Category: John Otter news

work today left a bad-taste in my mouth. Not sure what to do about it. I left several issues from last week at the door as I ran out to enjoy my weekend (which I need to do more. I generally take a folder or two home to try to problem-solve work related things…which I’m not paid for). Luckily I did enjoy my weekend. (I rambled about work & then deleted it)
Hopefully a bit later I’ll play some music & shoot some pool. If not I’ll stay at home and try to put my work issues onto paper. I should be painting. A friend has sewn a hem on a good sized canvas and I’ve already primed it with three coats of gesso. My studio had a leak during the heavy rains but seems OK now. My sketchbook is getting very close to being out of blank pages. I think I also have three or four primed canvases stretched and ready. I need to switch modes from drawing to painting – the recent (half-assed) attempts to work with paint after a long (in my mind) hiatus resulted in paintings that looked like my drawings (but not as good as, primarily because they’re paintings not drawings).
Another friend mentioned a commissioned painting, and sounded serious. I really like working on paintings for friends and people I know. When I say “commissioned” I don’t mean “will you paint a picture of me and my dog” or what-not, I mean someone wants a painting and I’ll make them one. I’ll take their tastes, styles, interests, etc. into consideration when painting but cannot say with certainty what the final outcome will be. One of the recently primed canvases is actually a painting I gave up on…covered it all up with gesso. I don’t do that often, I used to destroy the bad paintings (very fun & physical – slash the canvas, jump up & down on the stretchers, etc.) but these days I’m more into recycling.
The time changed over the weekend & today when it was becoming time to leave work the sky looked the same as the previous week due to it being overcast. I’m looking forward to the day I leave work and still have a couple hours of sunshine.

Tuesday night

Web 2.0: A Pattern Library: “What Web 2.0 is”
I like webmonkey, and this is a nice article. And the blurb about the author says “Tim Ziegler builds websites in Texas with d2p. He wants to fabricate a giant bicycle-powered gyroscope. He hopes he’s around when the robots all break free. “

I love this bit:

In the old days, you had to code every separate web page, and even code each section of each page with information like what font to use. This is an awful, time-consuming and painful way to make websites.

The trend over the last several years is to make the pieces of websites more and more modular, so you have:

• An external and linked stylesheet that defines all fonts, colors, and other visual elements.
• A handful of display templates, one for each kind of page design.
• A database of information that includes the content of each page as well as meta information about each piece of content (which can be author, “post-on” dates, notes, location on maps, anything).
• A system for throwing all this stuff together on the fly.

The beauty of this kind of system is that the user sees a web “page,” but the page itself reflects the latest content, the latest design, and even can pull in information from other websites or services. Goodbye web page, hello pull-it-together-on-the-fly thing-that-I-don’t-know-what-to-call-yet.