Especially because of all the work I’ve been doing in Drupal, I’ve switched most of my development efforts away from Perl solutions and started working mostly with PHP. The «Perl versus PHP» flamewars on the Internet are all over the place and usually full of nonsense. I really don’t want to add to that. In fact, I’m pretty pleased with PHP. The language has come a long way since it’s days as PHP/FI. I’ve come to appreciate its variable scoping … Read the rest
This is how I got started with the series of pen and ink drawings of pens and ink bottles. I’m not even sure what it was at first that intrigued me, but it’s not that difficult to figure out. I love my pens and these were good exercises in texture and reflection with a variety of surfaces. There were challenges with these drawings, but they are sketchbook pieces, so I didn’t want to take them too seriously.
My sketchbook is … Read the rest
This is the first in a series of posts which will show the progression of a pen and ink drawing on my drawing table. I intend to upload a scan each day, although I will likely skip days on this piece while I show other work being done. This scan in particular was made about two weeks ago. For some days I have multiple scans to show steps of the process, so this will not be seen in real time, … Read the rest
This Illustrator file was too big and complex to be rendered into a high-resolution raster by either Illustrator or Photoshop. Here GIMP’s Ghostscript interpreter was brought in for the job, which it did handily in less than an hour. Illustrator flat-out refused to export the 500,000-endpoint vector file at the resolution I needed, and Photoshop kept one of my eight processor cores working at 100% for more than two days before I gave up and gave … Read the rest
Congratulations to Barack Obama for knowing at least one section of the Constitution of the United States better than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It would be horrific to think that Justice Roberts did that purposefully to make it look like Obama forgot the words he had just said. If Obama had parroted Roberts the whole country would be ablaze with the news that Obama had gotten it wrong, regardless of Roberts’ blunder.… Read the rest
It’s a glad day for me. For the first time in my life a man I voted for has taken the office of President of the United States. America has shown a willingness to transcend the prejudice that has poisoned so many chapters of our history. I keep on thinking about how it was less than fifty years ago that people were skeptically whispering, «do you think that America is ready to elect a Catholic President?» Today proves not that … Read the rest
I never saw much of the Battlestar Galactica spinoff Galactica 1980 when it was out. It came available on iTunes recently and I’m too much of a fanboy to resist it, no matter how bad I know it’s going to be.
It’s immediately obvious why some of the fanboy faithful don’t consider Galactica 1980 to be canon. This is supposed to take place thirty years after the original series, but as the title suggests, it takes place in the year 1980… Read the rest
Yeah, I hate to say this, but for a while I’ve had the impression that the best is the enemy of the good when it comes to blogging software and content management frameworks. From a purely technical standpoint, switching Monochromatic Outlook from WordPress to Drupal was a leap forward. Drupal is robust and flexible and allows for brand new content types to be built. It’s modular and the variety of existing add-ons is fantastic. The taxonomy system allows for slicing … Read the rest
I’ll spare you all the details of the latest studio move, but it’s coming along. Basically I’m moving into my own space. I’m still at Art Explosion, just not sharing a space anymore. Art Explosion is very convenient to me, and my only real complaint with it is that there’s some interpersonal drama there from time to time. In fact, I’ve started to think that all that drama at Art Explosion could be turned into a nice webcomic if I … Read the rest