Starting again is hard
There's always more to do
I used to love to draw random objects. When I worked as a computer programmer in Washington D.C., I spent a lot of my time drawing wallpaper for my computer screen using random objects around my desk. I would draw coffee rings (and I didn't even drink coffee at the time--such a foolish youngster I was), paper clips, mugs, pencils, you name it, I drew it. I wish I still had some of those computer drawings. The scary part is I used a hand-coded pixel editor to draw the images pixel by pixel. Luckily, we've moved beyond pixel editing for the Horribles.
And, yes, the rug does say Geeks.
Seattle, WA | 2007.07.05 | Cast of Horribles | Computer
My three-thousand dollar mirror
It's true, my computer is kaput. It has slowed down my doodling as I'm forced to use my work Tablet PC to create the Horribles.
After many hardware failures, the power supply finally blew, and took the power strip with it. The blow took out the house circuit as well. Using my incredible deductive powers, I determined that the power outage was caused by either a faulty power supply in the computer (unlikely) or a faulty powerstrip (much more likely, as it was a very old strip).
I'm not sure of my next steps. I thought about buying a new computer, but the more I looked insides of computer, the more it seemed a huge waste of money not to reuse them. I'll begin replacing the components piece by piece, hopefully stopping at the new power supply, and maybe a new case and fans (the Alienware case, while shiny, is huge and its fans make too much noise).
Seattle, WA | 2007.10.01 | Cast of Horribles | Computer, Suffering
I become lost in my projects
This is a fitting doodle. I have been working hard trying to finish NAIS, my New-And-Improved-Sewcrates.com project. I'm in the final stages, and I'm hopefully I'll post a nearly final version on Tuesday, the first of January.
To accomplish this, I locked myself in my little computer room for longer than I care to admit. This is not uncommon. These website projects tend to overwhelm me. I lose all sense of time until I finish.
Here's where I knew I approached bottom: as part of the new design, I'm resizing all of the thumbnails and photographs to enlarge them for today's bigger monitors. Because of server limitations, I have to manually generate each photo album (as opposed to creating a batch project that does all of them overnight). It takes anywhere from two to ten minutes to create the album on the server. Even though it was not important that I finish today, I found myself unable to stop. I would tell myself, last one. I can continue tomorrow. But instead of getting up, I would decide to wait a few minutes longer until it finished. Then I would click generate on the next one, and tell myself just one more. You have no idea how addictive generating photo albums is for me.
It's similar to the MMORPG video games I play. While large parts of those games are not fun, I continue to chase the carrot at the end of the stick. No matter how often the carrot moves, I just tell myself just one more.
Seattle, WA | 2007.12.30 | Cast of Horribles | Computer, Julie, Projects
It knows everything about me
I have a confession: I haven't been doodling lately. My computer has been on the fritz and I've been terribly busy with the Villa and watching Grey's Anatomy and not playing with the dogs although they're desperate and lonely and wish I would chase them around the couch a few times (my friend would say I'm projecting human feelings on our dogs--well, yeah, and so?) and the moon has not been in the second house and the sun, well, it's been coming out lately, which has really been throwing off my internal body clock. I mean, this is Seattle and after not seeing the big yellow glowy thing in the sky for six months, it's difficult to reacquaint myself with it.
To my litany of excuses I can now add a legitimate one: Button ate my pen. When we leave the dogs in the Castle for the day, we lock them in the kitchen and laundry area. (Soon they'll be locked in the dog room in the Villa.) While I would love them to roam the house, we can't trust them: Ziggy tends to pee on things, and Button, well, Button eats everything. We've also discovered that she may be able to fly. While we haven't caught her in the act yet, stuff that's way out of her reach (and the reach of most non-mutant humans) somehow ends up chewed and scattered around the house. I plan to invest in a wireless webcam for the new dog room so we can document this and make lots of money parading her around the various mutant carnivals as the Flying Dog.
Getting back to the kitchen, besides the gate to the dining room, the kitchen also leads to the computer room, which we are careful to close before leaving. We left it open a few inches on Tuesday, and Button and Ziggy managed to sneak in while we were away. Once in, Button proceeded to find every lose paper, memory card, and plastic thingy and throw it around the kitchen. She likely flew onto the chair or desk, and then reached over and grabbed my fancy Cintiq pen that was in its fancy pen holder. She brought her prize into the kitchen and spent the rest of the day chewing the two ends.
I ordered a new one yesterday. It will be the first delivery in the Villa (besides the furniture, of course). I'll continue to work through my dwindling queue of doodles, and hope once we set up our new fancy two-desk study, I'll get a-doodling again. I have a couple of anime doodles I need to draw, and I'm sure depression will hit as soon as I realize how much money the Villa will cost. Julie hasn't told me yet. Ignorance is a wonderful thing.
Seattle, WA | 2008.04.03 | Cast of Horribles | Computer
It tells me to do things
Just got back from watching Wolverine. We thought it was enjoyable. I'm not sure what people were expecting. It's not going to win Academy Awards, but it's certainly a good way to spend a couple of hours.
Mercer Island, WA | 2009.05.03 | Cast of Horribles | Computer
The skunkworks
Here's my favorite Horrible from my secret project. That was me during the peak of my work. (It all went downhill from here.)
The cold continues. Our fountain completely froze over. I kept it running because I liked the icicles falling from the lion's heads. I turned it off this morning to stop the pump from burning out.
Mercer Island, WA | 2009.12.09 | Cast of Horribles | Coffee, Computer, Secret project
The blank page is sucking out my soul
That's an OLPC (One Laptop per Child) in the Horrible. One of my writing mates uses it to write during our Sunday morning meet-ups.
We're off to watch the women's gold medal match in Vancouver on Friday. It took some arm twisting, but I am looking forward to a new photo album (it's sad that that's the reason I do things now).