12-30-99

I am up late again. Work is over until Monday. I have to get up at 8 AM for the first time in 3 weeks in the morning. That will be unpleasant. I have been up too late these last few weeks. I fall back into swing hours easily. Sleeping in is so pleasant. But school starts up again on Monday. I have been surfing around to various sites across the world looking at live radio talent. My media players are fighting each other. I have both Real networks G2 and Windows Media player. They seem to get confused over which should play the video. Both suck horribly over these antique over extended phone lines out here in the country. But it is interesting to watch the grainy, pixelated figures on the job.

My life is pretty pathetic right now. I don't have the energy or time to start a still life painting that I won't have time to finish. New Years eve is here and I am not supposed to drink. My doctor thinks it may rile up my bad ear and make me dizzy. I am bored with teaching myself computer techniques. We may go cross country skiing this weekend although Clint has outgrown his boots for the 4th time. We can always rent a pair on the way. Skiing sounds like a blast.

Today at work we had the annual company potluck. M. cooked a turkey cajun style by deep frying it in oil and injecting it with spices. Totally delicious. I got up early to take in my Orange juice and grapes. We had a nice talk over the food but soon they took off early to start the holiday weekend. I was stuck there with three presses to grease. We are incredibly slow. The shelves are bare of incoming paper. All our customers must be on vacation. I could have stayed until 6 PM greasing but just couldn't get exited about it. After 2 hours I said to hell with it and left. On my way out of town I stopped off at CompUSA to look at new software and ran into one of my web design classmates. He is the only one who dropped out of the course. He was shopping for a new printer. He says he is still working on becoming an internet portal and has a couple clients lined up for his html skills. I wish him the best of luck but imagine he would have been better off to stay in class.

After that I got a haircut which was way overdue. They were swamped and missing a barber. As I sat waiting for my turn I couldn't help stairing at the floor. It was almost completely covered in great piles of cut off hair. The barbers and customers were all ignoring it. There was something almost macabre about the hair covered floor. I could guess the ages of the previous customers by the primarily salt and pepper flavor of the hair. It's a tiny little four chair barbershop in downtown Gig Harbor. I like them because they take walk in's, aren't too pricy and have been their forever. The whole room can't be more than 12 feet by 30 feet. Usually one of the barbers will sweep up the hair between customers. I assume they were too swamped with people wanting a pretty head for the new millenium. I felt like I was in some sort of a sheep shearing charnel house. I kept thinking I ought to get up and run bleating for my life. Everyone was sitting calmly, pushing the great mounds of hair aside with their feet as they got up to get sheared. I really ought to take some Nyquil tonight. This cold is making me dippy.

12-29-99

Wednesday morning. I just got up at the crack of 10:30 AM. I need to start getting up earlier. School starts up again Monday and I will need to get up each day at 6. Yesterday I had the kind of day I should forget about. When I got to work at 3:30 PM my foreman was gone but had left me a note. He had the plates on the press, the feeder and delivery set up and the ink in the ink fountains. He had prepped the press for me. In theory I should have been able to walk up to the machine and start running the 9x12 catalogue envelopes within 20 minutes.

Our stripper/pre-press guy is on vacation. The fill in guy doesn't know our system very well. He had stripped the job to grab the narrow end of the envelope and the wrong narrow end at that. My foreman hadn't caught the error because we are all accustomed to perfect pre-press. I tried to feed the envelopes the way the job had been stripped but it appeared hopeless. When I went upstairs to restrip the job I found the black flat on the three color job missing the negative. It had never even had a negative attached to it. That was quite a puzzler. As usual there was no one left in the building to explain the mystery to me.

I washed up the press and started on the next job. It was a one sided, black and blue job on cover stock. It was a post card advising job applicants to the Frank Russell company that their application had been received. Thrilling stuff. The designer had tried to simulate three colors by using a 10 percent screen of black that I have seen on several other jobs we do for them. Unfortunately, on the previous pieces we have done for them, they used a 2 percent screen. This looked way too dark. I showed it to the owner who asked me if I had much to do tonight...So I got to restrip that one too. This involved cutting a mask out on the negative and running just the screen as a third separate pass using grey ink. This makes the 10 percent screen print like a 2 percent screen.

That worked great and I even gave a victory "thumbs up" gesture to the empty building as I finished the job. Washing up, I wondered if I was getting dizzy. I couldn't decide if I was feeling poorly from this cold or if Menieres disease was cropping up again. I took a ginger pill and hoped for the best. When I got home I got a little dizzier but not bad enough to take the seasick pill my doctor gives me. Instead I sat around at the computer feeling uncomfortable for a few hours. While I am grateful that I don't get the full tilt vertigo anymore, this low grade dizzyness isn't a picnic either. This morning I feel pretty good and that will probably last about three days before my ear start to ring again. I am thinking about doing some drawing. I have had a belly full of computer. My classmate emailed me that he hasn't done any homework whatsoever during our holiday break. I have never stopped doing homework for the entire three weeks. In the remaining 4 days I could do a nice still life. I have a set up in mind that uses an antique leather covered book next to a keyboard.

12-28-99

I have developed a bad habit. Instead of writing nice, well thought out entries here in the journal, I grab words I have written elsewhere and paste them in here. Maybe I am trying to take a holiday from the site. I am a little burned out on it I must admit. The HTML overhaul was long and tiresome. The following is a letter wrote to one of my classmates:

I am a little worried about y2k. I bought Sue one of those freeplay wind up radios for Christmas. Our power normally goes out several times a year even without y2k. It has been out for as long as 7 days in the past. I found lots of neat stuff at realgoods.com which I can't afford. My dad likes to buy their stuff.

I surfed around to a few of the sites on the link you sent me. I liked the Irish live radio. Love those accents. Even if we have a major breakdown in motherboards or something else unforeseen, rich people like bill gates have so much riding on the continued operation of computers that I am confident a way will be found to fix any problems. The only difficult to predict outcomes are the wackos. No doubt some wacko somewhere will manage to cause some havoc.

My boss at work has been stockpiling assault rifles. He carries a handgun in his glove box and listens to some right wing station, I think it might be kxi or something. I try not to irritate him.

We will be here at home over the new year. I think it is a lot of hoopla over nothing. Their is no war on so the media have to get worked up over something to sell papers and commercials. I am still plugging away at my site. I have all the pages but one changed over to the new GIF thumbnails. It is satisfying to see them come snapping in quickly at 2k each instead of 20 thumbnails at 8k each. Seems like good practice anyway.

12-26-99

We had a nice Xmas morning in Olympia with the family today. Sue, Lisa and my dad went for a bone chilling 2 hour walk down around Capital lake after we opened the presents. I stopped in to peer in the windows of my gallery. My paintings were hung nicely inside. Deb and Hugh Moody have done a very nice job with that gallery. I was glad they were closed as I was tempted to buy a charming $70 plaster wall ornament. Instead of a long entry here I am going to make some of my writing do double duty. Here is a Xmas letter I sent out to 6 of my relatives who were kind enough to send me a card:

It was nice to get all the holiday letters from everyone. I have a soft spot in my heart for family, but judging by my in box this year, I am the last one to write. I really don't have all that much exiting news to report this year. You have probably heard that I am printing and going to a technical college full time, studying web page design for a year. I have been surprised by how much I brought to the program. Going to school in middle age appears to be an advantage. Some of the younger people in the class don’t have the broad base of life experiences on which to draw.

For example, one of my classes was in photography which web designers use to take pictures of their clients facilities and products. Whereas I have been taking pictures with manual cameras for 30 years, almost everyone in the class was only familiar with the new automatic everything cameras. We were required to learn and then demonstrate proficiency in shutter speed and depth of field. The modern digital cameras don’t even have a shutter per se. And by making point and shoot photography so easy, the camera makers have eliminated many of the opportunities for taking truly creative images. I guess I didn’t express that very well. Suffice it to say that I was walking around the classroom at the teacher’s request showing the students my 20 year old Pentax and demonstrating what a shutter and an aperture looked like and how they worked. Also my knowledge of what good design looks like from 30 years of printing other designers work has come in very handy. Not to mention my color sense developed through 12 years of painting. If you have the Internet you can see what I learned in my first quarter: www.virtualalt.net/~mwebster

We still cross country ski in the winter as a family. I still climb a fair amount although Sue doesn’t care much for it anymore. Clint has shown a growing interest now that he is getting stronger, preferring the overhanging all muscle routes. He is real big on BMX bicycle jumping. He and his neighborhood buddies built a large dirt jump in our back yard about as big and high as a car. They love to sail over it on their bicycles, far up in the air. We made all the kids’ parents sign a waiver and keep it locked off when we are away. He also works out with weights in our garage/studio/gym. He still goes to karate now and then but seems to prefer working out with his speed bag or heavy bag in the garage with his buddies.

Lisa is a very busy little teenager. She has lots of girlfriends and spends a lot of time on the phone. My bout with Meniere’s disease has been getting a lot better. I have gone from a dizzy attack every 3 days for several months to one every three weeks. That is a vast improvement and I can only hope it continues to improve. The doctors are quite baffled by the disease. Mine encouraged me to research it on the Internet on my own as nothing he could do for me guarantees a “cure”.

Sue has the same job with the school district in occupational therapy and enjoys the free time it gives her with the kids especially since I am so busy now. My long term goal is still to paint full time. However, to do that I need a decent day job to pay the bills while I learn. Web design looks like a good fit and with the grades I am getting (straight A’s) my job prospects look good. I hope the new millennium treats you well.

12-25-99

Hooey! I can not believe how much time I have been poring into this site. Over the last 4 days I have changed the directory structure at the server level to reflect my instructors desire that we have 2 levels of directories to speed up downloading times. It has been mind numbing work going through all 22 pages hand editing each and every clickable link to reflect the new syntax structure.But it is 99 percent complete and I have learned a lot.

On a lighter note, we celebrated Xmas at the in laws tonight 5 hours ago at 8 PM. I gave Sue a wind up radio for when the power goes out. She was quite happy. More later, my mind is aching from all this keyboard time.

12-23-99

Tuesday night, or really, Wednesday morning. I worked a standard afternoon shift today, eight hours. I am out of practice at working a full shift. I have been working on a nightmare rerun for a customer whom we would like to get rid of. They are represented by a large ad agency who sends us lots of good customers. However, this one client, a large firm of lawyers, brings us a printing job every month that seems to never go right. This time the ink didn't dry on the matt stock. So tonight I spot varnished both sides of two sigs. I also cut 5 skids of scratch pads, something I only do when the presses get slow. I have been hearing from lots of friends and relatives from near and far. Sounds like a Xmas carol. This weekend I should buckle down and write back to them all. I feel a form letter coming.

Today in the morning I went rollerblading around the development. Clint and his bicycle buddies were out jumping and street riding. It reminded me a lot of summer when the family is all around before I go to work. Pretty nice. I am almost feeling like starting up a still life out in the garage. I have a week and a half before school eats up my free time. There really isn't much point in it. I have 20 pounds of unsold still life paintings under the bed. Since this is my year to re-career, I might be better off to continue boning up on school books.

12-20-99

I know, I know...I redesigned my page without changing to a new month here in the online journal. My only excuse was haven't got to it yet. I really like my new design. It has been a huge learning curve for me with a lot of bugs still to work out. I think I will let it all sit for a week and cool down before I jump into it again. My life over the last week has consisted of work on the printing presses at work and work on this web page at home. I spent this whole weekend at the computer except for a walk with Sue yesterday and a rollerblading session around the neighborhood today. She can't figure out why I am obsessed with this web page.

I look at it as taking advantage of time off from school to get a jump start on next quarter. And what better way than to apply all the stuff I learned last quarter on a real live working web page? I can understand her perspective. She sees me sitting here from wake up to lie down and worries. But her life is very stable with a good family type job with the school district. Lots of time off with our kids. I have to get off this keyboard.

12-16-99

I woke up from a good nights sleep to an empty house, my mind filled with dreams.

I was away from home with group of people on a mission. We all knew each other well but only as fellow students or workers, can't remember which. At first, in the dream, I was back in the old Presbyterian church in Olympia wandering around the brightly lit lobby on a Sunday morning with all the old church members. They were all the ages I remember from my junior high days while I had become middle aged. I marveled once again at the peace and beauty of the lobby. Walking into an inner sanctuary I found myself alone with the crucifix and a grand piano. Sunlight streamed into the sanctuary through high stained glass windows. Gazing at the colored beams of light I became mesmerized by the galaxies of tiny dust particles ascending randomly upwards in the still air.

From there, in the dream, I found myself in a group of people far from home on a mission. We were all very lonely and stressed out from the work load. Our leader took us to a red light district. Their were no "working girls" and they suggested using each other. I thought the idea absurd since I am happily married, but took a closer look around at some the crew (logic is never a big issue in dreams). It was a dim, smoky room filled with beds. The woman running the place told us there were no upstairs bedrooms but we could draw partial curtains around the ends of the beds. When several of the other members of our group started making out I noticed that the woman standing in front of me, who until then I had only known as a fellow worker was in fact quite lovely and wearing very little. One thing led to another as the old saying goes. Strangely though, as she came into my arms, she became my wife in her motions and touch.

Jeez, I can't even cheat in my dreams. I sure miss my family. I have been trying to work longer hours during the holiday break. It's ironic, I need more money to support the family I can't even see. At least Birdy is here with me. He is preening on my knee as I type. He gazes up at me with his beady black eyes, cocking his head from side to side, apparently trying to decide what kind of a weird creature I am and why don't I have feathers. I suppose I could go in and meet Sue for lunch but then I would have to hang around town in the wind and rain for three hours until I am due at work. Instead I might just stay here and work on updating this site.

I figured that I could easily create a whiz bang site with a quarter of web design school under my belt. It is turning out to not be so easy. This site has evolved over the last three years into a fairly tidy, smooth running homepage. The changes I want to make to it are so comprehensive it is taking me weeks to write all the code. Some of the changes I don't even know how to do yet. I have been spending hours and hours in PhotoShop teaching myself how to make transparent gifs that do what I want them to do. My teacher tells me I am one of her over achievers. She says we always want to leap ahead of the curve, that we need to be more patient and wait for the knowledge to come gradually. She is probably right. I may be pushing this web site too hard. This is supposed to be a vacation from school, not a mind bender. Maybe I will go in and have lunch with Sue after all.

12-15-99

I should be in bed right now. It is one thirty in the morning. I got up around 9 AM and worked on html and PhotoShop until I went in to work around 1. Actually I went to the dentist for my bi yearly lecture on not flossing enough. I have been making great strides in understanding smaller file sizes through using gifs. I am updating my menu frame on my index page right now so that instead of a column of blue buttons on the left there will be pictures as mouseovers. I haven't quite got the design sorted out in my head yet. Their are more pictures than there is room for. The old buttons were more compact but less pretty.

This doggone dizzy disease is driving me to distraction. Just when I think I have it licked, it ups and bites me in the rear. The reason I am up right now is I am waiting for a spell to pass. I took the medicine late because I have had so few attacks lately I assumed I was tired instead of getting dizzy. Oh well, at least they are a lot farther in between than they used to be. Up to 17 days instead of every three. At least I don't have to worry about trying to get up to go to school tomorrow after this all nighter. I can sleep in since it is Xmas break. I am not due at work until the afternoon.

12-12-99

This is my first Sunday since September 20th that I haven't had to spend on homework. Everyday off since the 20th, I have spent on homework. Am I whining? Not really. I love school. I am excited about the future it is opening for me. Saturday after work I drove up to see the old friend who introduced me to computers 3 years ago. He and I used to argue about the evils of computers as we labored over our printing presses at Southgate press. I was convinced they were harmful to the creative mind. He was so sure I was wrong he loaned me an old 486 he had on hand just to prove he was right. It was the first computer in our house and had us all hooked in a month.

A. quit printing to start his own computer consulting business as well as becoming an Internet service provider on whose computers this site is still hosted. He became so talented at network management that he hired on with a database asset management company whose main client is Washington Mutual Bank. Last night he showed me some of the web sites he has written for his company that enable the various locations to access the main database. One of his pages had 3500 lines of html code; not to mention some C++. I am a little unsure of his knowledge of the glamorous end of web design like shockwave but his understanding of business oriented database management as it applies to web design is astounding. Like our friend and former supervisor at Southgate Press used to say, "A. is a very bright young man." He is also a good friend and fun to hang out with. He was very supportive of me when I was laid off and trying to make a living as an artist. When I took him climbing a few times he showed a easy grace on the rock.

I am still quite uptight from finals week. I just blew up at my son for leaving his open water bottle on my bookcase. He was walking by with the birdcage and knocked it over on my books. He shouldn't have left an open container there but I shouldn't have had a cow over it either. He is so used to me having constant PMS that my hollering about the water washed off him like water on a ducks back. When I tried to read some of my textbooks this morning I fell asleep on the couch. My mind is scattered. I wonder how long my mind well take to get back to "normal".

12-11-99

I am writing this from school. School is out for the winter break. I am waiting for my parents to show up who are delivering my rain coat which I left at their house over Thanksgiving. Their are no other students here from our 14 student class of web designers. They have all left for the Christmas break. We gave our last presentation this morning on our 30 pages from the class book on animation.

Having all the presentations and homework in is a huge relief. I have been sweating out the days finishing the huge dump of assignments they gave us over the last couple weeks. The team projects were the worst because I couldn't count on my team. One of my team members promised every day for the last 2 weeks that she would have her slides ready to join the 40 slide powerpoint presentation. She never delivered.

After we gave the show this morning without her, she wandered in around 11 AM looking like a lost kitten. She asked where everybody was. I said school was out, it was all over. She turned around and walked out. Funny thing is, she is the school president. Perhaps she was having a bad week. Finals has been brutal on us all.

The good news is, I now have 3 weeks off to live a semi-normal life as a printer working swing shift. No more doing homework after work and trying to survive day 6 days a week on 4 hours of sleep a night.

Now I get to sleep in every morning until it is time to go to work at 1 PM. I plan to use my new learned skills in web design and PhotoShop to completely revise this site.

12-7-99

My boss took pity on me. He gave me a light night tonight. I have been whining about lack of sleep from finals week. Today we had to leave school at 11 AM when the network went down. It turned out to be a blessing. I was able to come home for 3 hours and work on this computer. This computer is a little better than the school computer. The main reason is I have both Office and Adobe on the same machine here. My main computer at school only has Adobe. If I want to work in both Adobe and Powerpoint, I have to walk between rooms.

She tells me that Office 97 slows down our high end computers so badly that the animation programs we learn next quarter will not function. I have 95 percent of my finals work completed. All of my presentations are finished except for the late team members who have yet to give me their slides. I probable got my first grade lower than an A this morning. We had a written test on basic computer operation. There were a lot of obscure questions about wandering around a computers guts. I can do the wandering quite well, but to write about how to do it without having the computer to work on, forget it. Especially with the sleep I have been getting. I have to wonder if they are dumping all this work on us just to see if we will snap. Kind of a "lets see how far we can push them" affair.

Even the students who don't have jobs are whining. After I got through most of my homework this afternoon, I laid down for a 20 minute nap. It was an exquisite feeling to lay on the bed, letting my mind drift off in pleasant thoughts. When I reached that semi-dreamlike state, I heard one of my classmates walk in and say Good Morning. Very eerie, and strangely calming. Then I got up and went to work, waving at my kids as they walked home from the bus stop.

12-3-99

Friday is finally here. I asked for a whole weekend off at work in order to catch up on the finals week homework at school. We presented one of our 6 person group Powerpoint presentations today. It was a high stress presentation. A large part of our grade in 2 of our nine classes depended on how the 6 of us carried it off. My 7 slides were in the middle of the 20 minute show. As I waited for my turn I could feel myself starting to sweat as the 3 people before me stood up and narrated their slides.

We usually put these shows on for just our Powerpoint teacher. This one had all three of our teachers in the room plus the entire class of 20 students. Of the six of us, only T. and myself can speak well in front of a crowd. We both still get nervous, but at least we can face our audience and think on our feet. I love listening to her. She speaks with conviction and surprises me with her integrity. I haven't seen my grade yet but I felt reasonable solid after the first couple slides. I used to write a paragraph of notes for each slide before the presentation but under these deadlines I am learning to improvise. On a couple of them I knew the material pretty well. I was able to expand on the subject with one part of my mind while the other calmly looked out over the audience to see a couple slow grins break over the faces. Whether I was speaking well or just making a fool of myself remains to be seen.

My ability to speak might just be the nature of printing. It is a trade where you have to have the Hutzpah to walk up to a machine and perform. Customers frequently come in at a pre-scheduled time to sign off on their printing jobs. When things go wrong, or if they want something changed, I, as a pressman have to act like I am in complete control for the boss and the customers. Often, in fact, I only have a vague idea why things went wrong. They stand and wait expectantly as we (hopefully) perform miracles.

I have also learned to perform and speak in front of the small crowds that gather when I paint on location. Rockclimbing as well can be a crowd performance if there is a couple partys waiting in line on popular routes.

Thursday I got so excited about completing an image map using cut up tables I through my hands up in the air in a victory celebration. Unfortunately I was leaning back on the legs of my chair at the time and fell over backwards. The two other students in the room were hugely entertained. N. our html teacher was very impressed I had completed the code in 3 hours but saddened she had missed the great fall.

12-2-99

We are having a very busy finals week. I have been up until 1 AM every day for 5 days in a row. I get up at 6 AM. There is no other way to get all my homework done. At least they aren't giving us any more new homework. We have all the assignments that are due by next Thursday.

Printing has been hard as well. My foreman is on vacation for a week now. I tried to rerun one of his black and Metallic PMS 8900 duotones twice now in the last 5 days. Bad both times. The second time I tried to rerun it, I had the owner sign off on the color mix and hue. I had good control during the run, matching to the signed off copy with lots of overs. Unfortunately, after I put the next color on, black over the mettalic halftone in a dry trap, the first color had somehow dried back and become wrong.

Now they have finally admitted that I was right when I told them that the foreman is the only one with enough experience with metallic inks to print the job. They are saving the fourth rerun until he returns from vacation.

On a brighter note, I have been free of the dizzy attacks for almost 2 weeks. I am unsure if I am in remission or if the disease has merely eased back finally, like everyone promised it would. Also it could be the Ginger vitamin supplement pills I started taking the day the dizzy attacks ended.

Another piece of good news is I am still getting A+'s on every assignment at school despite the frenzy of finals week. I completely forgot about a large assignment until two days before it was due. I raced through 4 hours of Photoshop work, made a typo on the finished piece and still got an A+. I would have given myself a C.

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