Logger town, Ketchikan, Alaska. Colored pencil on Bristol vellum.
Completed 6/3/2007. I didn’t think to do scans for a progression.
I believe the photo was taken here.
Source image
28
Sep 08
Work-at-Home Dad
I have been working from home full-time for nine years, and I’ve been very happy with the arrangement. But when I became a father almost two years ago, I found that working at home with a baby around brings some new challenges.
Sure, I can step away from my desk almost whenever I want and hang out with my son for a while. I can relieve my wife if she’s having a rough day or has errands to run. We can go to the park, or just play in the yard. I don’t have complete freedom from my desk, but I have a very flexible schedule.
On the other hand, some days it’s hard to get anything done. Going downstairs to play is easy and fun. Before you know it, two hours have gone by. Sometimes after a baby-induced bad night I’m too tired to think, and find myself staring blankly at my monitor.
08
Mar 07
Resize Terminal
Before I switched to Mac OS X, I was using a Sun Solaris machine as a desktop, and fvwm2 as my window manager. Fvwm has a nice feature called “grow window” which lets you grow a window to the full height of the display. This was occasionally useful for other programs, but I used this feature constantly for terminal windows, particularly when writing code. The extra vertical space really makes it easier to maneuver around a file. So when I came to OS X, naturally my first foray into Applescript was to port this feature so I could keep my lovely “tall” terminal windows.
This script will cycle through three sizes:
- “normal” (default: 80×24)
- “tall” (default: 80×50)
- zoomed
If the window isn’t in any of those states, it is set to normal size. The sizes are all customizable by setting property values at the top of the script.
Download resize_terminal.zip
02
Aug 06
txp:dml_rand_masthead
I wanted to use a random, rotating image as my site’s masthead and there was no simple way to do this in Textpattern. Initially I wrote a form with custom PHP code, including the Textpattern config, connecting to the database, doing a query… it seemed messy. So I started over and decided to do it as a plugin.
To install:
- Download the plugin file (see link below)
- Go to Textpattern’s admin tab
- Go to the plugins tab
- Paste the contents of the downloaded file into the text box and click upload.
- Once the plugin shows up in the list, you’ll have to click ‘no’ in the Active column to change it to ‘yes’; then the plugin will be active.
To use:
- Upload your masthead images using Textpattern’s image system. Put them all into the same category. I’ll use “site-masthead” as an example.
- Where you want the masthead to appear, add the tag
<txp:dml_rand_masthead category="site-masthead" />
By default, the link will be built so that the tool tip is “Go to main page”. You can change this to any value you want by adding the linktext attribute, e.g.: <txp:dml_rand_masthead category="site-masthead" linktext="Return to home page"/>
You can also give the class="classname" attribute to attach a CSS class to the masthead.
Download dml_rand_masthead-0.5.txt
28
Jul 06
Surf’s Up
This was my back yard yesterday afternoon. It got worse later (after dark when I couldn’t take any more pictures). The ivy bed and all of the grass shown in the photo was totally submerged by 10 PM, as were the bottom few inches of the shed’s front door.
I was lucky — no flooding inside the house. Some of my neighbors were not so lucky. At least one had their basement flood all the way to the ceiling, and spent most of today running a pump to drain it. Several houses have big dumpsters out front today, full of furniture and so forth.
Look at the area to the left of the shed, and you’ll see Kellogg Creek, which is one of the main routes of water drainage around here. It is normally not visible from this angle, as it runs in a bed several feet deep. But it flooded its banks, and that’s where all of this water came from.
20
Mar 06
Through Grandpa’s Eyes
My nephew, wearing his grandfather’s reading glasses.
Colored pencil on Bristol vellum. Background is pastel.