Careerbuilder.com: Spam King of the Recession Age?

Like many Amer­i­cans these days, I’m hunt­ing for pos­i­tive cash­flow and inves­ti­gat­ing ways in which I can trade my time and effort for paper I can turn around and trade for food and lodg­ing and art sup­plies. And in this day and age, the way to do that is through a vari­ety of web­sites that con­nect job seek­ers with employers.

The high­est val­ue sites are ones where the employ­ers have to pay to look at a résumé. The log­ic is … Read the rest

Progress in the Studio

Look­ing at this scan I’m hav­ing a lot of trou­ble see­ing the good in here, so I offer this in my defense: the image to the right is a sec­tion of the draw­ing in progress about two inch­es wide. So all the slop­pi­ness is exag­ger­at­ed by the amount larg­er the image is shown on screen than on the draw­ing table.

I do think I’ll have to touch this up after I fin­ish the rest of the draw­ing but for now I’m … Read the rest

The Ad Hoc To-Do List

I strug­gle against clut­ter. I don’t like it, but it is all around me. I have to con­fess my envy of those who have placid Zen-like open homes and work­spaces. I gen­er­al­ly do a pret­ty good job with my liv­ing room, but even now I see a few piles of unopened mail, box­es, and assort­ed mis­cel­lany wait­ing to be shoved away some­where out of sight and out of mind.

Late­ly I’ve been lis­ten­ing to the 43Folders pod­casts, specif­i­cal­ly Mer­lin Man­n’s … Read the rest

Handheld Computing: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Once upon a time, I could pull a small com­put­er from my pock­et while sit­ting in a cafe and use it to check my email, write blog posts and short sto­ries, update my resume, and cre­ate invoic­es for clients. I’m not even talk­ing about my New­ton, which stretched cred­i­bil­i­ty to call pock­etable. No, all these things could be done and done well by my old Palm Tungsten|T3, which I bought in 2003. If truth be told, most … Read the rest

Buy Some Art From Me

In the long-stand­ing tra­di­tion of launch­ing ecom­merce web­sites with incom­plete fea­tures, min­i­mal con­sid­er­a­tion to user expe­ri­ence and inad­e­quate test­ing, I bring you the new incar­na­tion of the old Paroxysm.com.

Sad­ly, you won’t find the adven­tures of ‘Zoop’ Dubin, Pri­vate Eye there any longer, but maybe that can be added at some lat­er date. What you will find is a col­lec­tion of my pen & ink draw­ings, pho­tographs, and lux­o­graph­ic prints, and a shop­ping cart for pur­chas­ing prints … Read the rest

Is Copyright In Danger?

A recent debate/poll in The Econ­o­mist end­ed with a tal­ly of 71% to 29% declar­ing that copy­right laws do more harm than good. While I’m the first to admit that there are seri­ous prob­lems with the exist­ing han­dling of intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty, I’m appalled at the seem­ing­ly wide­spread notion that cre­ativ­i­ty should not be legal­ly pro­tect­ed and encouraged.

Last year, only the $700 Bil­lion bailout dis­tract­ed the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from pass­ing the Orphan Works Act, which would … Read the rest

A Minor Color-Theory Epiphany

I’ve spent the bet­ter part of the after­noon in the stu­dio work­ing on the sec­ond in my series of draw­ings of San Fran­cis­co land­marks (if I’ve start­ed the sec­ond it’s offi­cial­ly a series, right?) I’m in the ear­ly pen­cil phase, doing a lot of study of ref­er­ence pho­tos and cre­at­ing a lot of out­lines, not attend­ing to ques­tions about texture.

One of the fas­ci­nat­ing things about the human mind is its capac­i­ty to cre­ate con­nec­tions from total­ly dis­parate fields, and … Read the rest

Hoping The Universe Ends Soon

I’m watch­ing the sec­ond episode of the His­to­ry Chan­nel series The Uni­verse and am get­ting aggra­vat­ed. I seri­ous­ly hope that the series improved over time. The nar­ra­tor’s voice is grat­ing on me and the qual­i­ty of sci­ence dis­played is poor. The writ­ers seem to have made their deci­sions based on dra­mat­ic impact rather than facts.

The sec­ond episode, about Mars, is bet­ter than the first episode, about the Sun. I had to roll my eyes when the nar­ra­tor intro­duced the Sun … Read the rest

2009 Spring Open Studios

Thurs­day night at Art Explo­sion on Sev­en­teenth Street in San Fran­cis­co Spring Open Stu­dios 2009 kicked off with an «after-work pre­view» show to pro­vide a peek at the new work that was on dis­play all week­end, begin­ning with Fri­day night’s open­ing at 7pm. I haven’t the time or incli­na­tion to pro­vide a com­plete sur­vey of the vari­ety of the work at Open Stu­dios this year, but I took some snap­shots of a small sam­ple of this year’s notable work.… Read the rest