July 2005

Rhonchi.com is still not ready under the hood, but it’s less primitive than it was before.

Do you have a job posting for a Respiratory Therapist? You’ll be able to post it there. Just contact me.

So I’m working on some client work on my iBook with Firefox. I need to use bluehornet, a system to manage newsletters.

It appears that you are using Netscape or an old version of Internet Explorer. The system is optimized for use with Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher. If you know that you are using Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher, click here to enable the login button.

This system is not MAC compatible.

MSIE 6 came out in October 2001. Do they mean to say that since that time they have not upgraded their system to support any other browsers?

In addition to being proud of the fact that they’re optimized for an old browser, and that they don’t support the coolest operating system going, they also refer to a Mac as “MAC.” Please. It’s either “Mac” or “Macintosh.” When you capitalize it, it stands for “Media Access Control.” People know this. (see Wikipedia entry.

I can log in, but then I can’t do anything useful.

It’s 2005 Bluehornet, time to join the 21st Century.

Bluehornet have proven to me that they are incompetent boobs, and I will not steer anyone toward them.

Ever.

An awesome, very personal, raw, and real post from Tony Pierce.

(Warning: strong language)

Personal and truthful, even though “nothing (there) is true.”

I dig that the earpiece and microphone don’t look archaic. That looks like it could be a bluetooth headset for a cellphone!

I love her wild hair, I like the androgeny, I like the furry jacket (inspired by Vadim’s Barbarella?), I dig the minimalist goggles.

I was probably inspired by Jean “Moebius” Giraud, a french comics creator who has been doing visually stunning (albeit incoherent story-wise) comics work for a long time. (wikipedia as well.

This would look good with a light watercolor wash.

In 1992 I was working in Charlottesville, and would come home to my folk’s house in Roanoke. My Dad had bought a Mac IIci, and I would fool around with it interminably. It was a handy machine, for its time.

I think at the time this was a large image at 532×388 pixels.

I like this one. Most of the work I’ve ever done with a science fiction feel was in a cyberpunk vein, but one of my favorite books was Difference Engine, (mentioned before in my book post)and the idea of alternate history is very compelling to me.

I think what I was thinking of with this piece, with a British helmet, and a gas mask, was the Alan Moore comic book V for Vendetta, a wonderfully British (with a capital “B”) rendering of a futuristic dystopia.

Here’s a synopsis of V for Vendetta from Wikipedia.

The series is set in a future Britain where, in the chaos following a limited nuclear war that left the country mostly physically intact, a fascist one-party state has arisen. It resembles the Nazi regime — including government-controlled media, secret police, and concentration camps for racial and sexual minorities — but with a British cultural flavour, and a greater reliance on technology, especially closed-circuit television monitoring in the mode of George Orwell’s 1984. (CCTV had not yet become common in England at the time Moore wrote the series.) When the series begins, political conflict has ended, the death camps have finished their work and been closed, and the public is largely complacent, until “V” — a terrorist and self-proclaimed anarchist, who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and has an improbable array of abilities and resources — begins an elaborate, violent, and theatrical campaign to bring down the government.

Even the premise is wonderful. It’s still in print, and you can usually find it out at the larger chain bookstores, or even via Amazon.

Anyway, back to the drawing: It’s minimal and was done fast, on notebook paper. I think this is a “classroom drawing.” For posting I’ve removed the blue lines underneath the drawing itself. I am not doing raw scans for most of these things, I’m doing cleanup.

What I might do with the drawings down the line I have no idea. I have thought about doing an online comic or comic strip, and I’ve considered what kind of licenses might allow others to use these drawings as raw material, but for now just scanning the things is very enjoyable to me. It allows me to revisit my artistic past, and explore the possibilities of my artistic future, as well.

This is a hard drawing to look at for me. It bespeaks pain. The man is on fire, or covered in smoke. It could be interpreted as anti-smoking, perhaps, as many in my family smoked and paid dear prices for it.

The style is so fast, so confident, but not so much deliberate. It’s part of a style of mine to just keep making strokes and gradually an image appears. The idea was to draw fast and deliberately, to feel the emotion, and put it down. Often this resulted in horrible messes, and I threw lots of scribbles away. But occasionally it resulted in work of which I’m proud.

I can feel a kinship with the 19-year old self who drew this, perhaps I’d give the kid a hug. But I don’t think I savor feeling so burned as I once did. Moroseness and nihilism might be, at times, entertaining, but they are not really great ways to live life.

Leah commented about Dog Nowhere that it seemed to be about an emotion, rather than an image of a dog. I think that’s an interesting insight. Smoldering Man is much more explicit I think in being an image that tries to instantiate an emotion.

Was our choice of movie the Universe’s way of providing some foreshadowing?

The red stuff is the fancy coloured glue from a scrapbook.

Here’s something:

Company Introduction:

*** [redacted to protect the guity] is a fast-growing, dynamic company which views IT as a core competitive advantage. The Company is a ***.

Job Description:

*** is looking for a Web Developer with minimum 3 yrs. in web based applications development and support utilizing many of the key skills and concepts, like: VB.Net, C#, ASP/.Net, JavaScript, HTML/DHTML/CSS, SQL Server/DTS, IIS .Net web services (VisualStudio/VB.Net), XML.

Job Requirements:

Microsoft web development skills including .net, VB, C#, web services, Win2000 server.
Software engineering skills (process oriented for analysis, design, development, unit test, system test). Able to work with minimal paper documentation/design specs.

Company Benefits:

Medical
Dental
401(k)

Contact Information:

Email resumes to:****@***.com

Translation for the bold bit, above? We don’t know what we want, but we want it done with a great processes!