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
I’ve been wondering lately if my perception of economic realities is colored by a shift in the makeup of the persons running industry; whether once upon a time there were industrialists with great vision and now, those being few and far between, I make decisions as though there aren’t any.
Recently in California we voted to put a lot of public money into a high-speed rail to connect San Francisco with Los Angeles. I’m all for high-speed rail and I … Read the rest
Freedom is the right to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.
—George Orwell, 1984
Yesterday I spend the latter part of the day in the studio finishing up a pen and ink drawing. Working in pen and ink makes sense to me. There’s a lot I don’t understand, but every thing I learn makes me better at what I do. The world makes sense when I’m putting ink on paper. If I … Read the rest
I received a letter in the mail a couple of weeks ago from AT&T, who has provided my cellphone service for at least six years now with very little trouble. Of course, It’s really three different companies: I was on AT&T before AT&T was bought by Cingular, which was before Cingular bought SBC and started calling itself AT&T. AT&T, it seems, is now offering DSL in my neighborhood. And the prices looked pretty good. Instead of the upwards of seventy … Read the rest
Forgive the technical diversion, but this is a little unsettling. I’ve been stubbornly clinging to the idea that I can get away with using integrated getter/setter methods in my code. I thought it was an elegant solution to the clumsiness of making separate methods for getting and setting values in my objects: simply check to see if there is a value passed to the method, massage the value any way I want, then return it. If no value is sent, … Read the rest
Yesterday I was surprised to see an email from a gentleman at WeRecoverData.com asking to speak with me about the experience I had earlier this year when I sent a hard disk for data recovery. I was surprised mostly because in May I listed them along with Acomdata as a company «not to do business with». The post itself was a bit more nuanced, but suffice it to say I didn’t portray the company in a glowing light. The email … Read the rest
I’m not totally unsympathetic to the proponents of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that would rewrite the California State Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. I understand that my position (which amounts to a «why the hell should I care if gay people want to get married» attitude) is not the only legitimate opinion. Some folks just don’t think that’s the way it oughtta be, and they are entitled to their opinion. I probably should have just left it at … Read the rest