Isolationism

I let this one slip through the cracks even though it happened a few weeks ago: The newly redesigned Critter Jungle website was quietly launched in November. Critter Jungle, if you don’t already know, is a lovely privately-owned pet shop in Hampton Park Plaza in Ottawa (near where Carling meets the Queensway); The proprietors are family friends, so this was a one-off project in my spare time.

The main goals of the redesign were to change the appearance of the site to bring it in line with more current design trends such as elastic page width and easy-to-read content, less garish choice of colour (now that web-safe colour is effective unnecessary since everyone out there is using true-colour display modes), and to emphasize a change in direction for site content. We also wanted to make the site easier for the customer to manage, and increase accessibility and usability.

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This is the worst lull in updates I’ve had since I started my blog. On the other hand, it took about seven years from when I bought the domain to my first post, so things aren’t that bad once you put them into perspective.

I’ve been working pretty hard, lately: Work is gearing up for a product release in early January so there’s a lot to do—especially since situations like these tend to bring a whole bunch of “Oops, we forgot to do x, can you handle it?”’s to the surface. In particular, I’ve been playing with Apache FOP for the past couple weeks to enable us to generate dynamic-content PDF files on the server based on SVG source material (and possibly XHTML as well, now, too). Very interesting technology if you have to work with PDF documents.

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I’m not quite back on my feet after a solid 11-12 hours of driving in the space of 30 hours over the weekend to visit Midland (splitting headache today since I woke up), but I felt well enough to start this last night and finish today as I don’t feel well enough to concentrate on much. This drawing is also of Bex, my wife and best friend, done in pastel to complement an earlier piece I drew years ago. Click the image for a larger version.

As you may have gathered from comments in another thread, my grandfather on my mother’s side passed away late on Tuesday night. We’re headed to Midland to say our goodbyes this weekend, so this blog will be sparsely populated with news for another few days around here to come. My thanks go out to all who have offered their condolences. He will be missed.

There hasn’t been much to say to make it worth posting lately. I’ve been generally disinterested about following the news, although the few things I care about seem to be going ill and leave me feeling sick and wanting to withdraw further from the world. My schedule has been badly out of balance the past week or two—staying up late to work or draw, or just because I don’t feel tired, and sometimes waking late, sometimes not (but always feeling more worn down than when I went to bed). Headaches come easily to me if I didn’t already wake up with one. It seems like moments of happiness are as brief as the interludes of sunlight that have managed to filter through the rain for a few brief moments every few days before vanishing as quickly as they arrived.

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Well, what did you expect? I’ve never been one for much besides figure drawing; the human form is immensely challenging and what I enjoy drawing most.

In honour of my very good friend Marc who is abroad in Taipei, I present this portrait to let him know he’s still very much in our thoughts and hearts. Though it may still be another year before we see him again on this side of the Pacific, I haven’t forgotten what a true, loyal friend he’s been to me and my family. Cheers, mang.

Well, it’s late and I’ve already been politely reminded to head to bed, so I’m not going to stay up any longer to talk at you about how I drew this except to say that it’s (obviously) a digital drawing and I’ll write another post about the software and process tomorrow.

This is a portrait of my beautiful wife, Bex, using photo reference, by me using mixed media. You can click the image for a slightly larger version.

Sorry for the lack of posts over the past few days. Here’s what I’ve been doing:

I ended up working a fourteen-hour day on Wednesday to add MSIE 5.5 support to our application at work (went from 0 to supported in that span of time, too, which isn’t bad considering how many style definitions we had and how much JavaScript could have gone wrong but most thankfully didn’t).

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As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I use a software package called Boodler to create environmental audio for entertainment purposes. Although I make use of it on a daily basis I haven’t actually done any soundscape development for a couple months or so; our newborn son took care of a lot of the time, but I needed a bit of a break as well—I had been working on some rather complex stuff to get different Boodler agents to be able to communicate with one another in real-time to be able to perform fancy scheduling tricks (like having crickets suddenly go quiet at the sound of a loud thunderclap).

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It’s finally the weekend and none too soon: My week hasn’t been especially bad (but not especially good either. Kind of so-so) but today could have gone better—Squeaker wanted to be entertained at 4 in the morning, I had a fun visit at the bank with my financial advisor (I think I’ve decided I prefer going to the dentist), and I’m dog-tired well before my usual bedtime.

I’ve been slaving away this week at lots of Python code, too—it’s the worst kind, to boot; I’m refactoring my own old code, which is a thankless job if ever there were one (although I am adding a number of extra little switches and things for efficiency, better error handling, output verification, etc.). When you’re already pressed for time on a product release schedule, trying to explain to your manager that you’re trying to leave maintainable code that could mean literally hours of saved time per week from those that employ it regularly is pretty awkward when he knows the old version worked (no matter how old and busted you think it is).

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… Let me share a couple pictures from Hallowe’en 2006.

First, the jack-o’-lantern, pattern of which is probably recognisable to most readers, was wantonly downloaded from Homestar Runner then Dremel-tooled out with a bit of knife-work for the straight edges. It turned out all right considering how quickly I threw it together, but it probably left a lot of trick-or-treaters confused.

And then there’s my costume, which is the same as last year plus the addition of one PASGT helmet. I had wanted to silkscreen two large white-text-on-black “RIAA” badges to put on the ammo vest, but couldn’t find the time to pull it off this year. Maybe in 2007.