the paint color in the den.

I haven’t blogged about the ongoing home renovation for a couple of reasons, primarily because it has been a costly, messy, over-budget, deadline-missing nightmare that I don’t want to think about anymore than necessary.

In an effort to keep costs down, I volunteered (was volunteered?) to do all the painting. Admittedly this is something I rather enjoy, if the prep work is kept to a minimum. It is remarkable how inexpensively a room can be transformed with paint. Also, a couple of days of physical toil is always a good reminder about how easy sitting at a desk can be. It’s an Irish work ethic thing, I think…

As a working artist, I thoroughly enjoy the act of opening a gallon of pure color, free from the challenges of perspective, form, light and shade, and composition.

The pleasure is diminished exponentially whenever I paint the same room again. My estimates are every twenty-four months a room is deemed to be in need of re-painting.

I don’t care to “run the math”, but the equation would go something like:
(((three homes/thirteen years of home ownership) x number of rooms) / 24 months)

Don’t even get me started about staining outdoor decks, this only pertains to interior painting.

Suffice it to say, I have long since lost the energy to fight the fight about color choice. Early on I stood my ground, flaunting my role as the artiste, and occasionally was permitted to choose colors of bold hues. My better half, a city girl who would dress in all black every day if she could, likes any color as long as it’s neutral. The first suggested paint color presented to me was met with a resounding “perfect, great, let’s go”.

Regarding the room I spent the weekend toiling in, the former paint was a stylish kind of Butterscotch-Caramel color. Overlaying a lighter pale green (Terrarium, by FreshAire) required not one, but two coats of primer.

I won the battle then, but it’s clear now that I’ve lost the war.

At least we did something green.

Feeling I was failing as a father for having not taken my 11 year old son to a Major League Baseball game, we scored primo tickets (provided by my wife’s business colleague) and all four of us saw the Yanks last night.

The pressing question for old-school New Yorkers like myself with memories at the old stadium: Is it the same? Yes, only better. The old stadium had become steeped with a unique smell; a melange of urine, beer and BO. The new stadium has “new stadium smell”.

The old stadium is draped in scaffolding, tarp and mesh and looks like a sorry, haunted arena in the process of being dismantled. If you take the train, you walk by it to arrive at the shining new beacon of America’s past-time and the new home of baseball’s greatest dynasty.

I’m not even a huge fan, having soured at the strike of ’94, but I am not exaggerating when I tell you the hair on my arms was standing up as I got into the halls of the stadium and again when we arrived at Section 123.

Joy quickly turned to horror. A loud-mouth, obnoxious, stereotypical local sports fan from New York (pronounced New Yawk in this case) seated directly behind me decided to hold us all captive : “Come ON DEREK, HIT the BAWL right DOWN ‘DA MIDDLE. ” “MELKY – what ARE YOU SWINGING at? Dat was over ya head- ya don’t swing at a pitch OVER YA HEAD”. I know uppercase text is shouting, that’s the point.

We get it, we’re close enough that they can hear you. No one else around is displaying this kind of low-brow behaviour.

This alone is a compelling reason to sit home in front of the TV in the comfort of your home (if you are so inclined) with the noticeable distinction that baseball is far more engaging at the ballpark. It was a horse race combined with a home run slug fest. A great night out.

… during a few days off.

In reaction to a cryptic Blogger “bX” error, I changed the template for this blog. I’m not going to go into great detail about the error here, because a ton of posts have appeared on this subject – here is one well-written one.

At precisely the same time, my web traffic “flat-lined”.

A little background. First, if you haven’t already dived into the habit-forming Google Analytics for tracking your traffic, you should. Knowing that your blog is reaching eyeballs is reassuring. Your hard work and efforts are worthwhile. It’s how I start my day, everyday.

Be advised that a change in templates requires that you repeat the copy-paste of your tracking code.

Wonder where you readers fled to because your blog traffic graph “flat-lined” after a template change? Nowhere. You still have the average number of readers (reciprocal link traffic spikes notwithstanding) that you’ve always had, but the javascript code that you copied into your old template was likely removed by the application of the new template.

You won’t lose the historical data before the change, but by the time you notice, there might be an outage of traffic reporting (ten days in my case).

I got a clue something was afoot when I was getting traffic on my podcast, from a link on the blog – but no traffic on the blog itself.

While tracking your blog is relatively easy for those experienced with looking at HTML markup, it certainly isn’t for the casual non-technical blogger. A search of Google Help will always bring up instances of the same problem, but as both are Google products, better documentation is called for.

Whatever happened to a separation of the presentation from the data?

“Everybody Else Is Too Loud” is my new podcast. The goal is to update on weekends to discuss the prior week’s events – the subject will be anything I feel like talking about: film, art, games, music, family, webcomics, graphics tips and discoveries, gadgets, news, and likely some highlights of my current work(s)-in-progress.

Please press “play” on the audio controller and thanks for checking it out.

Episode 04 Show Notes:

• YouTube post-mortem
• Twitter is hacked, business plans published
• “I Knew That” – Smart Quotes vs. Dumb Quotes

In true curmudgeonly fashion, I have long eschewed YouTube as the supreme time-waster. Still do – as a matter of fact, albeit there is a time and place for everything.

I recently wrapped my first YouTube video blog. It is the inaugural launch episode of “Tim’s Gear Review”. There will not be many episodes about new gear, since I buy these items myself, but I am certain shoppers searching for reviews on used gear they are considering on eBay and Craigslist may find some worthwhile advice.

This was hard work, but a great exercise in dusting off my video editing chops since I primarily do graphic design full-time now.

Some lessons learned:

Lapel (lavalier) mic:
I knew some hum would be introduced from the lights for the my on-screen appearance, but it was far more severe than imagined. Isolating the audio, rather than “fixing it in post” is the way to go. I suspected this, but “dove in” anyway using the camcorder’s on-board mic. Dubbing is impossible for me because of the unscripted, conversational approach. I’ll purchase one for the next review (maybe a review of the lavalier itself?).

Are you a YouTube Newb?
I am. Did you know that you cannot “re-upload”. Not without resetting your View Counts, anyway. I wrongly presumed, like a blog post, I could Publish – Post – Proof – Edit, and Re-Post.

While initially crestfallen that the subject of my first gear review (the Wacom Intuos4 graphics tablet) was already reviewed by dozens, I feel that I have something to contribute on this topic. I have been a graphics tablet user for over twenty years, having used Summagraphics and Calcomps before Wacom hit it big.

I overcame that discouragement and was amused that a few dozen people have viewed it (at this writing) and am awe-struck at amateur content providers that garner nearly a half million views.

I have discovered some pretty funny, polished productions that inspire me to raise the bar higher on my next production. If it were not for iJustine’s behind the scenes blog post, or Terry White’s Intuos4 review, it probably would not have occurred to me to publish. Thanks for the inspiration.

Link to Gear Review on YouTube

“Everybody Else Is Too Loud” is my new podcast. The goal is to update on weekends to discuss the prior week’s events – the subject will be anything I feel like talking about: film, art, games, music, family, webcomics, graphics tips and discoveries, gadgets, news, and likely some highlights of my current work(s)-in-progress.

“Everybody Else Is Too Loud” is my new podcast. The goal is to update on weekends to discuss the prior week’s events – the subject will be anything I feel like talking about: film, art, games, music, family, webcomics, graphics tips and discoveries, gadgets, news, and likely some highlights of my current work(s)-in-progress.

What a week to kick-off.

“Everybody Else Is Too Loud” is my new podcast. The goal is to update on weekends to discuss the prior week’s events – the subject will be anything I feel like talking about: film, art, games, music, family, webcomics, graphics tips and discoveries, gadgets, news, and likely some highlights of my current work(s)-in-progress.

Please press “play” on the audio controller and thanks for checking it out.

Episode 01 Show Notes:
RUNNING TIME: 5:05

• The King of Pop: Michael Jackson
• Farrah Fawcett

For the last couple of weeks it was becoming clear that I should be prepared to share my Farrah experience since her health was declining, but this snuck up on me nonetheless. Here’s the story:

In 1977, the year Farrah Fawcett “broke” and left “Charlie’s Angels” the TV show that propelled her to household fame to try her hand at theatrical movies, my father presented an opportunity to have a drawing of mine signed by her. I was fifteen.

He wouldn’t let me take the day off from school – that was just his way. Farrah had been using the theater at my father’s firm, Movielab, to look at dailies.

She was so huge at that point that she was refusing autographs; but somehow my father was able to arrange for her to sign a pencil drawing copied from her publicity photo.

My mother – a cancer survivor – felt the TV reality show chronicling Farrah’s show was “commercial”. I don’t know because I never watched it, but I think raising awareness is always a good thing.

Rest in Peace, Farrah.