workin 9 - 5... or midnight
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
One of the benefits of the new job is the different technologies I've been getting to interact with. My past job was all web-based, even if it was different web technologies. So far I've worked on 2 CD-Rom projects, 2 Tablet PC projects, and a tradeshow kiosk with a 42" plasma touch screen monitor. I'm just working on my first project now that will be displayed on the web-- a whack-a-mole game that the client is hoping will be stolen for some free viral marketing.Last week was kinda crazy. The week was supposed to be devoted to working on the game, but I didn't wind up spending a single hour working on the game at the office. By Monday afternoon I realized that I'd get much more done on it at home, so I resigned myself to working on everything else at work, and working on the game at home-- which wound up being about 30 hours' worth. I worked 70.5 hours from Sat - Fri, working every evening except one, then had to go in to the office for a few hours this past Saturday and then again Easter evening to test the kiosk project with the Proj. Manager before it went out Monday morning. AND I even went in early Monday morning to make sure everything got out ok. I can work a lot, sure, but waking up early... that is not easy for me. I'm not complaining about putting in all those hours-- it's not going to happen often. But even so, it's not bad because I can just bring everything home at night and still get out of the office in time to have dinner with Kim and the kids. I feel much better about sacrificing my own time if it's not at the expense of the time I have with them. That said, I think Kim was more over-worked last week than I was. Truth is, I've always got some project or whatever to occupy my time. It just happened that last week that time wasn't spent on my own projects. (Tonight my project was to work on a new mix that I'll post here soon, and to do a bit of writing!)
Getting to play with the 42" touch screen was pretty cool. I basically built a flash menu that displayed a bunch of videos. Creating the menus was the easy part-- finding a combination of codecs and bitrates for the video that flash could handle displaying on such a large screen took an entire day of going back and forth with the video guy to find something acceptable.
The tablet PCs are really awesome. Something about the idea of using a pen with a computer is so appealing to me. The lead flash developer just got one about 2 weeks ago to take to meetings and whatnot and I have to say I'm quite envious. I'm gonna have to swindle one of them sooner or later. It's kinda like having a laptop that's just a screen. You can plug a usb mouse/keyboard into it, but natively you either have to tap on a little keyboard on the screen, or just write on it like pen on paper. As you write it tries to figure out which letters you're writing, you correct it, and through this back and forth you teach it to interpret your hand-writing. For the time being I need to just get one of them fancy wacom tablets and make due.
Oh, and something good that came of going to the office this weekend-- it was warm enough to take the scooter! Yay spring!
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exposure
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
I walked out from tucking my daughter into bed last night and kim was sitting at the desk reading my website, which i found to be kinda like having someone walk in while i'm shaving or something. There's nothing wrong with it, but you still just feel a little exposed.At some point she went to the Edward Hopper page and i realized that i need to do another artist page. I even have someone lined up-- Yves Tanguy (eve tahn·gee). He's far from my favorite artist, but he painted one of my favorite paintings, which perhaps you will see soon!
I was also reminded of something that i'd been thinking about last week. The reason that i created the Fine Art Collection Google Module and these artists pages is that, in spite of whatever lack of elegance i may have in writing about the artists themselves, I like the idea of spreading Art and helping to educate others, or at least interest them in Art. Last week i was thinking about the music industry and the massive machine that generates interest, awareness, and ultimately sales of music to so many people. Why is the proliferation of Visual Art so comparitively nonexistent? And no, in this case i don't think that design counts. Ipods are great and all, but i'm not just talking about aesthetics in general. I mean, how do we as a society find out about new art? Sure there are trade publications, and of course there are galleries and museums, but to be honest none of those have a lot of impact. Galleries in milwaukee are... are there any galleries in milwaukee? The art museum here, for all of the hype about the building itself, doesn't get much in the way of quality exhibitions.
There's the obvious fact that there just isn't a market for Art outside of print shops in the mall, but I would like to find some way in which i can learn about new artists. Of course, most of the time i don't like what i see anyway.
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new new york times
Monday, April 03, 2006
The New York Times just put out a major redesign of their website and i think it looks pretty good. I looked under the hood at the code briefly and it looks pretty good too. There are a few tables holding things together, though i don't think that there were any nested tables. And let's be honest, nested tables were like that little bag of gizzards you get when you buy a whole chicken at the grocery. No, the not the rotisserie ones. (I can't believe i spelled rotisserie right on the first try.)
I kinda miss the little ajax-y pop-up div menu thing they had going on for a few months there, though it was more neat than it was liable to be used. I like that major sites are moving away from left-side navigation. CNN just re-designed recently as well and made it a point to draw attention to the left nav bar being gone. The new NYT homepage has this impossibly narrow main nav on the homepage (I never had a client that'd approve something so sleek), and no left nav at all through the rest of the site, it looks like. None that i've seen so far, anyway.
Mostly i'm just glad to see such a large-name website with such a modern, clean design using newer code/design practices. It helps in the job of convincing smaller clients that it's ok to be less garrish on the web and still have a "successful" website.
The more i look around at their site, the more i like. There aren't a bunch of gratuitous images cluttering up the design. We used to have to use 8 images just to create a box with pretty little rounded corners. And there were these invisible images everywhere!
"We have expanded the page to take advantage of the larger monitors now used by the vast majority of our readers. We've improved the navigation throughout the site so that no matter what page you land on, you can easily dig deeper into other sections or use our multimedia."
The web is expanding to 1024 pixels wide! It's about time you all got at least 17" monitors. Now if only everyone could read a 9pt font.
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ding!
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Ok, it's done. A new painting in two days! I need to work like this more often. Anything more than that is just too much time commitment.
Click to enlarge and stuff. The hair is shiney because it's still wet in the pic.
So, does it seem like it's "missing color," or is it busy enough with just lines and shapes to justify its being monochromatic? Speak up, foo.
My daughter loves that word, "foo," (short for fool). And we were wrestling today and she said to me "I sat on your hade!"
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work in progress
I spent like 7 hours painting today (& tonight). I had begun this drawing in illustrator a while back and decided last weekend to add the background in. I debated whether or not to do the background, but i'm glad that i chose to. Details are everything. Having some sort of reality present really helps to ground an image. I sketched it out onto the canvas this week and stopped to pick up some paint brushes during lunch on thursday.
I'm not actually doing it black and white, i'm painting it green and white. Other than that there'll be no color. I wasn't really pleased with the way the watercolor of kim reading came out, so i decided to just forego color completely this time--something i considered doing with the watercolor anyway. I was trying to figure out what color to use and considered a deep blue, but thought that might look too "inky;" a medium brown i thought might have a nice mimic sepia tone effect; or this green that i chose to go with to accentuate the leaves in the upper left corner and the green of the lawn lawn chairs. The idea was to try to draw out the natural aspects of an image that could otherwise be considered mechanical (especially once you get caught up in the geometry going on on the right side). Green is the color of life, of course, right? The idea was also to simply avoid doing black and white. Colors elicit emotion, as well as an impetus to consider why i chose the color i did. Why did he choose that green? What is the deeper meaning? Maybe it's all just because i already had a tube of that green.
There's this irony in making these paintings in that on the one hand i feel like, to some extent, making the transition out of the computer and onto a medium that involves me using my hands to create it totally validates it as art. I'm not saying that's what i believe, just that it's a feeling i get and it's got to be rooted in something. The irony is that a large part of what i like in these images is the perfection of the lines and shapes and there's no way that i can paint with that sort of perfection. It's like the humanness, the part that supposedly makes it "art," also diminishes the quality of the piece. The lines look good from even just a few feet back, but after working with pens on paper for so long with the level of detail that allows, and especially in comparison to being in Illustrator, trying to deal with the rough nature of a paint brush on canvas is hard to appreciate. That being said, from across the room where i am now, it looks awesome. Where the piece really comes alive, i think, is in the eyelashes and they came out perfectly in the painting.
I still have all of the stuff on the right side to finish, but i'll post of pic of it when it's done.
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