Author: splicer

Pilot is quick­ly becom­ing my favorite pen man­u­fac­tur­er and my least favorite pen com­pa­ny at the same time. Their design and atten­tion to detail is remark­able, their qual­i­ty con­trol appears to be cur­rent­ly unpar­al­leled in the indus­try, and their prices run on the low side com­pared to pens of sim­i­lar qual­i­ty of design. In these regards, Pilot is mak­ing most of the rest of the indus­try look bad. What’s the catch? Pilot USA won’t sell these pens.

The newest addi­tion to … Read the rest

I’d orig­i­nal­ly thought to title this post «Back to Paper», but the thing is, I’ve nev­er before real­ly used a paper orga­niz­er or cal­en­dar. I’ve tried a few over the years, of course, but noth­ing real­ly took. In 1993 I gave up on keep­ing a paper address book and began record­ing names, num­bers, birth­days and address­es on my desk­top com­put­er using OS/2 2.0’s «Data­base», a rudi­men­ta­ry form-builder that was part of its col­lec­tion of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty appli­ca­tions, … Read the rest

I came across a very small repro­duc­tion of this adver­tise­ment while read­ing David and Mark Shep­herd’s Park­er ‘51’. Although the Park­er 61 foun­tain pen is men­tioned only briefly in their book about the icon­ic ‘51’, the use of Nor­man Rock­well illus­tra­tions in Park­er’s adver­tise­ments was too impor­tant to ignore even if they were for the «wrong» pen. The 61 is one of my favorite pens, and I dare­say I like mine bet­ter than my ‘… Read the rest

Mark this down in your cal­en­dars, OK?

…and that means mark it down in your cal­en­dar and show up.

Once again, the Mis­sion Arts Foun­da­tion will be host­ing a week­end of Open Stu­dios, and once again I’ll be there in my stu­dio answer­ing ques­tions and hope­ful­ly sell­ing art­work. I’m at Stu­dio 16 at the 17^th Street Art Explo­sion loca­tion. There will be wine and crack­ers and a zil­lion artists oth­er than me par­tic­i­pat­ing, so it’s sure to be a blast. … Read the rest

I’m pulling out all the stops on this piece. When it’s fin­ished I may have to title it «Swap Space» or «Scratch Disk».

It may not be as bad as that. Right now I’m try­ing a fin­er line­screen than the one I start­ed work­ing with. That means increas­ing the image res­o­lu­tion for each chan­nel as I screen it. The final res­o­lu­tion will be the same (which is twice the res­o­lu­tion of any of my pre­vi­ous large-for­mat lux­o­graph­ic prints) but the … Read the rest

Remem­ber how proud I was of myself last night for exceed­ing my sys­tem resources? Well, I’m over it now. This is get­ting annoy­ing. I closed all the files and shut­down and restart­ed my machine to make sure I was­n’t using mem­o­ry from oth­er appli­ca­tions or mem­o­ry leaks or any­thing like that. I brought the sys­tem back up with rough­ly 20GB of disk space free. I tried to open the work­ing file of that one col­or chan­nel in Pho­to­shop, which … Read the rest

I know I’m being pro­duc­tive when my hard dri­ve runs out of space. 

Open Stu­dios is hap­pen­ing in anoth­er month and a half, and I don’t have any­where near as much work ready as I’d like. Get­ting prints made and framed requires a bit of lead time, so it’s not just a mat­ter of get­ting more ink down on paper. My dead­lines are draw­ing very very near. You can eas­i­ly imag­ine how frus­trat­ing it is then to have my machines show … Read the rest

In an effort to pro­mote the not-quite-lost art of let­ter-writ­ing, the USPS is giv­ing away postage-paid note­cards adorned with John Adams quo­ta­tions about let­ter-writ­ing. I’m skep­ti­cal that the «first one’s free» strat­e­gy will actu­al­ly cause peo­ple who are not nor­mal­ly let­ter-writ­ers to adopt a habit, but I have to give them props for the attempt. I’m sure that it will suc­cess­ful­ly rein­force the habit in those who already have it. Not to men­tion how refresh­ing it is to see the … Read the rest

It’s a love­ly day here in San Fran­cis­co, so I took advan­tage of the sun­light to catch up on some pho­tog­ra­phy. I have Open Stu­dios in two months (com­ing up quick­er than I’d like to admit) and a few projects that have fall­en by the way­side since my acci­dent in Sep­tem­ber. I packed up my cam­era with one of the lens­es that’s still intact, grabbed some toy dinosaurs, and head­ed to Trea­sure Island.

The shoot­ing was nice, but frus­trat­ing. My … Read the rest