July 2005

Wild, colorful, out-of-character. Red Blue and Yellow only. My 16-year-old self was in a “primary colors” phase and was trying to stay focused on that.

I don’t think it’s great, but it sure looks like I had fun, dripping goache on the page the whole way through.

Pretty colors!

Here’s that androgynous girl again. A minimal bit of brush and ink and there’s an image of a girl. This is an earlier incarnation of what became Leather Jacket Girl 1989. I like that a lot is conveyed with a very few strokes.

With the space afforded by my big workbench back then, I was very free to experiment with various media. Without a doubt I enjoyed and was frustrated by ink and brush the most. It’s absolutely unforgiving of error. So the zen challenge, and I did very much look at it as a zen challenge, was to get all the strokes out and have it be coherent and beautiful and have no errors.

Anything else was not perfection. I suppose this is a kind of perversion of zen. The idea is not to be manically perfectionist, rather to be one with the medium and with your emotions as you embark on the artwork.

I threw out a lot of pictures. I did try to learn from them, but there were a lot of discards. I think I might have learned more perhaps had I done more pieces with a pencil underdrawing and then inked over that. But then that spontaneity I was seeking could be lost.

I had read a lot about Chinese and Japanese Calligraphy at that time, and I very much liked their quick brushstrokes that evoked an image and emotion. I still love that work.

One stumbling block I do set up for myself is that I want to be inspired and have the work flow out effortlessly. The block is when I let that prevent me from doing more experiements. My “good student self” has diligence to pursue something even when I fail repeatedly.

I find that goal hard, but I do try and pursue it to improvement. I suppose the story of this, my second marriage, is of working to improve even as things are difficult. Not that my marriage is so difficult, but it is a marriage, and as such is the blending of two egos and persons in a partnership of love.

As M. Scott Peck says, in The Road Less Travelled, “Life is hard.” He also talks about how marriage is the institution which smooths our rough edges and lets us have a view of life from a view of love and acceptance of the essential hardness of life.

Anyway, I digress. So let’s digress some more.

Yesterday, on websandiego there was something of a flamewar. While it’s nice to see activity there, it is frustrating that it is so devisive. Hurt feelings are so trivially easy to evoke in the context of a mailing list. And a strong criticism can feel like a personal attack on someone and on their business. The fact is, in this world one will be exposed to people they disagree with. A person’s reaction to such criticism shows the “content of their character” I think.

Looking back on the thread, I do not regret my words. There is much to learn from that thread for me. Not the least of which is the reminder that I have allowed websandiego to drift somewhat, and that perhaps I can, even from this distance, do things to foster that community.

On Sunday Leah watched Nicholas Nickleby, which was not bad at all for a costume drama. There was a speech at the end that does not seem to appear in the actual book to the effect of: “All lives are a tragedy; happiness is not to be expected, but the key is to recognize happiness when it comes and to delight in in.”

Speaking of Dave Letterman…

I had particular wants when I was a teenager. For example, at Christmastime I would ask very specifically that any t-shirts bought for me have no logos whatsoever. I still prefer blank t-shirts. Though the kids recently had the totally original idea of getting me a “Joe Cool” T-Shirt. Dude, I would so accept a Joe Cool t-shirt from my stepkids.

Anyway, one gift I got was a workbench. It was assembled by my paternal grandfather with screws. It was phenomenally awesome for me. I would draw on it, paint on it, overspray on it, experiment with fire and glue and paint and ink and carving and stencils (not all at the same time) on it. It was like having a garage in my room.

Well, David Letterman, with his “Late Night With David Letterman” show was a godsend to me. I stayed up far too late and watched Dave. This usually caused me to wake up late. But Dave was funny. Late Night was dadaist, silly, ironic, observant genius. There was no equal. I still have a large collection of Dave-oribilia that I keep meaning to auction off on eBay. It’s mostly magazines and such, but they’re lovingly preserved out in that garage.

Anyway, this drawing was a quickie. Dave would do this as kind of a “take” after a gag. I called it his “Alarmed Look” and after he did it a few times I drew it on some paper I had lying around. And somehow, over the course of 20 years, I managed to hold onto it.

I keep meaning to write an essay like “How David Letterman Saved My Life”—about my teen years and how his sense of humor reminded me to keep my darn chin up. It makes a great title, though it is misleading. A lot happened in those years.

And since then too.

Hey, onward!

Ladies and Gentlemen, we, the suburbian Joe and Leah are now the proud owners of a wonderful mismatched set of washer and dryer from the excellent Buzz’s Appliances here in Simi Valley.

No more characters like Smoky, at least not in laundromats.

Woo hoo!

I have some words that I use that, when I apply to my wife, they get funny looks.

They’re great words, but not ones most people use on a regular basis.

Logy is one. Here’s the definition from answers.com:

Characterized by lethargy; sluggish.

I do believe we all feel that way sometimes. I think I first heard the word on Late Night with David Letterman, way back in the day.

Today I definitely feel logy. My sleep was nonstop work. The whole night I dreamt that I was at work, in a hospital, at UVa, but there was no work. I wandered the halls like a ghost while other people worked. Occasionally I would come across people I sort of knew, but then they would fast forward. At some point I remember wondering if I had good benefits in this job, particularly whether this job paid for a membership in a health club. The random assembly of healthcare workers in the elevator when I asked replied that no, they don’t. I don’t remember if that matches reality. I think the hospital employees could use the UVa facilities at a reduced rate or something.

But the repetition of the dream, going from unit to unit, floor to floor, riding in elevators, walking the halls was a bit maddening. Not as scary as a nightmare, but numbing nonetheless.

I have to say it’s put me in kind of a negative mood this morning, which I’m slowly transitioning out of.

In the meantime, I feel a little logy this morning.

Logy is a peculiar word, and I can’t remember ever reading it, but I like it. It has an interesting history. Maven’s Word of the Day:

The word you have in mind is indeed spelled logy, and its pronunciation is indeed “LOW-gee” (with a hard g) (though it is sometimes pronounced “LAH-gee,” as if the first element were log, which it may in fact be), and its meaning is indeed ‘sluggish; lacking physical or mental energy or vitality; lethargic; dull’.

So what do you need me for?

The origin of logy is not certain. It may be from a Dutch word log ‘heavy; dull; cumbersome’, cognate with a Middle Low German word meaning ‘sluggish’. It could also be a variant of a (British) English dialect word loggy, which is derived from log; this word is from the 1840s.

Logy is an Americanism, first recorded in the 1840s though apparently not common until later in the nineteenth century. It is fairly widespread, but more common in the northern and western parts of the country.

Blame Dave for this one. I never have heard anyone else ever say it but me.

The other word Leah does not care for is “giddy.” Giddy’s a fine word, and I actually like to be giddy, but I think I must say it in a way that is not totally in the spirit of love or something, like giddy is a negative. But I dig giddy. Into my life this morning I would be delighted with some giddy to come my way.

Words are fascinating to me.

That’s 15 years old! Wow.

When I drew this I was deliberately trying to draw something in a Hello Kitty way. It’s not till a few years ago I heard the term super deformed, so I termed it “Japanese Cute Style.”

Superdeformed is (from wikipedia):

In anime and manga, characters which are drawn in a highly exaggerated manner are said to be super deformed (SD) or chibi. Super deformed characters are typically small and chubby with deformed limbs and oversized heads, and may be used to express intense emotion, especially in the cases of anger or surprise. They are meant to be cute and are often used in humorous diversions from the storyline.

I like the details. If you click through to the flickr page you can see some annotations of what the various parts of the drawing are.

You’ll note I’m sporting a cheesy mustache here. This is the same mustache as the one in the photo on this namebadge.

I love my shoes there. And I love that I pictured myself wearing a They Might Be Giants T-Shirt. It’s the original “Hayseeds” TMBG shirt. You can still buy that one.

Ah, callow youth.

I mentioned before my appreciation of things Japanese. I think of the character in Breaking Away who is obsessed with the Italians and even speaks in Italian. I was not that bad, but I did put a an imperial flag on my wall in High School. It was a bit more than being just a Francophile. I was trying to learn as much as I could. I accidentally ended up reading a lot about Japanese business processes. I learned what a zaibatsu was and what a salaryman was. And ninjas. You can’t go wrong with ninjas.

A bit sleepy this morning. Time to start the day!

Well, today my telecommuting was utterly disrupted by a big ol’ blackout!

Suddenly, wham! no power.

This bummed me out. Called Southern California Edison. Reported it. Reset the breakers, nothing. Met another of my neighbors, who was trying to get word via the radio in his car.

Weather is cloudy, and it’s warm. about 90, and humid.

So I call my supervisor, let him know, he says I can come to his place (which is close). He’s in Thousand Oaks and unaffected by the outage.

Then, power comes back up. I don’t have to go! I start up my computers. Thank goodness. Just finish Scandisk on the PC, and wham, out again. Okay, so I have to go.

I disable the automatic garage door opener, start the truck, back up out onto the driveway, get out and close the garage door manually, and I’m on my way.

I open the iBook and turn on MacStumbler on the way there, only find 2 WAPs on on the way over there. This is a pretty good indicator that there’s no power in the neighborhood (Wood Ranch), that the wireless access points are not on the air.

A use for wardriving in a power outage! Is there power? Are wireless access points chirping? Not a perfect correlation, but not a bad one either.

I call SCE again and now they are reporting an outage for Simi Valley. Good to know.

I arrive at his place and get set up there. His WAP has WEP and won’t play nice. We get the key working, then wham, it decides to stop giving me a DHCP lease. Wha? The whole week seems to be technical glitches.

My stomach on Monday, Tuesday Leah called me from work where their fileserver was dead and I was looking up places that might sell a replacement. This morning my cell phone didn’t seem to want to ring. Oi. Then the power today, and WEP nonsense this afternoon.

The workday was shot after 3pm.

I went home, got some groceries, and as I entered the neighborhood I turned on MacStumbler again. LOTS of WAPs in the neighborhood. Yay! The power is back on.

I detruck (like… deplane!), get the groceries out, and come on in. I reenable the garage door to automatic, and check my email. now I gotta put the groceries away, but first I wanted to tell the internet what a wonderful power outage we had here in Simi Valley today.

Now, groceries need to be put away. Leah’s on her way home.

What a day.

Andy Warhol has been on my mind recently. I have an ink drawing from years ago that’s in the on-deck circle for posting here. When I was in High School, I thought Andy was a genius. His famous-forever statement that “everyone would be famous for 15 minutes” was inspirational, and his knack for plugging into the zeitgeist with his art was great as well. Pop art inspired me in a way that abstract expressionism didn’t. It was tacky and silly and could be very witty. It was “the in-crowd” I was concerned.

Since I was an ironical young man, it fired my sarcasm and irony neurons very well.

This piece, from 2000, was all digital. A collage featuring various objects I found from around the net. It was hand-made, which is to say it was made in Photoshop using those elements. I surely used an image search to find the pieces.

Thing is, it’s rather dull. A piece like this can be found instantly on WebCollage, which crawls the net and semi-randomly creates a collage using the pieces found. It works like this:

This is what the Internet looks like.

WebCollage is a program that creates collages out of random images found on the Web. More images are being added to the collage about once a minute, so this page will reload itself periodically. Clicking on one of the images in the collage will take you to the page on which it was found.

It finds the images by feeding random words into various search engines, and pulling images (or sections of images) out of the pages returned.

This kind of instantaneous art is beguiling. I think it makes a piece like mine, which seems to have, sort of has, a point of view, and says something about consumerism, obsolete. I still like my piece, but the randomness of WebCollage has much more staying power precisely because it’s always changing, as the web is, all the time.

I look like a goofball in this picture. Nonetheless, a grand time was had by all at San Diego’s famous Turf Supper Club last Friday on our little trip to San Diego.

It only took us a few hours to get there from our Simi Valley home.

We took the new van, which runs good. Leah drove, whilst I worked on building a function to convert latitude and longitude in degrees and minutes to a decimal value. The PHP code I hacked together was this:

function convertEnglishDegrees($minutes_seconds)
{

$out = “”;
if (trim($minutes_seconds)!=’‘)
{

$out = trim($minutes_seconds);
$out = strtolower($minutes_seconds);
$out = str_replace(‘deg’,’‘,$out);
$out = str_replace(‘degrees’,’‘,$out);

$allowedcharacters = ‘0123456789.- ‘;

if(stristr($out,’s’))
$sign = “-”;
else if(stristr($out,’w’))
$sign = “-”;
else
$sign = “”;

$temp = “”;

for($i=0;$i {

$char = substr($out,$i,1);
if(stristr($allowedcharacters,$char))
$temp .= $char;
}

$out = trim($sign . $temp);
$temp = “”;
$parts = explode(’ ‘,$out);

$e = 0;
foreach($parts as $p)
{

if($e==0)
$temp .= $p;
else
$temp .= $p + ($p/60);
}

$out = str_replace(’ ‘,’.’,$out);

}
return $out;
}

Not pretty, but it worked well enough on the sample lats and lons I had. This was all so I could get some more data points to work on the 3ones map. Why not just require decimal formats of people? It’s in the spirit of “Postel’s Law” aka the “Robustness Principle: “be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others”

Anyway, we met M & M at the Club, grilled our own steaks (Matt is a master griller and helped perfect Leah’s steak). We stayed at their place that night and slept there.

Morning brought a great breakfast in La Mesa whose name escapes me now. There’s even an inexplicable short film to show for it. Great chorizo.

Aside: Why can’t I get Soyrizo in Simi Valley?

After we said our farewell to M&M, we went to see my Grandmother, who was in the hospital all last week with various health problems and we were quite worried about. It’s a mixed bag, being close but not too close to my San Diego family. It feels like we can just pop down there anytime, in reality it takes some planning. Were we in San Diego we’d simply drop on in. As it was we had to wait till Saturday. We hope my grandmother continues to recover, she’s getting excellent care from the family, and has some surgeries scheduled in the upcoming weeks. I don’t often reference prayer here, what with me being primarily skeptical and secular, but I’d appreciate any prayers you have on offer for the sick.

After visiting my Grandma, Leah dropped me off at ye olde San Diego Comic Con. Unlike last year, I did not take photos. But I did get in free (yay!). I served as the attendant (read: wheelchair driver) for my pal E.

I was not sure it was possible, but we were able to cover the whole Con floor, which is significantly huge. I’‘ve been attending cons since I was a teenager, and it is bigger every year.

My usual Con modus operendi is to cover the booths at the con with my own methodology. If you’d like to carry out my method, here are the instructions:

Materials
1 notebook
1 pen or other writing instrument

Method
Start at the westernmost part of the convention center, and go up and down each aisle of the con. While doing this keep your notebook at the ready to mark the “address” of booths which look promising, you can also include a brief note about why it’s promising, like “50% off graphic novels” or “good antique action figures” or “cool t-shirts” There are numerical addresses above each aisle (seen here). This year they were numbered from 100 to 5300. That’s 53 aisles of densely packed comics, movie, gaming, art, movie and other fandom stuff. If you have limited time, taking stock before diving in is a good idea.

Then after running all the different booths and making your marks, you can then go to presentations as much as you want, then between the times there are good presentations being shown, sneak back down to all the addresses you made a note of.

It’s that simple!

It was a great time for me, though I was a bit tired at the end of Con. I only made two purchases, but I made notes and grabbed schwag from the places that interested me for future online research.

Continues in The Weekend, You Say, Part II.