Letters from an Artist

October, 2001

Happy Halloween...if you're into that sort of stuff. Lisa said she wasn't tricker treating this year, but changed her mind at the last minute. Clint is home watching the world series. I went for a bike ride in the rain today at lunch. It was sprinkling when I left the office, but by the time I reached my turn around point up in the North end it had started to pour. The economy seems to be stalling and everyone is slow. Exercise takes my mind off things. I've been doing lots of creative design type stuff. It's great to have the opportunity to be creative, but it can be taxing. I wouldn't mind a few days of grunt work. In my old printing job we had a nice mix of extremely hard jobs interspersed with long sessions of grunt work. By that I mean very high end advertising agency jobs mixed in with long runs of 1 or 2 color jobs. The simple jobs were the kind of work where you could put your mind in neutral, loading and unloading the press for hours, or even days at a time. Rather like chopping wood for the winter. Lately I've done nothing but interface design, challenging myself day after day to come up with beautiful, innovative designs. It's great experience, but I am hungering for a change of pace.

Saw my first movie in several years last night. I've been needing a break from the pressures of constantly trying to improve my computer skills, even when I'm home. Sue and Lisa went to see a friend perform in "The Headless Horseman". I met them at the theater on my way home from work. Sitting in the dark rainy parking lot, wondering which pair of headlights was theirs, I listened to the end of a talking book by Janet Evanovich featuring the bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. I seem to need to be constantly entertained. I'm not sure if this is good or bad. I suppose it isn't any different from listening to the radio. Winter has set in with a vengeance.
     I occasionally surf by another online journal: jessamyn.com . Three years ago she attracted my attention when she won the "best personal homepage" award in the Seattle Times. Her life is radically different from mine, which is probably why I enjoy reading about it. She also offers a lot of insight into the minds of the younger generation. Today she had a link to another nicely put together online journal, jenifer.net . This online journal phenomenon takes some getting used to. I still wonder occasionally why I bother. Is it one of the symptoms of a creative mind, or am I a closet author? Not good enough, or determined enough to write a real book, we use the power of the Internet to self publish our autobiographies as we live them. Sadly, if you have the determination and organizational skills to keep one going for a couple years, your life is probably pretty boring. Cabin fever is setting in early this year. I am hoping for at least one more climbing trip this fall, weather permitting.
    The movie was called "Bandits" and starred Billy Bob Thornton, Cate Blanchette and Bruce Willis, listed in order of talent. I've seen Billy somewhere before. His performance as the pyschosomatic, paranoid bank robber was entrancing. Willis played the Clint Eastwood personality without much effort. Cate was young, lovely and mostly convincing as a neglected housewife with an overdose of hormones who falls in with bank robbers. It's amusing how Hollywood thinks it has to pair the aging baby boomer actors off with young actresses. They seem to believe people won't buy tickets to movies featuring "mature" actresses. They might be right. Clint and I were drawn to the movie in part because of her performance in Titanic. Sue and I had our chance to be young and lovely. We still stay in decent shape, considering we are approaching fifty, but there is no mistaking the bloom of youth. At my age, there are days when I am happy to simply still be walking round with a halfway healthy body. I don't have the energy to keep up with a younger woman, and seeing actors my age paired up with one only reminds me of the reasons why I stopped watching movies and TV. At her age, Sue and I were extremely active, climbing or skiing every weekend all year long. The downside is that we now have the worn out knees to prove it. The upside? That's a little harder to define.
     I can look at life without the distortion of overabundant hormones. And as much as anything is stable in this world, I can count on Sue and the kids to be here for me, and I for them. I have a few friends, a challenging, creative job and more interesting hobbies than I can shake a stick at.

My friend G tells me some of her fellow instructors at my old alma mater have been showing the students this web site. I shudder to think of those tender minds reading these words. I feel I still have a ways to go before I can call myself an experienced web designer. Yes, I work in the business and have made some huge strides forward in the year since I left school. But am I a web designer? I think of myself more as a team player who has artistic tendencies, handicapped by a logical mind. I may have wrote that backwards... I didn't write in this journal for 5 days, blame it on my cold, compounded by my bad ear. Saturday was nice, but I had the energy of a hibernating turtle. Sunday I tried to study my new PhotoShop 6 Wow book but couldn't muster the attitude or energy. Instead I wallowed in a Clive Cussler novel. Clint had an assignment to write a book report and couldn't find an interesting author. I dug out an old Dirk Pitt novel by Cussler and he was hooked. As soon as he finished I started rereading it. It's shallow, predictable and utterly enjoyable. I push myself so hard with computer homework that I forget the body needs a good veg now and then.
    The Mariners just lost another chance at the world series tonight. I started paying attention during the playoffs and listened to, or watched about half a game total. If they had to lose to somebody, they couldn't have picked a team, or a city, that deserved it more than the New York Yankees. I took a break from web design and built a cool Flash animation today. It's good enough we might be able to use it on the company site.

I've been dragging butt the last few days. My cold got down in my chest and made sleep difficult. I've had a free rein at work lately. In the absence of any current hot projects, I've been building interfaces for future use. I picked a generic client last week and have been building a series of interfaces in PhotoShop. For inspiration I've picked big names out of my memory (Ford, Sony, IBM etc.) and visited their web sites until I found something worth leaning on. My first version was a direct copy, simply to see if I could yank the pixels around to make it look that pretty. Once I understood the tools and effects, I was able to be more original. I am now on my 14th interface. Only 5 were truly unique...sometimes I had a look I liked, and rather than blowing it all out, I saved as a new file and swapped things around. The last 2 have been outstanding in my opinion. I've brought ideas and techniques in from half a dozen different sites, plus some of my own quirky notions to make one of the cleanest designs I've seen yet, especially from my hands. I am getting over my tendency to be hypercritical. I make them, they look nice and I move on to the next one.
   Lisa and I have been having some long math tutoring sessions. She is learning how percentages work. Unlike her mother, she has had good teachers so far, and still has that can do attitude. It's funny how she doesn't quite seem to "get it" in class. After I explain it in the simplest terms possible, she usually is able to wrap her mind around the concepts. I enjoy math as long as I can build on a base of understanding. If I don't get something, I can't skip over it and move on. I have to back up to the basics until I understand everything, then move forward again to the problem. When I was in college, tackling trig after a 29 year gap, I found that working all the problems in the book, page by tedious page prepared me for the tests perfectly. I didn't always "get it " in class, but I took notes, asked stupid questions...and most importantly: worked every problem on every page. I got perfect scores on every test all quarter.

Rode my bike today up the hills nearby for exercise. Clint, Lisa and Sue were on their weekly Saturday adventure. For the last month, Sue has taken a car full of boys to Tacoma for street riding. After dropping them off, she and Lisa shop or go to Lisa's indoor soccer match. Today her unbeaten team won 8 to 5 against a good team with Lisa scoring 4 goals, a personal best. She is fortunate to play on a team with 5 or 6 girlfriends who have been playing soccer together for 4 years. My bad ear, while improving, is still a distraction. Today and most of yesterday I've had both the tinnitis (roaring sound) and the diminished mental capacity. It's comparable to getting 4 hours of sleep. Maybe not quite that bad, but definitely not a good time for tackling anything complex.
      Tomorrow I'd like to go down and see my folks, but Clint works and Lisa is gone all day with a girlfriend. I've been scanning some more old slides at work on our Epson transparency scanner. In the high end print world, it would be considered a sub standard scanner. However, for scanning things for the web, it's phenomenal. It's quite a bit better at scanning slides than the Hell/Saphir scanner at my old print shop. Then again, it might be simply my knowledge of scanning protocol. I've gotten proficient with the levels dialogue box in PhotoShop. The better scanners, meaning scanners costing over a thousand, have a preview option where you can magnify the image and select the highlight and shadow values using an eyedropper. This calibrates the scanner for a scan pass that is precisely adjusted for the individual values of the slide. The downside is that it lengthens the time required for each slide.
     Back when I climbed all the time and had many friends who did the same, we all took slides and got together for slide shows. Later, when our kids came along we had slide shows at my dads house, showing the latest cute pictures of the kids. I guess it can be compared to seeing a movie in a theater, only in this case, it was a bunch of people with a common interest sitting comfortably in a darkened room, watching a progression of images on a large screen. If the slides were bad, or as my dad often did, not weeded out to show only the best, the evening could be long. When our climbing friends got together, there was a fierce competition to see who could capture the most dramatic image. At one memorable party at our house, one of our friends slipped in a couple pictures of his gorgeous ex-girlfriend skinny-dipping, turned sideways to make it appear accidental. The bottom picture is of my old friend Paul. We were on our way up to Vesper peak near Monte Cristo in the North Cascades.

Slow days at work. I built an interface from scratch yesterday for our interface vault borrowing a page from my old art books. Just like the artists of yesteryear used to set up their easels in the Louvre and copy the masters to learn their secrets, I found a beautiful web site and reproduced it in PhotoShop pixel by pixel. Using the basic concepts and tools learned from copying the "Master", I then created something entirely my own. It's clean, bright and professional. My own ideas are still a bit out there. This site for example would not appeal to many professional people. I am acutely aware of how unusual my artistic and esthetic tastes are compared to the general public. If I was truly devoted to capturing mainstream Americana, I'd force myself to watch TV. Several of my web design books preach the value of learning from television. Sadly, that is one bridge I simply won't cross. I'd rather work at seven eleven.
    Lisa and Clint have been buried in homework. They told me at tech school that I would be using the obligatory trigonometry course in my new career. I've not needed it at work yet, but I've sure used it at home with the kids. The weather has turned rainy. When I lifted my bicycle off the car rack this morning, I realized the leather seat was drenched and I would be standing up all the way to work. When it gets really cold and wet, I may break down and spend the sixty dollars a month for covered parking. So far, I like having my bike. Lunchtime rides are a gas. The news is full of the bombing in Afghanistan. I heard an ominous interview with an Afghan student in the US. He warned us to hold off on a ground invasion until after the winter. In that mountainous terrain, no one can fight old man winter. These photos are some recent scans of some of our old slides.

How do you like this new look? My only complaint is the time it takes to load. It totals around 130K, just the interface. I am unhappy with the way it reloads all the images each time the window is resized, at least in Netscape. Other than that minor issue, I am satisfied for now. I've been overdue for a new interface for months. I am aware that the pricing and web design links are dead. Just today I discovered that another of my free hosting services has dropped off the map. It will take some time to find a replacement. I spent most of the day today plugging content into the new interface. It was nice to relax here at the computer, applying the skills I use everyday at work. For a break I drove down to the library for some new talking books and a quick check for bugs on their Netscape 4.0 browsers. Later I set up the easel in the yard and tried to salvage some of the disasters I painted on my vacation.

The sun was out today and I road my my bike around the North end during my lunch hour. The wealthy neighborhoods built on the bluffs overlooking Puget Sound are entertaining to pedal through. There is some marvelous architecture overlooking the 20 mile fetch North toward Seattle. I haven't written much here lately due to all the work I've been putting into my new interface. I've tested it in all the browsers, from Opera, Netscape 4 through 6, Netscape on the Mac and IE on the Mac. I haven't found a serious flaw yet. I intend to start pouring in content soon. We've slowed down a little at work.
     My perpetually bad ear has been kind to me for the last two days. I've stopped taking an antihistamine called Claritin. I started taking it a couple years ago for reasons that are hazy. It keeps my eyes from itching, and I recall speculating that it might help control my inner ear problem. Like most prescription medicines, it has soared in price, as my income has dropped. At 3 dollars a day, I am willing to live without it for a while. I've also stopped taking the Glucosamine vitamin that was supposed to help my joint cartilage. So now, I take no medicines at all.
      I heard from an old friend of mine via e-mail yesterday. A and I worked together in a print shop up in Seattle back in 1997. At the time, I had never touched a computer and considered them as big a waste of time as TV. A and I used to argue about computers as we ran our printing presses, working the 3 PM to 1:30 AM shift, four tens. Over time he wore me down, and eventually I accepted his offer of a free beater 486 for a month, just to prove to me that he was right and I was wrong. After 2 weeks, I was completely hooked and bought my first computer, a Pentium 133Mhz. Dad still runs it today, although it has trouble getting online.
    I was telling this story to one of the guys at work today. He was surprised, and commented that I had come a long ways in a short time. And I guess I have. I am no longer stuck in a dead end profession, earning my meager wage using 30 year old technology working nights as my family grows up without me. It's true that this high tech stuff is not quite as stable as the older industries, but in times like these, I don't think one can plan on retiring in any job. Probably the most important job skill any of us has is the desire to continue learning new skills and honing the ones we already have. I looked at the paintings I did on my vacation...it's a good thing I have a day job.

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