December 30, 2002

Safely back in Baltimore. Don't drink too much, friends. | link

December 28, 2002

aurora, 12.28

After a long, hard drive north into the aftermath of a Christmas snowstorm, Jen and I settled in to a few days of warm gas fireplace and home cooking. We had a three-day engagement in St. Mary's County at the beginning of the week, opening presents on The Day with her family, and then we drove north to New York for a three-day stay with my folks. | link

December 20, 2002

I'm now officially jealous. Jen's bosses were kind enough to give her an iRock for Christmas. I have wanted an iPod forever, and she beat me to the technology! (Truthfully, I can't think of anybody more deserving than her, so these are not sour grapes. Honestly!)

I may not be at my computer for much of the next few days, with the holidays upon us, so if I haven't already said so, have a safe and wonderful time with your families, whether you celebrate Christmas or not. | link

December 19, 2002

So Jen and I order a gift for her dad about two weeks ago via the internet. We go through the usual online ordering stuff, and after entering our info we get a cryptic email that says thank you, and here is your password for the site, and nothing more to date. Now, logically, if I ran a business, I would have some brains and make sure that my product went out before December 18th or so, in time to make it to the recipient for Christmas. Because

1. If it is indeed a gift, it will be opened around other people, and the other people might be interested in the product as well.
2. Most people have time off over the holiday, in which they can look at the product (and the one in question demands some research.) When people get a gift, usually they are excited about it. Their chances of using it directly after Christmas are very good. Hint hint.
3. It's very good business practice to explain your shipping and delivery proceedures to your clients. Before or during the ordering process.
4. There's a good chance the recipient may not be home if the product is delivered at the end of December.

We called today and found that the company in question waits until the end of the month to send out all their orders in one bulk mailing. With no notification on the site, this means we should have ordered by Thanksgiving if we wanted to have it under the tree for the holiday. Nice job, you jerks. Now we have to figure out how we're going to wrap a big box of nothing.

From Mike's site, I found this company, Xplane, which does some beautiful graphics work. And I love the site as well. This is what good Illustrator work should look like. | link

December 18, 2002

christmas party, 12.12

December 17, 2002

Busy day today. Working out some client issues, doing some edits, some illustration, and some Christmas stuff as well. Hoping everybody likes the cards. Enjoying the season. | link

December 16, 2002

Mixed Bag. This weekend was a little bit of good and a little bit of bad. We went to the company Christmas party this Saturday, which was a very good time, finishing it at Todd and Heather's house, which was even better. Sunday we spent most of the day attempting to finish our Christmas cards. Jen did an amazing job with the artwork I gave her, and she produced a beautiful card that we're both really proud to send out. What began as a three-day project though stretched out into a week-long project when it turned out that the copier I used for the prints had offset the artwork randomly. I also found the limitations on my printer's resolution, so an upgrade in RAM is definitely in order. We did get the resolution and printing problems ironed out and finished them by hand last night, where it became evident that I cannot color in between the lines. Unfortunately, I wound up losing my wallet in a shoe store yesterday afternoon, which means that my Palm Pilot is now gone. Dammit.

A quick lesson in public service and damage control: This is a bad idea. This is a good idea. This is an even better idea, way too late.

I just finished cleaning up some very offensive JavaScript on all the main pages of my site. How embarassing. I apologize, everyone.

Ask and ye shall receive.

History repeating. One of the illustration jobs I worked on a few months back has been printed and is out to the end-users. Recently two international companies have launched advertising campaigns with remarkably similar concepts, almost down to the individual elements. I know for a fact that the AD for the job I worked on had proposed the idea long before the other campaigns went public, so it's not a matter of copyright infringement or simple copying. I do have a theory however that most of the ideas our industry creates get re-used in cycles, and sometimes those cycles do coincide with each other. I've seen editorial illustration go through this cycle, and usually the style of the illustrator is different enough to make the end product fresh. Commercials, design—any creative professional has to deal with this possibility. My question is this: How do we explain this to our clients? | link

December 13, 2002

Let's Kick Moby's Ass. Apparently some intelligent folks in Boston decided to beat up Moby on his way out of a nightclub this past week. Yes, that's right, Moby the original gangsta. I heard this news and shook my head—Moby is about 5 foot nothing, weighs less than I do, and is a pacifist vegan. Who is so threatened by Moby that they have to knock him around? It makes me think of those two upstanding citizens who beat up the Royals' first-base coach in Chicago this past year.

Here's the next in a series of test runs for the story idea. I have a lot of things I'd like to figure out with the lighting and cutting before I start cranking these out, but it's a good start. | link

December 12, 2002

There has to be a better way. I spent a good portion of last night printing Christmas envelopes from Quark; in the eight years that I've owned a Mac I still don't know any better way to organize a mailing list better than exporting a contact manager's database (then: Now Up-To-Date; now: Palm Desktop) and manually entering it into a linked series of text boxes in Quark. It brought back the days when I had several hundred illustration contacts and made a custom Quark template for Avery labels (instead of wasting the precious paper with merging Word files, something beyond my technical expertise) and hand-edited them based on the returned cards I got in the mail.

The Lantana update: Jen and I pulled all the lantana from the backyard a few weeks before the real frost hit and slammed them into some clay pots. I lugged all five of them into work and set them on the sill for sunlight, where they all proceeded to drop 90% of their leaves in protest. The two yellow plants are making a strong comeback, shooting healthy big new leaves towards the light. The purple plant is a little slower, but there are a bunch of small green shoots poking from the branches. The orange-yellow plant, the largest of the five, dropped all its leaves and sits like a stick in dirt. The white plant is a little better, but there is no green visible. | link

December 11, 2002

Here's the sketch I was promising yesterday.

Nate gave me a copy of the movie Spriggan, which is some beautiful freaking anime. I haven't made it to the end yet, but the story is pretty good so far...

I love my laptop. The entirety of Baltimore is encased in ice today, and our power here at work has blooped out twice already. My PowerBook just hums along quietly, waiting for its network connection to come back online. | link

December 10, 2002

So I've been looking around at other online comics/novels/stories and I found this one, called Broken Saints, which apparently has been around for a while. It's a long story with multiple parts to each chapter, and it seems to be meaty with dialogue. My criticisms are that I got bored pretty quickly with the format. They do a great job of setting up the story and providing sound effects and ambient music, but the word bubbles remove the layer of believability. The Flash work is nice, and some of it is slick, but the pace of the story is glacial and dull. I read fast, as I'm sure most of their target audience does, so I get tired of waiting around for the next text bubble. When it does come, it has the effect of making everything deep or dramatic. I had enough of that in High School (and I wrote a bunch of that in High School.) The other drawback to this approach is that he action is paced too slowly when it does come. I'm willing to entertain thoughts on this, if anybody has them.

No, I don't have anything to show you yet, because I'm still working out the subtleties of dark scenes with scratchboard. But I'll have something up soon, I promise.

Holy S%$*, this guy has a really nice site. And his work is first-rate as well. I suck.

Fortune Magazine says someone my age (31) should ideally have $100,000 stashed away for my retirement by now. It also says to maintain a current lifestyle of $100,000/yr, I need to save seven million dollars by the age of sixty-five. My current lifestyle is nowhere near that figure, and neither is my retirement fund.

Interesting Developments Dept.: Looks like there will be a fourth Mad Max movie after all. As an early fan of the series back in the 80's, it'll be interesting to see where George Miller takes the story now. | link

December 9, 2002

My charge card is smoking. With misgivings and deap-seated fears, Jen and I set out for Hell—I mean, the mall, on Friday night. We didn't actually buy anything, as I had to medicate her after a particularly long day (i.e. cellphone calls in the parking lot at 9pm) but after a delicious meal, all was good. We returned on Saturday to walk among the teeming millions, finding the majority of our gifts at the Target. Love that store. Sunday was spent finishing up a lot of last-minute ideas and following up on the few people we hadn't chased down to that point. With the exception of Jen and a few other small gifts, we look to be about 90% done with the shopping. We also found that Williams-Sonoma is the centerpoint of the universe- in 15 minutes we met up with four different friends there.

We also got our first look at the new Apple Store up in Towson; it's very well-designed and was full of people playing with iMacs and iPods. We were both very impressed with the hardware (Jen made an appreciative "ooooooohhh" sound when we looked at the 17' iMac) and with the store in general. | link

December 8, 2002

Here's to standing up for what you believe in. God bless.

A Hint to You, After a Trip To Smith & Hawken: A few years ago I went crazy and for Christmas bought every woman I knew a paperwhite forcing kit, because I thought they were pretty. It turns out that while they look really pretty, about a week after they bloom they tend to smell like urine. Rancid urine in your house. You have been warned. | link

December 6, 2002

It begins. Tonight Jen and I are braving the snow and people to begin Round 1 of Us vs. Christmas. We are journeying to the Columbia Mall to seek out interesting, insightful gifts for our loved ones.

Got any suggestions?

Looks like the roads are pretty clear out there, which is a Good Thing. We also got word today that one of our freelance gigs is swinging into gear—good news.

Outside the Port Discovery museum downtown, they have an exhibit featuring a large balloon tethered to a winch. During the summertime, I would drive to and from work watching the balloon rise and fall in the sunshine, filled, no doubt, with happy children enjoying a bird's eye view of the city. Today on my way to work, by chance I pulled up behind my friend Todd, who pointed out a very limp and deflated balloon covered in snow, huddled over the cold ground outside the museum grounds. | link

December 5, 2002

urban paralysis (a social experiment), 12.01

Indeed, I bought the milk, the bread, and the coffee, and lo, the heavens did unload. And yea, verily, we did sit and listen to the Prophets proclaim doom.

The salt truck, representing the taxes I pay to the city, rolled through at 6:20, after the sun went down and the temperature dropped below 20 degrees. Thanks guys. | link

December 4, 2002

Peep this. really well-designed photography site: boochakanan.

Continuing the trend, it's Retro Music Tuesday. Save It For Later (The English Beat), Pablo Picasso (The Burning Sensations), Institutionalized (Suicidal Tendencies), Can't You Hear Me Knocking by the Stones and The Neil Diamond version of Secret Agent Man (Because I can't find the Plugz anywhere.)

I did not think I could say this, but I fear I am growing close to Thanksgiving Critical Mass—the time when you realize just how sick you're getting of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, and gravy. I think that my stomach has grown about four grinch-sizes since last Thursday, and hopefully I have gained a few pounds (those that know me understand what a good thing this would be.) Unfortunately, the thought of a huge heaping plate of leftovers is beginning to provoke the gag reflex. | link

December 3, 2002

My Name Is. So I went to the Target with Jen to look for assorted stuff a few weeks ago, and we found ourselves in the sock-and-underwear section, which is also conspicuously near the hat-and-glove section. I looked through the hats they had there and found a tuque in a lovely green color, and wound up buying it because it's warm and light and fits my big fat cranium pretty well. To my dismay, Jen has taken to calling me Eminem when I wear it, although I leave the hoodie at home. Today I have it on because it's 20 freakin' degrees outside and my office thermostat is set on 'meat locker'. They are calling for snow tomorrow night, which means the fair city of Baltimore will go mental and buy up all the toilet paper, milk and bread visible. Then they will leave their houses and drive extra-fast to go someplace and crash their cars into each other because the idea of the all-season tire is a foreign concept (and you can't fit an all-season tire on your super-low-profile racing mags now, can you?)

I began sketching out ideas and a rough storyboard for a narrative I've been thinking about last night. I have a basic storyline together and a visual idea for how I'd like the first pages to look, and I'm still working on how to present them in an online format. One of the other problems I'm seeing is how to take pictures of the reference points I'd like; my camera doesn't have any setting for manual exposure or lighting conditions besides 'dark', 'normal' and 'light'. Most of the beginning of the story is set at 3:30am, so it'll be difficult to get what I need.

Postscript: I read the manual and found a ton of features that I had overlooked before, including the ISO settings, the infinity focus setting, and the digital zoom feature (duh!) I also found the timer function. So I'll freeze tonight and take a few pictures and see what I get- All may not be lost! | link

December 2, 2002

backyard, 12.01

Whew. The Thanksgiving feasting is over; the fridge is stuffed with Tupperware and bursting at the seams. All was successful with the meal, and the Meeting Of The Two Families went off without a hitch, thankfully. Everybody had a great time together and we dined in Little Italy. (Rather fitting, given the motif, eh?)

We were also lent the first season of the Sopranos on DVD the day before Thanksgiving, and spent a good portion of the holiday loosening our belts and travelling to North Jersey to peek in on the lives of Tony and his family. I realize I'm about four years behind the curve here, but I have to say this is a fantastic show. Jen and I are totally hooked.

I finally got a sheet of UV glass cut for three gifts my house presented me when I began demolishing the basement: a collection of Tijuana bibles fell from the ceiling over the old bathroom as I tore the tongue and groove down. (Additionally, I was presented with a series of letters to Santa and a series of longshoreman's pay stubs over the old kitchen sink, a very old and used tampon in the bathroom, and an envelope containing $50 in bills circa 1969 up front in the old closet.) In doing some research on the eight-pagers, I found a link to a book on the subject as well as some other sites. It's nice to have them framed, finally. | link

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