I was doing a lot of creative spelunking yesterday on tshirts and other dye-sub related product ideas. I’ve been trying to loosen up creatively recently, stop being so damn stiff about what i produce, and its helping.
I’ve been doing some COPIC coloring here and there (nothing worth posting yet) when i ran across my first problem marker yesterday. I was coloring with it when suddenly ink started to pool up on the nib. This is the first time i’ve had this problem with any of these markers, and unfortunately i wasnt watching for it so i got a huge bleed on the drawing i was coloring which ruined it. Not really sure why it pooled on the nib like that, i assume that it was a marker i had not used yet and it might have been overful of ink – i am going to try to keep an eye out on the problem and see if it crops up again. This is, of course, one of the problems with analogue media, there are no undo buttons. 
Spent a little time this morning going over various podcasts looking for something to listen to. I’m a big listener of audiobooks (i get good mileage out of my Audible.com account ) but i really haven’t delved into podcasts too much. There are the standard ones to poke at, like NPR’s Science Friday and stuff like that, but i also was looking for some more specific ones to some of my newer hobbies. There doesn’t seem to be a decent sea/touring kayak podcast of any note (the ones there are are all whitewater kayaking and thats like a totally different sport, imho) but there are a few good mountain biking ones. I’m giving Gear Noise a listen right now, and it’s pretty laid back… just what i was looking for.
oh, and in case you are wondering what could possibly be interesting about kayaking, here’s an interesting site to poke at. It will be a while before i’ll be doing any actual sea kayaking (there’s plenty of lakes and rivers here in michigan to keep us occupied) but there is some alure to costal waters that fascinates me…
Posted by fredrin on September 21st, 2006 :: Filed under
Daily Blogging
Recently Bare Bones Software released an really nice upgrade to their workhorse text editing software BBEdit. Ever since i switched to the mac, i’ve been using BBEdit for most of my text editing needs. Some of the changes in the new version, version 8.5 are really, really nice – in particular a ‘check spelling as you type’ and other small things that just make the interface that much nicer. I also got tired of looking at the Monoco font, and wanted a nice, new, monospaced san serif font that would be pleasant to look at and read, so i purchased Avant Garde Mono EF (before you get on my case about paying for fonts when you can find so many out there that are free, i believe that you get what you pay for, and sometimes buying fonts that you rely on is a smart thing.)
Over the years, i’ve bounced across many programs trying to find the right balance of usability and transparency (in other words, where the program itself doesn’t get in the way of what you are trying to do) and i keep coming back to text based lists and writing tools. Of course, there are tasks that require a little more robustness when it come to working with larger amounts of writing data, and for that Omni Outliner Pro is like, the best program there is for that. This new version of BBEdit, however, really seems to work better for me in little ways that are almost hard to quantify. It’s nice when a program does that.
My only issue with it is printing. For some reason, when i print, the text on the page gets word wrapped at about the half way mark on the page, sort of like the right margin is 4.5 inches or something. This is really irritating when it comes to printing lists or text. After doing some digging and playing with a lot of settings, i decided to email support and see of they can help me figure this out.
Hawk got himself a nice new Mac Pro the other day, and while there is a part of me that wants to strangle him and take the thing, my old G4 tower is still puttering along. I do need to do a rebuild of it one of these days just to clean up the system. I’ve gotten out of the habit of rebuilding my computer ever six months since i switched to mac. Bad fred.
Posted by fredrin on September 20th, 2006 :: Filed under
Daily Blogging
