About Me

Nosce te ipsum, in English "know thyself", is something I've lived by for some time now. But that doesn't mean I need to share anything. In fact, there's little value in doing so.

I suppose I could give a sort of curriculum vitae / resume to establish my background and supposed-expertise. But who I am doesn't add to any argument, that's probably some sort of argument from authority. The very act of describing myself is an act of arrogance anyway. I'm using a pseudonym because a name not only doesn't matter but it detracts and distracts from one's work.

It's for privacy and not secrecy. I don't generally care about people knowing who I am. However, I do want to detach my pseudonym from my real identity in order to have some real-life privacy.

So instead, what I've accomplished will speak for my abilities. Maybe.

In short, I'm nobody. Stop wondering and get on with your life.

About this place

This is a personal web space run by my hand-crafted compiled website engine. It's a proof-of-concept for a philosophy (see compiled website reasoning) as well as a working host for my reviews and writings.

The spiralofhope Logo

My logo is a combination of the golden triangle and the Fibonacci spiral.

The heavy lifting for my logo was done with great thanks to geminiguy from the Unity Linux team. I conceived of it and got some graphics, and he assembled it and made an SVG version of it. I tweaked it, tilted it and made various sizes of it both with and without a transparent background.

It is based in part on PersOnLine's public domain image, which is a combination of the golden triangle and a Fibonacci spiral.

A Golden triangle is an isosceles triangle in which the two longer sides have equal lengths and in which the ratio of this length to that of the third, smaller side is the golden ratio:

A Fibonacci spiral is created by drawing arcs connecting the opposite corners of squares in the Fibonacci tiling. In my case, it is ( 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 ):

(source, public domain)

Now to put my new logo to use.

I learned about Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) when I poked around my WordPress profile. Because it required a square image, and it refused to just enlarge the canvas size and pad it with a transparency, I was forced to edit the image.

I ended up learning a little about Inkscape, the de-facto standard for SVG editing. It took me a while to figure things out, and I almost went back to GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) <shudder>. It being GNU should be enough to describe how difficult it is to use.

At any rate, I figured out how to change the shape of the canvas and export it the way I like. I even took the time to rotate it a bit, to change where the eye focuses.

One day I may create a new version as a favicon.

I've also been forced to have a white background instead of a transparent background, because it won't look proper on many websites.

I figured out how to have an alternate logo for the dark scheme of this website, and so I did some fiddling around to make a dark logo. It was a lot more annoying than I thought it would be!

Any of my variations of this image are copyright me with all rights reserved until I figure various licences out. (Real Soon Now™)

No relation