idiotking

When I started learning graphic design, the program I worked in was Quark Xpress. From the earliest versions in black and white up through their disastrous switch over to V.5, I was a staunch Quark guy; I knew PageMaker but found it was inferior in many ways. In the early aughts I finally switched over to InDesign as it eventually was bundled as part of the Creative Suite and the IT support I was doing required me to know how to debug and troubleshoot it. I found that InDesign was relatively easy to learn and integrated easily with Photoshop and Illustrator, making the switch that much easier. All of my legacy files remain in Quark format, which is why I’ve still got at least two machines that run it reliably, but I haven’t booted it up in probably ten years.

I’ve been using Final Cut Pro ever since I got the gig at WRI, and it’s served me very well for that entire time. It was easy to learn, followed many of the same UI and conceptual frameworks I was already familiar with, and ran quickly (in 2014) on a 5-year-old Mac Pro. But as the length and breadth of the videos I’m producing have gotten longer and more involved, FCP has gotten slower and slower, making the editing process a slog. The latest video I worked on clocks in over an hour, with about 90 gigs of source files. Getting it to the finish line has been painful—it should have been finished several days ago, held up only by the spinning beach ball. I’m not using slow machines; my personal laptop is a M1 model, and my work laptop is a M4 with twice the memory. But I see no difference authoring on the work laptop than I do on my personal machine, which is ridiculous.

The guys at work both use Adobe Premiere and have been telling me to switch over for years, and I’ve been putting it off for that entire time. I’m going to make two big changes to see if it makes a difference in my editing workflow: I’m going to work off a solid state drive instead of a spinning disc to see if that helps at all, and if there’s no difference, I’m going to try using Premiere.

When I was in second and third grade, my friends and I were obsessed with Smokey and the Bandit, the Dukes of Hazzard, and CHiPs. We spent all our free time drawing pictures of cars and trucks—Convoy was a big deal too, but I was too young to see it. The other day I stumbled across this drawing I did back then, and figured I’d share it here.

#80 reflects an obsession with all of the things I thought a fast car needed, although it clearly has the aerodynamics of a brick: a square coupe body sporting a giant blower on the engine, a NASCAR style window barrier (ABC’s Wide World of Sports featured a lot of stock car racing back then), side pipes, a rear brake scoop, a moonroof, louvers on the rear window, and a gigantic wing on the rear deck. And, lots of stickers in the rear window, for speed.

#53 is more sedate. A blower on the hood and side pipes hint at a juiced up motor, but this car would suffer from instability at speed with that tall, flat front grille and no spoiler. Both cars sport CB whips, which were also an obsession in the late ’70’s.

It took me a couple of minutes to realize these two cars are lined up at a dragstrip—the vertical structure at the left is the light tree, the staging crew seem happy to be working, and are professionally dressed. I suspect I drew #80 and handed the drawing to one of my friends to add #53.

I’m glad my Mom saved these glimpses of what 8-year-old Bill was thinking about back then.

Turnstile, the Baltimore-based hardcore band, just announced a new album by releasing a video featuring the title track. As with their last album, they’re veering away from their hardcore roots and doing something…different. I’m glad to see them stretch their legs, and I hope the rest of the album is as good as Glow On was four years ago.

Previously.

This morning I was elbow-deep in the hood of the Travelall, enjoying the warm afternoon breeze and sunshine poking out from behind the clouds. I looked up and saw a car drive slowly past the house and then stop at the curb in front of the neighbors’ house. I returned to my work for a few moments and looked up to see a woman walking up the driveway. I waved and greeted her; she nervously introduced herself as one of the daughters of the doctor who owned our house, who we bought it from 22 years ago. My face broke out in a huge smile and I shook her hand, and that seemed to break the ice. We talked a bit about the tulip tree exploding in color over the driveway, and she explained that she wanted to drive by and see it bloom—her mother had planted it years ago and she couldn’t get over how big it was. I walked her up to the house to met Jen at the door, and we took her inside for a tour of the first floor.

She was very happy to see what we’d done with the house, and told us it looked great (but a lot smaller than she remembered!) We asked after her family and caught her up on some of the neighbors, and traded some stories about the house. She asked if she could bring some of her brothers and sisters back, and we told her that would be fine—as long as we had a little time to clean up first. While she talked with Jen, I ran out to the front to take the glass DR W.E. McGRATH sign from the box next to the door out and give it to her. We’ve been talking about sending it to the family for years but never got around to it, so it was great to be able to hand it off in person. We said our goodbyes out on the front lawn and I went back to work, feeling more upbeat about the day.

I took the week off from work this week to burn up some excess PTO time, and I’ve been working on the truck and doing some small house projects to relax. On Wednesday, Jen and I signed up to be chaperones for a class trip Finn’s school was taking to the local community college and then to the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum. I wasn’t expecting much out of the college visit, but because this trip was organized by the graphic design/IT/CompSci teachers, they took us through the fabrication labs first and then up to the CompSci classrooms. I was thrilled to learn they’ve got an entire program focused on machine tool training.

The first room they took us through was lined with CNC machines, and the professor explained how they start with the math and programming, then move up to training on the machines. We then entered a second lab lined with Bridgeport lathes—there were maybe 15 of them—where they do hands-on training.

Down the hall is another lab with 3D printing machines—not the consumer grade stuff I’ve played with, but multi-process industrial units that do resin, powder, and plastic. And they mentioned that they’re putting in another lab in the summer to do more 3D processes.

It’s not cheap; I’d love be able to go through the entire course for a certificate, but that would cost many dollars. Individually, though, some of the courses are very affordable and are offered at convenient times after work hours.

The Cryptological Museum was fascinating. There’s a ton of stuff there to look through, including the machine that used to make and decode the nuclear launch codes, several Cray supercomputers, and a pair of original Enigma machines you can actually use to decode messages. I read a lot about Enigma when I went through my Neil Stephenson phase, and vaguely understood how the machines worked through his descriptions, but it was another thing entirely to be in front of them, see some of the rotors disassembled, and to see the American version of the Bombe, designed by Alan Turing and built to break the code on a daily basis. The math is mind-boggling but the physical machinery made it much more understandable. We were also happy to see they’re still highlighting the unsung women and people of color who were instrumental in breaking codes up to and during WWII.

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