I get a fair amount of flack from friends and colleagues about my old skool practices -
- code-wise: I like to hand code, it takes longer - but I debug less.
- design-wise: I layout everything on paper (with red pencil) before it goes digital.
- illustration-wise: I always draw a tight sketch in pencil (again RED pencil) and scan it in - the sketch lives in the Photoshop document permanently — for me the sketch is the soul of the entire illustration.
I know that Dreamweaver is a great tool, and that Photoshop automatic shadows are good enough, and that most clients don’t know kerning from canola oil, but I GET something out of handcrafting xhtml/css and php, I’m not sure what it is, but I know it’s there. Those RED pencils are directly tied to my brain, the ideas aren’t hindered, they just flow, and before you mention wacom tablets, been there, done that, they’re fine, but they don’t come in red.
For now I’ll just continue my hand-crafted ways, why mess with a good thing.
We were in a lazy mood yesterday, so we popped over to the market and scrounged for something intresting and psuedo healthy for dinner. I had watched Bobby Flay’s Throwdown the night before - and Bobby made hot dogs, so I had hot dogs on the mind. I know I shouldn’t eat hot dogs, they’re full of nitrates, and are essentially salt and empty calories. But I had a jones for a hot dog, and it was hard to ignore
Browsing in the vegan section of the market we stumbled upon Smart Dogs - Vegetable Protein Links [doesn’t that sound yummy?] and there sittiing right next to the Smart Dogs, was packages of Smart Chili - so chili dogs it was, we paired them with a whole wheat tortilla, and a slice of fat-free cheese — cooking was simple, three microwave minutes and the dinner was complete. We had low-expectation, after all it’s highly unlikely that veggie protein links ‘plump when you cook them’, or if chili with texturized soy protein is ‘rich and meaty’ — but… we liked them, the Smart Dogs where good, and the Smart Chili was excellent.
So if you’re in the mood for veggie protein links, or vegan chili dogs - Smart Dogs and Smart Chili are an excellent choice.
Going through the pockets on a sweatshirt I found a receipt, from WaWa — 3 Bagel-Cheese-Sausage sandwiches, A One Liter Diet Coke, and two Chunky bars - the timestamp reads clear as day 3:27am. Clearly — I have no one to blame for me being unhealthy but myself, it’s not feasible I shared one on these sandwiches with anyone at that hour, it’s more than likely at least one of them never made it home. That was breakfast 2 months ago. Estimated calories: 9 billion / 8 billion calories from fat
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I’ve been cooking lately, and I’ve been on the hunt for decent low-carb, low-salt recipes that have a bit of heat, I’m all about the heat - there are all kinds of hot sauces on the market; some hot, some tasty — but surprisingly few that both have decent heat and a flavor.
I’m not a fan of those hot sauces that are so insanely hot that they cause prolonged physical pain, [my tolerance seems to be anything under 100,000 Scoville units] — I’ll list a few of them here to spare you the unbearable pain and suffering Read More »
So aggravating, I had a fellow illustrator do some artwork for a project, and he sent it over as a password-protected PDF, and of course, neglected to provide me the password, to further piss me off, he wasn’t reachable by either email or phone from 9am to 7pm - so in a deadline induced frenzy - I had to somehow get around the password, it was actually really easy. Read More »
Last friday I went to a nutritionist, I won’t bore you with the details — but the equation basically is; poor eating habits x 20 years = illness, so I changed everything about my eating habits 5 weeks ago [shortly after being diagnosed with the illness] and I was feeling pretty good about ever decisions I made - I was eating a protein packed 1000 - 1200 calories per day, I had minimal carbs, almost no sugar, no additional salt - my energy level seems good. So what the nutritioinst told me was I WASN’T EATING ENOUGH! - excuse me? isn’t overeating what got me here in the first place?
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So now that I kind of have a decent playlist, I decided to ‘kick it up’ a little bit, by eliminating the annoying gaps between the songs — of course Itunes can do this automatically, just switch on ‘crossfade between tracks’ & ‘gapless playback’ and you’re all set, but sadly this seemingly obvious feature isn’t available once you move your playlists to your my ipod [I realize the new ipods CAN play gapless - but NOT cross-fading].
I could have burned my playlist to a CD and then re-imported it back into itunes, but that seemed so analog — I chose instead to use Read More »
“T” and I have been walking every night, it’s no big deal — about a mile, generally she leads [she walks much faster than me] we both wear our ipods (her a shuffle, me a 40gb 4th gen), she has a kickass playlist that’s primarily 80’s pop, and it keeps her moving at a decent pace, I’ve been struggling with my music choices — most of what I like to listen too is horrible to walk to, it’s loud and not particularly peppy - and my walking is suffering because of it [certainly not because I’m in unspeakably bad shape].
Yesterday’s walk was a painful endevour, both my back and ankle where complaining - but let’s focus on my suck music - So perhaps “T’s” 80’s inspired workout was the key - so I tried to put my own spin on an 80’s workout playlist - hardly perfect, but I’m thinking it’s much better than anything else I’ve put together to date.
All that being said, I’m totally open to suggestions.
Saul’s 80’s Infused Walking Playlist:
- Obsession / Animotion
- Cowboy / Kid Rock
- Don’t Go / Yazoo
- Dreaming / Blondie
- People Are People / Depeche Mode
- Facination / Human League
- Too Shy / Kajagoogoo
- Rock The Casbah / The Clash
- Policy of Truth / Depeche Mode
- Push It / Salt n’ Pepa
- Relax / Frankie Goes To Hollywood
I live an accumulative lifestyle, I realize that. I’m constantly fighting the habit, you see in my heart I’m a minimalist, if I could I’d throw all this crap out, paint the walls white, and get a single comfy chair for the center of the room, and just BE. I doubt that I’ll go that far, but I do have the nice men from 1-800-GOT-JUNK coming in a week, I hope the bring a BIG truck.
As if the world could possibly use two of me, I’m rather desperate for — organized, educated, talented, aggresive, committed, eager and stable help in the studio, and no this isn’t a classified ad, but if it was the person could — illustrate in several styles (realism & decorative), code (ASP, PHP, AS, JS, CSS, HTML), write a proper sentence, know how to walk, talk and act around clients in a relaxed and casual manner, design in an informational rather than a trendy manner, and lastly [and most importantly] understand that I don’t care if it’s the ‘hard way’, I want absolutely everything done ‘my way’ or it gets done again. That’s not to say I won’t listen to recommendations… It just means I’m likely to ignore them.
As the title kind of suggests, the above is basically my job description, I can’t imagine working for myself… I’d likely begin poisoning myself slowly, imperceivable bits of mercury in the morning beverage perhaps, I just have to do it, when I’m not looking.
Die, you bastard die!