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 argument from authority. The very act of describing myself is an act of arrogance anyway. So instead, what I've accomplished will speak for my abilities.

As for why I'm using a pseudonym, 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.

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. I conceived of it and got some graphics, 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 ):

fibonacci_spiral_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.

I doubt I will add the logo into the site's header or anything like that. One day I may create a new version as a favicon.

I, the copyright holder of the above image (spiralofhope-96.png), hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

In case this is not legally possible:

I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.