The Adventures of a Young Savage
And his mild-mannered pseudonym, Benjamin Jancewicz
Writings about life, and usually how beautiful it is.
Over Christmas 2007, we got to journey up to Connecticut to visit home. My grandfather Edward Jancewicz (Jaju) had recently taken a fall, and was in a recovery center.
He hadn’t been in high spirits, but when Nya came to visit him, he lit right up. My favourite photo is when my dad was swinging Nya in front of Jaju; every time she got really close they both burst into laughter.
Babchi (Martha Jancewicz, my grandmother) seemed so proud to hold her!
Fun with a camera, on our way from Joy Schoenleber’s wedding in Ohio. Nya is a cute kid. Tamika is a cute wife. I look funny with limited facial hair and long head hair.
This is a set of banners I created for The V at City Vista’s grand opening event. I had a lot of fun figuring out this animation. It uses large hidden panels of green and black to wipe away text (because clipping masks just wouldn’t cut it, it was too complicated of an animation).
Click on the image, then give it a minute to load. It’s worth it.
I set my camera (a Canon 20D) to the Delay setting (you know, the one you use when you want to do a family photo with you in it), and placed it on a tripod.
Then, every time I walked by it, I hit the shutter.
I saved all the images, opened them as frames Adobe ImageReady, and exported it as a gif.
Pretty cool, huh?
I’m very proud to announce that my father, Bill Jancewicz, had a website. Or, a journal, if you prefer. Or a blog, if you’re a nerd.
In any case, I designed it for him for Christmas, and now that’s he’s been using it regularly, I thought I’d announce it. He uses it to post updates on the Wycliffe translation & missionary work, as well as what’s going on with the family.
So visit http://www.bill.jancewicz.com and check it out!
So, if you subscribe to this website by email; you’re not getting this.
Why? Because I’m too popular. Ah, my public, how they love me…
It used to be that you could enter in your email on the left side of this page, and every time I published an entry, people would get a nice little email in their inbox with the post. Convenient, no?
Sometime in January, this journal hit the 100th subscriber. But rather than have a celebration and happy happy fun times, the thing stopped working. No warning, no alert, just gone. And all this when I was just getting consistent with my posts; getting into the habit of posting every day.
I racked my brain. I spent hours on the phone with GoDaddy.com (my hosting plan). I spent hours scouring WordPress forums. I got on the nerves of some WordPress admin. Finally the nice fellow who designed the plugin that I used (called Subscribe2) said I should check out what GoDaddy’s limits on emails were.
Lo and behold, I can only send out an email to 100 people at a time.
So, I’ve ditched Subscribe2, and moved to Feedburner. It’s a great service that essentially does the same thing, except it’s not on my server. But the sad thing is, I can’t tranfer all my existing subcribers to Feedburner.
Looks like I’m going to be sending out a lot of emails…
May I introduce you to Kutiman. He makes music from videos. Except he ignores the original song that the artist was trying to play, and uses them for their individual notes.
This is incredible.
Hat tip to my friend Christopher Smith for sending it to me.
Martha Jancewicz, 83, of Norwich, rides her toboggan down a hill off the first tee of the Norwich Municipal Golf Course on Thursday. Jancewicz takes to the slopes several times a winter when snowfall permits, for some sledding fun aboard a vintage wooden toboggan that she estimates to be 50 years old.“My kids rode on it, my grandkids rode on it,” she says.
That’s my grandmother for you. You may remember her other article.
Yes, the blog is still broken. I’m still working on it. So none of you are going to get this by email. My apologies! I may just make the jump to Feedburner…
Anyways; on Monday we had a huge snowstorm. Being the Young Savage that I am, I drove to work. Two lanes of the four on I-95 were completely whited, and the two that remained were very narrow black strips. No salt, no plows.
The Subaru did famously; deftly picking it’s way through foot-high ruts and rounding corners like a champ. At one point, I was driving in the right hand lane and a Saturn passes me while we go around a wide curve. Suddenly, the Saturn looses traction, slips out of it’s lane, spins across all four lanes, narrowly misses the guardrail on the opposite side, guns his engine, zips across all four lanes of traffic AGAIN, and comes to a skidding stop in front of me. I slammed on my brakes (thank God for ABS) and came to a stop about a foot away from him.
He guy wipes his window, waves, does a K turn, and drives off.
The rest of the ride was uneventful. Then I get off on my exit, and I hit the curb.
I didn’t see it coming; the edge of the offramp was hidden by pounds of fluffy white snow, and I smacked my right front wheel into the 6 inch high concrete edge.
I kept going, and arrived at work, but noticed a slight wobble in the steering.
Having owned a Passat and a Saturn that were plagued with alignment, ball joint and rim problems, I knew this was not good.
I drove home. The wobble was worse. I couldn’t go above 50mph without it shaking all over the road.
The next day, we pile into the car to drive me to work. And the car won’t shift into Drive. Even after warming the thing up for close to half an hour, the Subaru only will go in reverse. Finally, after adding transmission fluid and straining on the shifter; I popped it into Drive. Gears 3, 2 & 1 were still locked up.
And the wobble got worse. At 35-40mph, the steering wheel shook violently. And in addition to all that, I could feel the transmissions thumping ever so slightly.
I called work and told them I was going to take the day off.
Tamika and I remembered that at church last Sunday, someone had pointed out that one of the guys, Tom Walker, was a mechanic. Just out of the blue. Just, “Hey, that’s Tom. He’s a mechanic”. So I pulled open the church directory Trish Barrett had given me and called him.
He was in the hospital, his wife had just come out of surgery. He said his “garage” was on wheels, and that he could come by on Thursday morning.
Tamika and I prayed for the car, and for Tom’s wife.
On Wednesday, I had to get to work, so we drove the car. The wobble was still there, but less. The problem with shifting was gone.
By Wednesday night, the wobble was completely gone. And the car was still shifting normally. We decided to still have Tom check it, just in case.
This morning, Tom came by. And the car is absolutely fine. When I hit the curb, snow and ice got lodged in the wheel, and threw off the balance. Also, the bottom of the car was coated with ice, including the transmission. So, when the weather got warmer, all our problems just melted away.
Praise God.
100/100
I gazed down through the portal in the desk. The menagerie of wires twisted below, the soft fans humming to themselves, breathing, sighing.
I made this.
It was my job, of course. To expertly arrange wires in organized systems, feed them through their portals, name them, number them, record them, plug them in.
I know what each wires does and where it goes. What information that passes through it’s coils and how quickly it thinks.
Most people would look at it and see cacophony. But I see the system. I look under the desk and see how it works instantly. I understand.
Kind of like people. I understand how they work, why people fall in love, why they break up. It’s natural for me. Look me in the eyes and I can feel if you’re truthful or not.
But most people don’t take the time. To them, it’s cacophony.