3-30-02
Went out Friday looking for work again, something I do several times a week. One of the places I visited was the iegroup.com. She was very kind to take time out of her busy day to talk to an unemployed designer. Many years ago, back when I was a pressman, I was laid off from a good job in printing. While I was out pounding the pavement making cold calls on all the printshops within driving distance, someone asked me what I did for a living, to which I replied that I was in sales. What do you sell, they wanted to know. I said I was selling myself.
     It takes moxie to to make cold calls, they don't call them cold calls for nothing. What is surprising about the cold calls is how much fun it can be. Sure there will be shops where you can't get past the secretary, or the owner is in a bad mood and looks like he will toss your resume the minute you walk out. But for every 4 of those shops, there will be one where the owner is gracious, gladly taking the time to offer ideas and words of encouragement to a serious job seeker. To those people, I say thank you.
   While I've been looking for full time work, what I've been finding instead are smaller part-time jobs that are rapidly increasing in number to the point where I may well almost be buried in work. When it rains it pours. Today (Saturday) I went over to a friends house to talk about Flash. Last night I was trying to figure out how to determine the "x" and "y" coordinates of where a loaded movie would land, using the load movie command in ActionScript. I knew there was a "load into target" variation, but it didn't get me where I wanted to go. After staying up till the wee hours trying figure it out, I sent her an email explaining the problem. Today, when we met, she showed me how to do it in 5 minutes. Here's the secret: create new symbol and make it a movie clip. Name the clip, but don't put anything in it. So it is a named movie clip that is empty. Drag it onto the stage, name the instance "empty1". On your button, use the load movie into target command and select the "empty1" movie clip. Because the "empty1" movie clip has no size, it inherits the size of the loaded movie clip, positioning it's top left "x" and "y" coordinates at the point on the stage where you dragged the "empty1" instance. Now you can drag the "empty1" clip wherever you want your loaded movie to land. It's a very cool trick. Simple and elegant, the best kind.
    Friday I also stopped in to see if business had picked up at the firm that laid me off 3 months ago. It was nice seeing my old friends again. It's hard to make friends like that and have to walk away. They are still hanging in there, although one other person is gone now. They have at least one new web site up: a very attractive site for Puget Sound Surgical. Tomorrow is Sunday and I am not even going to touch this computer. My mind needs a break.

3-23-02
Met my old grade school buddy today for a walk at Pt Defiance. We met in the crowded zoo parking lot where cars were unloading tourists by the hundreds to view the "wild" animals in their cages. Many people don't realize it, but there is another zoo at Point Defiance and it's called Salmon Beach. Calling it a zoo is, of course, unfair to the hardy souls who live there. But like the tourists ogling the tigers and monkeys in the zoo, I enjoy visiting Salmon Beach every 5 years and ogling the unusual lifestyle of the residents. For starters, it's not an easy place to visit. Since the parking lot is gated and marked private, I usually park at the Southwest entrance to Point Defiance and hike through the trees along the bluff top for a few hundred yards until the lot appears where the residents park on top of the bluff, some in garages, others in the open. Comparable to a walk-in campground, there is no road access to their homes. Every day, if they work in the city, they have to walk up and down the ridiculously steep rickety stairs, about 200 steps in all, to the narrow boardwalk that winds along behind the houses. The houses, if one can call them that...hippie shacks might be a more descriptive term for some, are built on old pilings sunk into the sand. Many are no more than 8 feet from the crumbling, dangerous bank. I know it sounds like a holdover community from the seventies, but there have been people living at Salmon Beach for a hundred years. For many it's a refuge from the hustle bustle lifestyle in the city. Simply to get from the car to the front door is a 10 or 15 minute walk for some homeowners, and I shudder to think about carrying a car full of groceries down those steep stairs on a rainy winter night.
    Sue worked with a woman who lived there. She said the winters were the worst and kept a change of clothes at the office to replace the soaked and mud spattered garments she wore walking up to the car. New this visit was a charming mermaid sculpture anchored to a large beach boulder. Like many things at Salmon Beach, there is no explanation offered, or needed for why a lovely bronze sculpture should be casually sitting on a rock in the surf. If you don't get it, you don't belong there. The community reminds me very much of the distant past, 32 years ago, when I went "walkabout" for three years, traveling the continent on a wish and a prayer, viewing and experiencing alternative lifestyles, many much more tenuous than Salmon Beach. I think it's wonderful that there are still places where one can "march to the beat of a different drummer", especially so close to a major city. If you do visit, please be courteous and respect the privacy of the community.
   We stopped to talk to a friendly local for a few minutes, asking questions he must have heard hundreds of times in the 30 years he has lived there and raised a family. Yes, they do have sewers now. They put in a 1 million dollar sewer system that pumps the effluents up the bluff into the Tacoma sewage lines. Yes, they do legally own their structures, although the land is owned communally by the homeowners association. "Homes are never on the market long down here. It takes a special kind of person to live here, but they're out there, and they find us," he said. "The seals bark at the dogs and the dogs bark at the seals - it's quite a chorus", one local was quoted while describing the Salmon Beach lifestyle to a Seattle Times reporter. Here is a picture taken after the Nisqually earthquake by a government agency. It's quite a large image, but clearly shows a damaged house underneath the unstable bluff above Salmon Beach: earthquake
   I hadn't seen T in a year, so we had a great time catching up on each other's lives. We go back to 1966 when we met in grade school in Olympia and have been friends ever since. Though the years and life have led us in different directions, we try to stay in touch. I'm not sure what it is about old friends; there's a bond there that won't break. He's been with a large airplane company in Seattle for over twenty years and had some good advice for me in my efforts to find full time employment.

3-19-02
Met today with my friends out at the college where I will be teaching part time spring quarter. They have been a huge help in planning the curriculum, thanks guys! Because it is part time: 2 days a week, and only 3 to 4 hours a day; I am still looking for full time work, although I will need to be cautious since anything else I take on will have to work around the schedule at the college. To that end, I met with the president of a local Web Design firm yesterday to talk about doing some business together. It was so nice to talk with someone who speaks the same language. We liked the same software programs and, as experienced designers, shared many of the same concerns along with an unshakable optimism about the business of Web Design and it's place in the larger scheme of things.
    Traffic was tied in knots due to the construction and the unending sleet pouring out of the leaden sky. I had to crisscross town as I dropped off some art slides at Robi's, the only E6 developer left in town, drove North to my meeting, then back to Robi's afterward. By the time I picked up the slides for an upcoming juried art competition my nerves were crying out for some exercise. I navigated the slippery streets back to the North end of town one last time and parked my trusty Toyota at the bottom of my favorite exercise hills. For extra training, I carried my laptop in a backpack as I strode up and down the steep hills in the diminishing rain. It's amazing how ones cares fall away during aerobic workouts. All the various concerns that occupy my mind dropped away one by one until I was left with a clear vision of myself last summer climbing fluidly up a steep cliff, in perfect control, trusting my partner's belay completely and able to simply enjoy the grace of being alive.

3-15-02
I've been learning some interesting things about interface design: simpler is better, and don't commit to an effect until you are sure it works on all platforms. I had an idea for an interface that involved using tiling pinlines down the right hand column next to the browser scroll bar. Where it got complicated was in putting pictures with drop shadows over the tiling pinlines. For the pictures to look correct, I had to save them with the drop shadow and pinlines built in around the border. By carefully slicing them out of the original interface file and adjusting the height of a spacer gif above them in the data cell I was able to get the effect I was after...until I tested them on a Mac. I've been scratching my head lately trying to figure out where to find a Mac to use for testing. My wife mentioned that she had some old Macs at the school where she works in Occupational Therapy.
     Yesterday I met her for lunch and tested my developing freelance project on her Mac...uh oh, back to the drawing boards. By tweaking various elements in the column I was able to make the pinlines function on the Mac, but then they wouldn't work in Netscape 6. I finally had to go with a simple tiling line down the left hand edge of the column. This left the bulk of the column as a simple background color over which I can easily position images with drop shadows and text. Here is a tip for pop up windows holding images: given a body margin height and width of 5 pixels, make the popup window 12 pixels wider than the image, and 65 pixels higher than the image. This is assuming you are putting a "close window" link below the picture.

3-10-02
Now that I've done some freelance Web Design work from home, I've discovered some little known secrets about the process that some of you might find illuminating:

3-8-02
Good news to report today. I've been hired to teach Spring quarter at a Technical College here in town. Since that is a month away, and even then will only be half time, four afternoons a week, I am still looking for full time and freelance work. I've been paid a down payment on my first freelance project, and that is making great progress. In the industry for which I am designing this site, there are a tremendous number of poorly designed web pages. I think I stand an excellent chance of finding more freelance work once I do a great job on this first site. The experience I gained while working for a year full time in a web shop is proving very useful.
     This evening I've been scanning my clients slides on my new Epson Perfection 2450 transparency scanner. It came with quite a suite of software that has taken some time to get comfortable with. It had a nasty tendency to not see the slides if I didn't put them in the plastic templates. If I put the slides in the 2x2 holes in the plastic template on the glass, it finds them, crops them perfectly and gang scans 4 at once after I've adjusted the highlights and shadows individually. But if I fill the window up with slides, then preview, it finds them half the time, but the other half of the time it freaks out, presenting a screen of white light with green artifacts. I've only done about 50 transparency scans total on this new scanner, so I won't judge it too harshly yet. New hardware and software combinations like this take time to learn. The slide scan quality is superb.
    This week I think I finally resolved Dad's dial up issues. The last few times I was down, his old Pentium 133 would dial up about 20 percent of the time. Mostly it would report a "modem not found" error. I'd hook up the laptop and dial out perfectly. I picked up a used Celeron 300 at Computer Renaissance in Tacoma for a reasonable price, brought it home, dialed up a few times perfectly, rebooted and couldn't get past DOS. "FDC Failure - Press F1 to resume". No luck Jack. I searched the net and discovered that FDC stands for Floppy Disc Failure. Thanks a lot DOS! On opening the case, I found a bunch of loose screws and some haphazardly placed ribbon cables.  I blew some of the excess dust out, wriggled the floppy wire back in and put it back together. It worked. I tested the heck out of it, loaded up some simple software and drove it down to Dads. It dialed out repeatedly and stayed on line steadily. I wish I could say that was the end of it, but unfortunately I've seen his old one work that well before, then begin randomly disconnecting. Only time well tell.
    The weather has been bizarre this week. At one point I was driving along the freeway in bright sunshine. Ahead was a dark gray cloud marching across the Nisqually Delta towards me. The cloud divided the sky in half from ground level to 30,000 feet. The transition zone was under a block. I've never seen hard edged clouds on the ground before. When I drove into the cloud it was snowing heavily. 5 miles later I drove through the transition zone again. In my rear view mirror it looked like Snoqualmie pass, snowing heavily, the cars and road covered in new snow, ahead was dry ground and bright blue sky. This weekend I plan to take some time off from preparing for, and looking for work. I burned out last weekend, studying straight through. All week I've been dragging. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

3-3-02
Sue and I went for a walk yesterday at the Theler Wetlands in Belfair. Located at the end of Hood Canal in the little town of Belfair, it has grown from a simple picnic area behind a community hall into a 3 mile walk across a wildlife estuary with board walks, viewing platforms and a research center where school kids arrive by the busload. Despite all the growth, it remains a quiet place out on the dikes where one can walk for miles enjoying the 30 mile view out across the Hood Canal. Several great blue herons live there and can be seen at close quarters as they stand in the shallows, searching for food. When they spread their wings and step off into the air with slow steady flaps of their 5 foot wings, they show a grace that transcends words. Ordinarily I take my painting stuff when I go there, but Sue didn't want to hang out that long so I simply enjoyed the scenery. I've done two paintings there in the past, one of which has sold. The other is hanging in State of the Arts Gallery. It's been excruciatingly beautiful sunny weather for the last 4 days, but I've been focusing on searching for work and developing my skills. I have a meeting soon to talk with someone about some work in Flash. Flash and Photoshop are my two favorite programs so it's great to have an excuse to spend some time with it.

3-1-02
My apologies to those of you who read this journal on a regular basis. I enjoy writing here, but it seems like playing hooky when more important issues, like supporting my family, loom in the wings. To that end, I've been pursuing a number of leads, some promising, some not so promising. I don't want to go into specifics here, but it looks like I may at least have some part time Web work in the near future. I'm starting to really like Illustrator. I was fortunate to work with an Illustrator professional in my last job. He spent a couple hours with me one day demonstrating how to trace a Xerox of a logo. I didn't use the program much there, but lately it has come in very handy. It's ability to control curves and join paths is simply amazing. Bringing those paths into Photoshop is as easy as holding down the control key and dragging to Photoshop. Another cool Illustrator tool is the paintbrush. Combined with my Wacom tablet, the line is incredibly expressive, lifting up and down fluidly with the flex of a real brush. If the curves are wrong, one simply grabs the path and pulls.

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