Shifting Gears

Thank God it’s Monday

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

iFix

iBook in PiecesThe 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

Happiness is a Warm Guzzi

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

Please Drive More Carefully

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

Why Are Smartphones So Dumb?

I can’t say that I’m thrilled about my Treo 680. The best thing I can say about it, I think, is that it’s not as bad as all the oth­er options out there. But a cou­ple of days ago the screen got cracked and so all the think­ing I’ve been doing about how to replace it has sud­den­ly become no longer the­o­ret­i­cal. It’s time for a new phone.

Trou­ble is, I have very high expec­ta­tions of a hand­held com­put­ing device. I … Read the rest

Red Ring Cycle Part II or 600 Bottles of Ink on the Wall

The Rotring 600 is Rotring’s most pop­u­lar and well-known foun­tain pen, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of their inex­pen­sive Art­Pen line. When peo­ple think of Rotring pens, they almost invari­ably think of either rapi­do­graphs or the 600.

There were a cou­ple of 600s in the pen case the day I bought my 700 back in the late nineties. I tried them out and did­n’t care for them as much as the 700. Of course, I’m glad that I … Read the rest

Pilots Great and Small

Namiki BambooIn case there is any con­fu­sion, Nami­ki and Pilot are brands of the same com­pa­ny. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, Nami­ki makes «fine» pens while Pilot sells office sup­plies. But the mar­kets in dif­fer­ent coun­tries cause the com­pa­ny to shift those lines around. The Nami­ki Bam­boo one might buy in the Unit­ed States is avail­able in Europe as the Pilot Bam­boo. Sim­i­lar­ly, I’ve seen the excel­lent Pilot Knight adver­tised as the Nami­ki Knight.

Pilot/Namiki makes some fan­tas­tic pens. A com­pa­ny that does as … Read the rest

All This Can Be Yours

The lat­est issue of All This Is Mine has just been made avail­able. Not only is All This Is Mine one of the most unique­ly charm­ing pub­li­ca­tions ever, but this issue has per­son­al sig­nif­i­cance to me, as it con­tains an arti­cle I wrote about choos­ing a foun­tain pen.

Go get your­self a copy! Usu­al­ly when I shame­less­ly pro­mote myself it does­n’t come with this much oth­er cool stuff sur­round­ing it. If you haven’t been exposed to All This Is Mine yet, … Read the rest