It’s not quite official yet, but OK, it’s official. The word on the street is that I’m headed back out to San Francisco at the end of this month for a project kickoff meeting with a new client (I’m keeping names and places confidential). I will be spending the next two weeks brushing up on several new technologies, a content management system, and my sparkling personality.

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In other news, a brief interruption in Movable Type service here at Idiot Central was traced back to a botched install of MT-Akismet in hopes of stemming the tide of comment spam. I was about to freak out yesterday when all I got after logging in to the management section was a blank page, but I walked away from it for half a day and remembered what things I’d monkeyed with when the site started to go south. So, to sum up: When the manual says that MT-Akismet doesn’t work with MT 3.1, it’s not kidding.

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I’m finding that installing and configuring a private VPN is about as easy as assembling a nuclear reactor underwater with directions in Chinese. I’m not a stupid man, but do they make this shit impossible to understand on purpose? Seriously, I haven’t had to deal with this many acronyms at one time in my life! And it seems like the vendors all have different acronyms for the same thing. Just call it one word and be done with it, you dorks.

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After a good bit of time in development, I’ve posted a replacement for (what I considered) one of the weaker illustrations at the Alphabet Project, the letter Q. I was trying something different, but I wasn’t ever really happy with the solution. The new solution is in the form of a concert poster for a show I didn’t attend, and it stars a lady I figured I’d find much more about here on the internets-but didn’t. I wound up using screen grabs from a video I found online for photo reference.

I’m also working furiously on new art for a larger project, something I’ve been threatening to do for years, and something it took a well-timed and much appreciated push from my wife to actually begin: I made a down payment for an advertisement at the Directory of Illustration last week. The Directory is a combination of marketing tools which include a searchable website, a hardback book which gets distributed in the fall, and a pile of other resources for promotion. This means that my work will be seen by a ton of new people very quickly. This also means I need to have a page layout for the book by the beginning of May, and I have space reserved for 20 illustrations on their website right now. Part of my revisit to the Alphabet Project is to clean up the work I’m not entirely happy with, which means that Paul Bremer will get a rework. Mark Felt will probably get looked at (or maybe replaced). And Interpol will probably get cleaned up too. Once I’ve got that stuff looking tight, I’m going to post a handful on the other site and see if anything happens.

I don’t think I’m going to be sleeping much in the near future…