I have always had every intention in the world to vote for Barack Obama. I really wish liberals found him more fascinating than the Republican ticket because while I admire and respect John McCain and Sarah Palin I would just as soon not hear anything more about them. I mean, shut up already! Yeah, the doddering maverick POW, and the folksy ultra-conservative corrupt hockey Mom from Alaska–I know, I get it, I’ve had my fill! Can we go back to talking about the charismatic Christian-not-Muslim black guy and his tell-it-like-it-is sidekick for a change? Hearing about those guys doesn’t irritate the f*ck out of me.
Just kidding. I recently got inspired to draw a fairly absurd cartoon:
Dating is an adventure, for sure. I went for a more “informal” feel here, doing the text all freehand. I have mixed feelings about the result, but it is better to produce than to procrastinate.
And since you bought the DVD, here’s the bonus material–the “making of” the above comic:
A few weeks back I trekked over to Japantown to pick up some good pens at Kinokuniya. I pencil the thing in, then go over it with ink. In this case, I settled on a 0.7mm Zebra Hyper Jell for the text and a finer 0.5mm Sarasa Stick for the figure. I have a 0.8mm Uniball Vision Elite but that is complete crap compared the the fancy Japanese pens.
And yes, let the ink dry before erasing the pencil. Unfortunately with these finer pens it takes some off the ink out too.
I arrived at work today to find that someone had left a bit of the Wall Street Journal sitting on my desk, open to this page:
Now, why would someone leave me this photo? For anyone who knows me, they might reasonably conclude that the sight of Korean women marching in skirts might lift my spirits in particular. And while I certainly do appreciate that aspect I also enjoy the obviously uncomfortable looks on their faces: is it the heavy-handed discipline? the insane authoritarian cult? the spotty food rations? the high goose-stepping? the discomfort of pantyhose?
Later in the day, my benefactor greeted me and explained his gift. It is because I have this picture tacked to my cube, stolen from Xinhua:
That’s the Chinese anti-terrorism people drilling on Segway scooters.
Will Wright’s latest software toy is out, and while I would be excited over such an ambitious project, I have also been underwhelmed by SimCity 4 and other games of that type in the past several years. There’s also a protest afoot against the game’s copy protection, so it has just over one star on Amazon.com. On a mailing list at work I explained that instead of rushing out to buy the new game, I’m taking a wait-and-see approach:
My interpretation is that it is an intriguing idea, but rather than building an interesting and educational toy, EA smashed it into an over-hyped high-priced bauble aimed at mass-market appeal. You can download the creature creator for free, but instead of being constrained by say, the amount of metabolism your creature would require or how fast it could reproduce given all it attributes, the only trade-off I could find was that if you spend more “money” you can buy more “features” . . .
My approach for now is to boycott the initial sales to see if they come around on the DRM, and wait to hear what other folks think of it, as well as maybe a price drop.
I spend a few minutes most mornings at the bus shelter at 19th Ave and Taraval. In July, they featured this public-service ad on the street side of the shelter, encouraging black youth to “stay alive and free” eating mama’s home cooking, rather than the cuisine associated with orange jumpsuits:
Cheesy, but well-meaning. I encourage all youth to “stay alive and free”.
The shelter side of this shelter usually features bizarre fashion advertising. In July, on the flip side of the above poster was this bizarre lady: a white woman seductively holding handcuffs. In addition to promoting “fashion” I guess she was trying to explain that temptations can be crassly grotesque:
To be sure, my neighborhood is dominated by Chinese families. Red is the color you wear on your wedding day.
Meanwhile, over on the BART, I see this strange poster in the distance:
I got up to take a closer look to discover a black man in his underwear, barricading the door against the sodomy we assume accompanies a prostate exam. “If you’re over 50, or an African American over 45, get your prostate exam!”
No comment.
So, yeah, there are some provocative posters, questionable imagery, but look beyond advertising to real folk, and you’ll see some soul.
This week I upgraded the guts in my desktop. For the video card I jumped up to an ASUS EN9600GT silent graphics card. It is pretty “bleeding edge” as far as Linux goes, and it is a double-wide card with a massive heatsink where others would have a fan. I like to reduce the white noise.
Unfortunately, it is too new for the currently-supported Ubuntu drivers. I used Ubuntu’s NvidiaManual docs to manually upgrade to the 173.14.12 drivers from NVidia’s site, and then things were happier. Except video playback. Files and DVDs seem to work okay, but the colors are off, notably, people get rendered with blue or purple flesh. (more…)
The deal is I’m trying to set some image published each Thursday. I missed last week for sure. Today is a double-header from around 2006: practice sketching cartoon characters based on a book I purchased on impulse on how to draw cartoons:
The first page is just practice drawing a simple character from repeated elements: nose, eyes, chin, ear, hair, smile. Then he gets a trapezoidal boy, simple arms, easy legs . . . . then we try posing him. On the next page we try to bring in some action.
A healthy reminder as to how you can achieve a great deal with simplicity, and that I should practice.
Ahhh, Ikea! Our favorite one-stop shop to kill an entire Saturday stocking up on inexpensive husgeråd. The checkout process can be exhausting, but I tend to find the post-unloading furniture assembly to be relaxing.
But, fret not, as I had done, for after my whining, Paul posted the number for Ikea US Corporate Headquarters, and I have since heard from others that calling this number indeed connects you to friendly human beings who can resolve problems for you:
(610)834-0180
If you find that this does or does not bring you satisfaction, please let me know. Cheers!
When people ask me what I do I answer either “computer stuff” or “Unix systems administration” and when asked what that means I answer that I keep the servers up and running. If you happen to be curious about my technical background you can review an old copy of my resumé online.
SAGE members and survey participants now have access to the 2007 System Administrator’s Salary Survey at http://www.sage.org/salsurv/. It is nice to check in an see how well one’s compensation aligns with that of one’s peers. I like the summary:
“A technically challenging profession that pays its entry people as much as US$50,000/year is an interesting one. System administration appears to be a fine way to make a living. Experience, education, and enhanced skillsets seem to be the growth path of choice.”
My current employer is known for its generous compensation, and the current survey is an affirmation of that. More importantly I’m enjoying my experience of my present employer and with any luck may actually hold this job for a few years.
I still hope to eventually return to Chicago to work. The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest average salaries, though Chicago averages not much less. The catch is that most Chicago jobs are in the financial services industry, and that is a less enjoyable work environment than the Silicon Valley culture.
I’m 32 years old, and so I try to behave like a grownup and not get excited over all the injustices of the world. And I try to have a reasoned, diplomatically nuanced outlook on world affairs. When it comes to Chinese politics I understand the tensions between regional independence and national cohesion, the tension between personal freedoms and the scary business of managing a rapidly industrializing nation of 1.2 billion people and limited natural resources . . . I care about what happens in China but I uhm, try to be a properly diplomatic adult and defer to them doing it their way.
This is the first contemporary “doodle” that I’m posting. I hope there will be more. I have long had a crush on the word “iconoclast” which basically means non-conformist, someone who marches to their own drumbeat, conventions be damned. I like it because it kind of sounds like “ironclad”. The “ironclad iconoclast” chugging along the seas blowing up wooden preconceptions!
Yeah, anyway, that crazy guy with the mug is me. Seriously, I can drink coffee from a paper cup if I have to but why should I have to? So, if I’m headed to a cafe I pack my own mug. Of course, Starbucks will still hand me my pastry in a bag, like I’m some sort of cretin.
I don’t actually talk as much as “Mr Iconoclast” but I have smiled and answered “MUG SIZE!”
Also, that overly-wide middle line could be considered a bug, which I could have fixed on the computer, but have chosen to preserve for posterity. Nyah!
