Usually by 4 o’clock every afternoon I’m fairly certain that everyone in the free world is taking fifteen minutes to either email me or call me on the phone - seriously, it’s cricket quiet in my studio till 4ish most days, but busybusybusy from 4 to 6pm - In the last year or so I’ve started planning my day around the phenomenon - which I’ve named ‘saul-bombing’ - the challenge of surviving a ‘saul-bombing’ is how quickly you can sort, and flag the stuff that actually must get done overnight from the stuff that although it looks important - actually doesn’t require any action on my part. My usual approach is to quickly flag the do’sand take note of and then archive the not-do’s. I then take the flagged items and fold them into my list of work to be done - hopefully without causing a epic ripple that fills my week with late nights - it takes some resolve to watch your week deteriorate before your very eyes, but with a few simple goals - you can at least make the process mentally easier.
- Don’t leave any unflagged email in your inbox, get the info out, get the email archived, if you’re ballsy you could delete it, I’m not, I’ve never regretted having 10 years of emails to refer back to.
- Don’t go to bed without figuring out your hit-list for tomorrow, you’ll sleep better.
- If it isn’t an emergency, no all-nighters, they seem like a good idea at the time, but in the long run your taking longer to accomplish less work.
- In the morning avoid your email, and all social networking (twitter, facebook, etc) till you knock a few items off your list, that will help minimize the ripple caused by tomorrows ‘saul-bombing’.
Tagged: email
I enjoy magic, hmm, let me be more specific, I enjoy sleight of hand, I don’t enjoy the new kind of magic where David Blaine starves himself for 31 days and calls it an illusion, or Criss Angel swallows radioactive waste and calls it a ‘mind-freak’, I like the kind of magic where a skilled and practice individual produces deck after deck of cards from thin air 3 inches from your face, while you stare yourself cross-eyed trying to figure it out - truth be told I never want to know how it’s done.
When I saw that this weeks Illustration Friday word was Poof!, I couldn’t help myself - I illustrated the first trick I ever learned, a store bought illusion where you produce a card from thin air and then you vanish it by having it engulf itself in flames, it was a neat trick and I hurt myself EVERY TIME I DID IT, but the trick impressed the girl I was interested in at the time, so I look at it as $45 well spent.
I’ve been fooling with some styles that are a bit quicker start to finish than my normal rendered approach, I really like this segmented approach, it’s fun to do, and I like the results, but I absolutely want to explore it further.
Tagged: illustration friday
This week I stopped at the farmers market and bought a bag of fresh ginger (7 hands) it’s probably more ginger than I’ve consumed in my entire life - It’ll keep for a few weeks in the veggie crisper - but I’m going to put the bulk of it to good use in the form of gingersnaps, they’re dead simple to make:
- 3/4 cup butter flavored Crisco
- 1 cup sugar
- 1/4 cup mosasses
- 1 egg
- 2 teaspoons baking soda
- 2 cup flour
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
- 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
- 1 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- Melt shortening in a 3-4 quart saucepan over LOW heat
- Remove from heat, let cool.
- Add sugar, molasses and egg, beat well
- Sift together flour, soda, cloves, ginger, cinnimon and salt.
- Add to first mixture, mix well and chill.
- Form into 1 inch balls, roll in granulated sugar and place on a greased cookie sheet 2 inches apart.
- Bake at 375 for 8-10 minutes.
- Let Cool, eat and enjoy!
I’ll probably iced some of them with a lemony sugar glaze, you’ll have to figure out your own icing - hmm, maybe chocolate would be good. Be creative, have fun, don’t eat them all in one sitting!
Mothers Day was months ago, but that doesn’t mean you can’t buy your mom a totally typographic tee
Shirt one in a series of typographic shirts - this one is mostly just because the image of your mom walking down the street wearing this shirt amuses me.
Tagged: merch
I have two TIVO’s, one upstairs, one downstairs - I can easily move recorded shows between the two (pull, not push) - and recently I’ve discovered how easy it is to move recorded shows to my mac, so I can watch it while I pound away at work. I know there are lots of ways of doing this - and that’s fine - but hardly qualifies as FUN, my way requires a browser.
- I’m assuming your TIVO is on your network, if it’s not it should be.
- First login to your TIVO account on tivo.com and make sure you’ve allowed media transfers - and grab your ‘media access key’ while you’re there.
- Open any browser and key in your TIVO’s IP address - mine is https://192.168.55.12 - note that you’re doing this under a secure connection ‘https’.
- When challenged - your username is ‘tivo’ and your password is your media access key
Bam!, you should now be looking at a web interface that show you all your recorded shows - complete with links to download shows to your desktop. The files themselves are in ‘.tivo’ format - which is essentially a MPEG2 variant - playing it has it’s own challenges, it’s one of the few formats that VLC doesn’t play out-of-the-box, I’m sure there’s an easier way buy I toss them into VisualHub, and that seems to work nicely.
Of course the hidden gem in this is that although the files are pretty big (1GB+) if I opened up my router JUST right - my friends could access my TIVO’d content - and vice versa, just a thought - would seem to be a very sketchy use for VPN software too - but that remains to be seen, for right now it’s a curious example of poking at an local network IP while on the phone - which is exactly how I found this.
I’m whipping up a geektoolscript to keep me posted as to what’s ‘playing’ on my tivo, because I can, and because that’s the way I roll.
There are plenty of apps that will let you do this - most notably TivoButler, and Roxio’s TIVO Transfer (which is really excellent).
