CSS and Javascript by hand. I know how to create highly faithful working web pages from Photoshop mockups. I know how to debug cross browser issues. I dealt with Netscape 4 and IE 6. Current browsers are a piece of cake in comparison.

I also have server side experience, using ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL server. Most of that work was in service of our content management and e-commerce platforms, pureEditor and pureCommerce. I wrote a lot of the administrative code for both systems, and along the way, developed a few really neat user interface widgets, implemented in object orientated JavaScript, HTML and ColdFusion:

  • A combination file selector select box plus file uploader
  • A file search plus file uploader widget, for use when dealing with larger quantities of files
  • A “multi-view” page, enabling the administrator to tab between editing a main item, and listing or editing associated items. For example, a page where an admin could edit a course, list students assigned to the course, and edit the student/course assignments.
  • “Search/select” functionality, where the user needs only enter a few letters to search on, causing applicable choices to be populated into an associated select box.
  • A really nice AJAX driven tabbed editor, for administering complex objects like web site records. The tabbing affords organization of the records, and the supporting script loads each section of the form as needed, adds event handlers on load, makes sure the form submission stays in the overlaid editor (rather than going to a new page) , can load external scripts on the fly, and facilitates all sorts of other interaction. I’m really proud of that one.

All of the e-commerce and content management sites have their own custom appearance, implemented via “themes”. I did all the theme development work, starting from HTML prototypes of the designer’s Photoshop mockups to actual integration with the supporting ColdFusion systems.

More recently, for the Bureau of Internet Accessibility, I’ve built a couple of generations of the Bureau site, (the last two versions in HTML 5) built user interface pieces to enable users to see their site scan results, and gotten my feet wet in Python, building several parts of the testing code that assesses pages for accessibility problems. As we started scanning sites, and started generating huge volumes of results (some sites are not well built) I learned how to create imports capable of handling large volumes of data in a reasonable period of time, without taking down the server.

In addition, before becoming a web developer, I spent years in retail. I know how to deal with customers, and I know how to support the people who deal with customers. I know how to document things, and how to explain things to non-technical users.

I’ve learned a lot in 14 years. If you can use my experience, see my resume, or get in touch via resume at tedohara dot net. Or leave a reply here. I see all responses.

 

Video Test

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This post is just a test post playing with embedding video with the HTML 5 video element. First, I’m going to try just dragging in a video, and see what WordPress gives me, then I’ll probably end up hand coding it.

This video was shot during my 2012 hot air balloon ride, with my iPhone. One problem I’ve had using iPhone video is that it often comes out upside down. It looks OK in Aperture, and in the QuickTime player, but when I go to transcode it into other formats, it comes out upside down. I discovered tonight the trick is to open it in QuickTime player, and export it.

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