If you’ve poked around this site much you’ll find all the telltale signs that indicate my detachment. Last time I checked I had 40,094 comments. I have a number of other priorities that I need to attend to at the moment, but the time has come for me to revamp this web site.

My shiny, new Intuos 2 Platinum Wacom tablet was delivered by FedEx late yesterday afternoon. I made space for it on my desk, made the USB connection, installed the driver and software on the CD, and then downloaded a working copy of the driver from the Wacom site and installed it. It didn’t take long to get it up and running, but I evoked a “Low USB Power” warning when trying to have it hooked up with my keyboard, Turbo Mouse, and Zip drive. Beyond this appreciable nuisance, everything looks fine. (I guess it’s time to buy a USB hub,.)
Gotta’ just love installing new hardware,especially when it comes with free software! My tablet comes with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0, Corel Painter classic, nik multimedia penPalette, and Wacom Brushes v.1 for Photoshop. While I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to experiment with the main applications, I can’t resist giving them a whirl when I get them as bundled software. Mmm-more toys!
I played around with the tablet a bit yesterday–finding it extremely awkward to use. Using a stylus is a real change from what I’m used to, so I’ll need time to grow accustomed to it. Plenty of creatives report that once they got the hang of using their tablets they wondered how they ever got by without them (which sounds a lot like my Turbo Mouse dependency). I’m still reviewing online documentation and various web sites to get a better understanding of the tablet’s workflow applications. I’m also going through the PDF manual.
Of course I have plenty of other reading to do as well. I went to the Ballard Library today and picked up two more books that have been on back order: Real World InDesign 2, and Photoshop 7 Studio Techniques. I’ve already started reading Maya 4.5 Fundamentals, and have three other Maya books I need to go through. (I hear late charges in the distance.)
For the time being, I’m doing house chores while listening to Spike TV’s Friday The 13th Marathon on the TV. Mary’s out to a business meeting with Marcus this afternoon, which leaves me free to focus on domestic matters. I’m dusting, doing dishes, laundry (with no complaints from Willy) and reorganizing my desk at the moment, and hope to work on a business card and get some study in by the end of the afternoon.
So, this is Halloween. Pretty exciting, eh? Other than expecting the biweekly visitation of “The Reclusive One,” we don’t have any special plans. (Hmmm.. maybe a pizza and video games would be a nice change?)

He suggested that I can achieve the desired effect by incorporating the If Empty MT Plugin, and then went on to provide an example of the code I’ll need to incorporate into my homepage. I’m not familiar with MT plugins, so I’ll have to do some more research before I start dropping tags into my code. I hope this plugin holds my solution. I’m also hoping that the process of using plugins isn’t too involved, and that the code required to evoke these features isn’t extensive.
My chief complaint about my site is the fact that my current host doesn’t support all of the PERL modules I need for the CGI scripts I want to use. Due to these restrictions, I’ve decided to change ISPs at earliest convenience–which means I’ll have to go through the painstaking and precarious process of updating and redirecting the majority of my site’s files. Moving is already going to be a bear of a chore, so really I don’t want to be making matters more complicated with this plugin.

I didn’t blink the first time, but she was right to ask me. “Do you know what TriVisions are?” I didn’t. You know those billboards that consist of strips that turn to a new message every ten seconds, or so? Yep, that’s a TriVision.
Anyway, I’d need to build mechanicals from comps using only the available FPO art, which would be rebuilt at the last minute by someone else when the hi-res art file became available. Of course, that’s not how they’d usually like to have this done, but there’s nothing else that could be done right then. (FYI: For Placement Only artwork is typically an extremely low-quality file of comparably small size. Used for developing the artwork compositions, the small file sizes keep the computers and servers from bogging down during development. After all of the “mechanicals” are designed, the Hi-Res art gets swapped in

The original art file contained flaws, it was at the wrong proportions for the required specs, and the original was way too small. Since all that was available was a flattened 300dpi TIFF, the art for the mechanicals would have to be cleaned up and run through a special third part program that I’d never used: Lizard Tech’s http://www.ianspiers.com/2003/05/06/ping-du-jour/ Continue reading →]]> I think the quarter really dropped last night. I’m still working it through right at the moment, so I’ll have to pass on going into details. For now, I’ll just say that I’m grateful.
In other news: Today marked another series of significant pushes into geekdom. Among them, I managed to set up a new email account (lifealdente@attbi.com) and a web space (http://lifealdente.home.attbi.com) for Mary on my existing AT&T Broadband account. It really didn’t take long to set her up, and the details she needed for administering the space were readily available. I even set her new email address to forward to her old AOL address.
After the testing the email forwarding and reviewing the space, we walked through the basics of using Transmit for FTP’ing her HTML documents. I was still making breakfast by the time she announced her first content edit. Of course, feeding her curiosity, she quickly returned to the SAMS lessons.
This is way cool! Mary is a voracious reader with a humility complex