Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Gotta Get a Geta
Erika took herself and the kids away for the weekend up to Deloro, giving me the chance to do some more work on the book. Aim of the weekend is to try and finish off as much as possible of the main index for the book, which lists all of the major CSS1 and CSS2 properties, as well as CSS extensions beloging to Internet Explorer, list and describe all of their values and how they work in a synopsis format.

Unfortunately I had a rude shock by late morning when I realized I couldn't track down copies of a finalized draft or tech reviewed version of chapters 16 and 17. I found initial drafts and I had checkmarks against them on my master list saying that there were done. But where were they. I scoured emails, the drives in my now memory-less main machine on a separate computer without any luck. I had placed copies of all of my finalized drafts up on a Web site for review, but I had nuked that a few weeks ago trying to clean things up. Emails to Bill W. and to Dave T. (tech editor and layout guy respectively) turned up nothing. Ugh. I'd really hate to re-write those chapters. Am hoping that either my Prentice Hall editor has a copy of them or that I may have a copy on my machine at work.

So I did my best to work around all of this, working on compiling information, checking the validity of code examples and formatting everything according to Prentice Hall's specs.

Earlier in the day I had thought idly about my roman coin collection and dug it out to have a look at it. I remembered that the main Toronto coin show was typically held on the next-to-final weekend of either February or March, so I decided to check out the Torex Web site. Discovering that the show was in fact on today, and needing a break from writing, I decided to head on over and take a look.

I haven't been to a coin show for a few years now, and while it was at a new venue, very little else had changed. A lot of mainly guys in a very brightly lit room peering over portable glass cases filled with coins of every description. I talked to one affable fellow saw my interest in Roman coins, and telling him that my interest was primarily in obtaining a complete set of roman emperor portraits, advised me to buy the best examples I could afford. He also kindly showed me a couple of coins from his own collection that were not for sale: a beautiful gold aureous of Trajan as well as a coin of unfamiliar denomination from the reign of Henry VI, with an excellent figure of the king riding in a boat.

Prior to the show I had found that Robert Kokotailo of Calgary Coins was going to be at the show, and I was hoping to buy something from him. With his permission, I've been using many of his coin images to illustrate various CSS effects in my book. I figured it would be good karma to meet him in person and if possible, buy something from him. Turns out that he is a large bearded man who knows plenty about ancient coinage. Thinking about the other fellow's advice about buying the best possible coin for the money, I soon zoomed in on a couple of coins, a denarius of Tiberius and one of Galba. I got to talking with Kokotailo about Geta, the first of four emperors for 69AD, often known as "the year of chaos". With a discount he kindly offered to me, I was able to afford this very coin of Geta, which bears a fine portrait of the man. While the coin was out of my price range, we got into a discussion about Otho, who immediately followed Geta but who's brief reign lasted only a couple of months or so. Hence, his coins are even more rare than Galba's (who reigned for about 7 months). Apparently Otho always wore a wig made out of string, Kokotailo told me that he is always on the lookout for coins of Otho that are in good enough condition to show the individual strings on the wig he wears. ;-)

So in the end, I walked out with a single coin to add to my collection, as well as book on ancient Greek coinage I had been looking for. Normally I also pick up a number of Canadian coins as well, but I was happy to have picked up what I did. I also vowed to learn more about ancient Roman Republican coinage, as many of them are very beautiful in design and are relatively affordable for the quality you can pick up – not being as noteworthy as the later imperial coinage, demand is not as high. Ditto for Byzantine coinage for that matter, though I find many of the designs relatively crude compared to that of the Republican era.