Well I just started breaking in my new sketchbook. Sometimes I’ll block for over a week to start one, obsessing over the perfect first picture. It’s like being a narcissist with a mirror. So there’s nothing like a little bit of drawing from life to snap yourself out of that.
Today’s sketch is from my usual Tuesday drinking group with my friends Goldy and Steve in the middle of an argument. Goldy was in full rant mode… (Steve was remarkably sedate.)
I had a crazy evening yesterday.
I was heading downtown for a meeting when I stopped at one of my favorite art stores for supplies when I discovered something very important was missing, my bike chain.
After the brief panic I realized where it was. You see a couple of weeks ago I’d finally gotten some nice strong straps to put an old milk carton on to my bike rack as a nice cheap basket. It’s been great. Not only has it doubled (maybe even tripled) my carrying capacity it means that anytime I’m not carrying anything extra it means the backpack goes into the basket which does wonders for my back not to mention the problem of overheating caused by the fact that when you are riding hard a backpack is like wearing a very thick sweater vest.
There have been a few bugs to work out. It took a while to get used to what it does to my center of gravity as well as breaking with the added inertia, but the biggest problem is security. Since noting is strapped down in the basket, unless your going straight home you have to take everything with you after you lock up.
Which brings me back to my little drama with the bike chain. A bad habit I’ve been getting into is rather than putting the bike chain around handlebar where it belongs when I’m in a hurry I’ve been just tossing it in the basket… or in one of the canvas shopping bags I’m using. So that’s where it was yesterday evening… in the canvas bag in my kitchen rather than around my handlebars at the Barnes & Noble downtown.
Fortunately I was lucky. A very cool concierge let me stow the bicycle in their storage unit for the hour and a half the meeting took and later I was able to keep it in the corner at a bar I was at for a social meet up. But with any luck this experience will be enough of a shock to keep from doing it too often… One does not want to stick one’s finger in an electrical socket too many times.
I was told about this yesterday evening and I just had to share. The Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra doing flashmobs throughout the city. I think I like the Ravel the best simply because the train station has better acoustics.
For this week Alexander Panizza performs Astor Piazzolla‘s Tango Rhapsody.
For this week’s Rhapsody we return to Franz Liszt and his Hungarian Rhapsodies. This is number five, nicknamed the Héroïde-élégiaque performed by Roberto Szidon. There is also an orchestral version but at the moment I find myself liking the simplistic haunting quality of the piano here. It’s not quite as “bangy” as a lot of Liszt’s stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrN4WJgOGPg
Well this was a very interesting night. I was finishing some last minute up a last minute upload of material (made last minute due to the cable being out for about two hours) When I saw that the latest upgrade of Comicpress was ready for instillation. So I got straight to setting it up. minutes later I found out I’d missed a very important detail. Which if I had bothered to have read what Philip M. Hofer had said about it on his page I would have known that Comicpress 4.0 was not actually a upgrade of Comicpress but a relabeling of the theme that has been slowly replacing it. Since I missed this point I was up until three in the morning reconstructing this page. And then today I spent way too much time separating all of my comics from my blog posts since a mistake I made around two o’clock when processing the comics for the Comic Easel plugin kind of mixed them all together.
Anyway I have the page mostly working and mostly presentable but I have a long list of fixes left to do. But it could have been worse and technically this is something I would have had to do sooner or later so at least it happened during a long weekend where I would be having hardly any traffic anyway.
Keep in mind, for all my complaining this is all on me. Phil, ignore my crankiness, you’re doing a great job keeping this thing current and it is appreciated!
