The latest portrait to come off my drawing table is titled The Hunter Watches Over You Always. It is the portrait of the father of a friend whose father died when she was nine. She is one of several people I’ve known who have expressed a connection or affecton for the constellation Orion. I’ve always liked Orion; it’s about the easiest constellation to find in the Northern Hemisphere. But it wasn’t until hearing a number of dear friends tell … Read the rest
After a long couple days at the studio (almost done with a new piece) I’m relaxing at home with a cup of Ginger Twist tea, my Omas Emotica fountain pen, a new bottle of ink (Noodler’s «Galileo Manuscript Brown» made exclusively for Fountain Pen Network), and the newest episode of the new Terminator TV series. It’s pretty decent pulp TV, which is to say that part of what’s good about it is that it’s not really that good. Also, … Read the rest
I want to like the iPhone. I really do, and I am confident that I’ll have one in a year or two. It’s very slick and pretty and there’s a lot of stuff that it does really well. I believe most of the iPhone naysayers are full of it. I have my complaints about the iPhone (which I’ll enumerate presently) but most of the complaints I’ve heard about the iPhone are just plain crap. I’ve come to suspect these vocal … Read the rest
I hate to make excuses for a website’s appearance. It sounds very much like the Web of 1995 where nearly every site had an oh-so-clever icon of an «under construction» sign. But having migrated Monochromatic Outlook to a different content management platform, I’ve found that some of the features will take more time to migrate than I’d anticipated. My book reviews in particular are looking ugly and are badly organized.
I will update and fix this and other issues with … Read the rest
I’ve been testing ink colors for some time. I actually wrote only with black ink until a little over a year ago when I had a contract in a department of a company that color-coded signoffs in their workflow. The department I was working in had green for our color and we were all given horrible green ballpoints so that we could sign our parts and approvals. Actually, it was a pretty good system; the workflow sheets were intuitive and … Read the rest
I admit it. I hate Microsoft Office. I’m constantly appalled at how bloated and complicated it is even to do simple things. I won’t write in Word, mostly because I’ve never been able to simply sit down and write with it. Maybe I’m too easily distracted? I know I don’t have the time to try to figure out how to simplify the interface by getting rid of useless toolbars and turning off annoying pop-ups that second-guess what I’m trying to … Read the rest
For a long time my drawing work has been done with precise technical pens and lots and lots of crosshatching. I’ve done very little in the way of loosening up into a more cartoony style. So when I was approached by the Life’s Work Center to create a single-frame cartoon to accompany an article in Open Exchange (one of the local free newsprint magazines), I wasn’t really sure I should take the assignment. I like Tom and the program they … Read the rest
The iBook was always just a little bit loose. That’s how I bought it. Everything in working order, but cosmetically you could see some gaps telling the story of an occasional brush with gravity. The pieces just didn’t fit together the way they surely did when they came from the factory.
All that changed when it slid off the drawing table in my studio and crashed into the floor.It would still turn on, but the screen and its housing … Read the rest
The most hackneyed blogger line in all of history: sorry I haven’t been writing much recently. I would have thought that being injured and keeping my foot up would have given me more reason to write. In fact while I may have had more time to write in the last two months, I haven’t had a lot to write about. Not really proud of all the television I’ve watched in the last two months. I’ve done some other things, but … Read the rest
On Thursday while I was on my way to my dentist’s office, I got hit by a car while riding my motorcycle.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been wondering whether I was imagining it or whether recently people have been paying less and less attention to their driving. It seems in the past month that I’ve seen a fourfold increase in red light running and a lot more people just doing outright dumb things. Most times, these people … Read the rest