CEO of Netflix Says: «Raise My Taxes»

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/opinion/06hastings.html?_r=1&em

A sur­pris­ing and cogent argu­ment. I’m not sure I agree that rais­ing tax­es is the right idea (clos­ing loop­holes would be a bet­ter start), but he has struck an under­ly­ing truth about the atti­tudes about wealth that our soci­ety would be bet­ter off with­out. Thought-pro­vok­ing in any case.… Read the rest

More Sketchbook Pens: Four Edsons

Edson DraftThese are now past­ed into my sketch­book, but are not actu­al­ly sketch­book work, but drafts. I’ve men­tioned this before, but often what I do when I’m not cer­tain how to pro­ceed with a draw­ing is to place vel­lum over the pen­cil draw­ing and take dif­fer­ent approach­es at ren­der­ing the sec­tion in ink. Some­times these come out as almost ful­ly-real­ized draw­ings and oth­er times I’ll work only on one the area of the draw­ing. Some­times I’ll rough out some ideas crude­ly … Read the rest

Second Stage of Falcon Inks

Falcon 2Here you can see that after addi­tion­al lay­ers the hatch­ing begins to take on a smoother appear­ance. I’m deep­en­ing up some areas to give shape, but it’s a process that will have to devel­op over time. The blown-out high­light areas still look like paint­ed-on stripes and there’s lit­tle reflec­tive detail, but you can see where it’s going. The main sur­face of the nib still has only two lay­ers of hatching.… Read the rest

Yet Another Stupid Perl Versus PHP Rant

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

A couple of pens from my sketchbook

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

How My Work Looks Before It Is Done: First Stage of the Falcon

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

A Little Slice of a Big Spiral

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

The Oath

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