Browsing the crowded aisles of one of our neighborhood antique stores on Sunday, Jen came upon this lovely reminder of our region’s brewing history. I bought it for $4 to add to my small collection of National Beer epherma. El Boh has separated from his paper backing by about 1/16 of an inch, and there’s some discoloration, but otherwise he’s as clean as can be. I have a series of custom-made frames half finished in the basement for my other two National stickers, and I’ll have to add this one to the collection.

Story by Marc L. Songini
MARCH 10, 2006
Maryland House votes to oust Diebold machines

The state of Maryland stands poised to put its entire $90 million investment in Diebold Election Systems Inc. touch-screen e-voting systems on ice because they can’t produce paper receipts.

The state House of Delegates this week voted 137-0 to approve a bill prohibiting election officials from using AccuVote-TSx touch-screen systems in 2006 primary and general elections.

Healey said the law would require that the machines provide a paper trail before the 2008 elections or Diebold would risk losing its contract with the state.

The bill also requires that any leased optical-scan system be equipped to accommodate the needs of handicapped voters, to ensure compliance with the federal Help America Vote Act statutes.

Could this be true? Could my shredded, battered, naiive faith in our elected officials be saved?

We just finished the first season of Six Feet Under last night. Apparently, this show came out in, like, 1999 or 2000 or something, and totally flew right over our heads. It could be that we don’t have HBO and that I waited three years too long to open up a Netflix account, or it could be that I’m just a cheap bastard. Whatever the case, we love the series (or, at least, the first season of it.) I think that the first episode kind of took us by surprise, and then we were immediately hooked. Now, I’ve heard varying reviews of the next couple of seasons (and don’t go telling us what happens, people), and I think we’re looking forward to Season 2, but we’ve decided to take a break on it and switch over to something different. Like Trainspotting. And then, Shaun of the Dead.

We made it through the Baltimore Blizzard just fine, although heading out to see Miss Lis at Molly’s did not happen—my apologies, Lis. There’s about 12″ of fresh snow down here in Catonsville, and for whatever reason shovelling it yesterday was a lot easier than the last snowfall we had—the last snowfall was that dry blustery kind that just blows all over the place, whereas this was the kind of snow that made big white drifts stick to the side of the house. I decided that cookies were in order if we were getting snowed in, and made them better than last time (something about packing the brown sugar.) The neighbor’s son came out and helped me clear the driveway with his snowblower, and breathed whisky fumes downwind to me while we chatted. It’s good to see some things don’t change.

Finally, I inherited another iMac last week, this one a slot-loading model (the date stamped on the CD-ROM is October 1999), and slapped a 120GB drive into it on Saturday. Most of Sunday was spent watching HGTV and a freaky Sherlock Holmes movie starring Robert Duvall (WTF??!?!) and loading my backup music files onto the machine. Purple, the old reliable warhorse I’ve dragged from home to work and back again, will be retired, and the new Bondi Blue machine will take its place.

We went down the street to the Rite Aid for some cough medicine. My throat was feeling more and more gravelly, and my voice was getting lower and lower. We bought the off-brand NyQuil knockoff, and I took two tablespoons when we got home.

At this point, I’m feeling less and less able to function cohesively. It’s getting lighter and spacier in here, and I feel pretty groovy. I think I’m signing off now.

So I’m up last night (Monday? Tuesday? What day is this?) at about 1AM working on my design portfolio in hopes of getting some new work. My initial idea was to lay the whole thing out in CSS and be all propeller-head, but my brain has been very soggy lately. After a few hours I switched to a table-based layout, and I was still having issues up until midnight. (I started in the early afternoon.) By 12:30 I was feeling very discouraged and blocked, so I turned to the internet to do some reading for a break. One of the first things I saw discouraged me to the point of crushing depression. I’m not going into the specifics here, but it made me look back and my own work and feel very worthless. At that point, I tried to rally but I just didn’t have it in me—it was like watching either of those two playoff games last weekend as a Denver or Carolina fan: nothing was working like it was supposed to, and by the end it was just embarassing.

I dragged ass to bed and laid awake for another hour and a half, attempting to convince myself that I was still a valuable commodity (actually, staving off panic is a better description) and finally drifted off to a troubled sleep. Every year or so, I get into a funk where I start measuring my life by all kinds of evil yardsticks—where I thought I’d be by now when I was 21, my life compared to other people I know, my career compared to other people’s careers, etc. Usually the results are the same: I’m upset and depressed and scared, and it takes many beers or some good news to get me out of the rut. It looks like this year is no different, and I got caught up in the self-flagellation thing again.

However, there are bright spots. Jen made chocolate cake two days ago, and it’s made sitting in the office for twelve hours at a clip much easier.

Today I woke up (at 10:30, ugh) and had a new idea on how to approach the structure of the site; by 4pm I had it mapped out and most of the bugs de-bugged. I uploaded everything at 12:30 this evening, and hopefully it’s working correctly in most browsers.

Behold: the new design portfolio, four (five?) years in the making. Still to do:

Check in older browsers. This is a CSS-based layout, so I’m hoping it doesn’t puke all over itself in Netscape 4.X or whatever old shite browsers are still out there.

Fix the timeline. there’s one page out of order with the rest.

Fix the footer. I wanted the footer to head all the way to the bottom of the page, but CSS footers are a big pain in the ass without using tables.

Link up all the damn pictures. eventually, the thumbnails are supposed to switch out with the main picture; I don’t have the energy to size down all the damn pictures right now. I’d also like to have the bottom of the tan area stay at a fixed position—but that’s for another day.

This also marks the unveiling of my new design identity, the first one in five or so years. Jen did a wonderful job distilling my identity down to the basics, and developing a cohesive design for the “brand”—design will have a separate identity from illustration, which will make both distinctive and different. I’m waiting for some checks to roll in so that I might be able to get the business cards printed, after about four years of having none.

* * *

We decided to hit the Gooch this afternoon at lunch to get out of the house. The Gooch is the local thrift store, right inside the city line, and sometimes the pickings are good. I poked around the books, looked through the clothes (nothing) and then found the “Electronics” section—usually a shelf or two of computer monitors and old inkjet printers. Today, though, I found a Sony CCD FX510 video-8 handycam sitting on the shelf, with an attached DC battery pack (meaning it plugs directly into the wall.) I futzed around with it for a few minutes, plugged it in, and fooled with the controls until I got a picture in the eyepiece; the tag said $9.95 as-is. I figured that if it powered on and made signal to the eyepiece, it was worth $10, so I snagged it. Miracle of miracles, Sony still has it listed on their site even though it’s analog tape—but they do have a scanned PDF of the owner’s manual. So all I need now is one Video-8 tape to test the record function. Update:I can get tape for $4 and a battery (providing the tape mechanism works) for as low as $20.

I also found three books in the circa-1954 “Made Simple Self-Teaching Encyclopedia” series: Astronomy, Physics, and Mathematics. They’re sort of the “For Dummies” books from the Eisenhower era, and they have a cool vibe to them. Obviously some of the information is dated, but I figure the basics of astronomy and physics haven’t changed at all, and they’ll make for some fun reading.

Check out this speech by Al Gore delivered this afternoon. Jen and I happened to catch the last 2/3 on C-Span before switching to the Golden Globes (a useless bit of pap if there ever was one). Gore stopped me in my tracks:

“A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that they had established a government of laws and not men. Indeed, they recognized that the structure of government they had enshrined in our Constitution – our system of checks and balances – was designed with a central purpose of ensuring that it would govern through the rule of law. As John Adams said: “The executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them, to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.”

“It is often the case that an Executive Branch beguiled by the pursuit of unchecked power responds to its own mistakes by reflexively proposing that it be given still more power. Often, the request itself it used to mask accountability for mistakes in the use of power it already has.”

“We have a duty as Americans to defend our citizens’ right not only to life but also to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is therefore vital in our current circumstances that immediate steps be taken to safeguard our Constitution against the present danger posed by the intrusive overreaching on the part of the Executive Branch and the President’s apparent belief that he need not live under the rule of law.”

Here’s a link to the C-Span Realplayer version of the speech. If you have a few minutes, check it out—even if you don’t like Al Gore. He makes a lot of very, very good points.

This Christmas, instead of an electronic gadget or a computer accessory, my wife gave me something I can tinker with for hours without a keyboard or a power strip. I’ve always wanted to learn how to play guitar, and now I have no excuse not to try. Thanks, baby.

This will probably be my (only) post from this week, as it’s been a long and busy one, filled with unexpected shopping, people, and cookies. Anyway, to all my homies out there, have a Merry Christmas, and I’ll talk with you when we get back.

Oh, yeah: Cool after-Christmas gift.

So apparently Bush had his little speech today. We heard it on NPR on our way home.

Bush Says U.S. Spy Program Is Legal and Essential. “Do I have the legal authority to do this?” he asked rhetorically. “And the answer is, absolutely.” Hmm. Last time I recalled, you didn’t have the right to yank away my civil liberties, goddammit. Oh, but your buddy the Attorney General has figured out a way to do that—when he wasn’t finding a legal way to let you off the hook for torturing prisoners of war.

How about those poor fucks in Cuba—the ones who’ve been there for three years without a hearing, counsel, or trial? How safe do you feel now, America? How’s that War On Terror going? Remind yourselves how safe you feel when they start asking for our papers every time we cross the state border, and hauling your friends away in the middle of the night.

The last three weeks, among other things, I’ve been working on new illustrations, to develop a portfolio in time for spring. I’ve finished my seventh piece this evening, and I’m really getting excited.

Getting momentum going is difficult. I had plans to choose certain editorial articles and stretch my brain muscles to develop ideas, but after several starts and stops, I put that on hold. Instead, I decided the best thing to do was to get my skills sharpened again and focus on the art first, and re-learn my own visual language. I think it’s the best thing I could have done, because I’m not using the ideas as a roadblock—I have a theme, and the material is plentiful. There’s a certain rhythm to working steadily and a love for the physical act of making art that I’ve been missing for a long time.

I’m going to do about three more pieces, and then weigh out how to display the portfolio online. I’m leaning towards another, separate portfolio site with a highly modified install of Movable Type and an illustration-related weblog. I’m also finally going to buy a black and white copier—the tool I’ve needed for years—so that I don’t have to make nightly Kinko’s runs anymore.

It’s a start. Keep your fingers crossed for me.