Just thought I’d share a personal success: my first launch at Google - mapped web pages! I am only a minor piece of the overall chain, but it has been fun to see it through. Even cooler is the fact that Google Operating System picked it up fairly quickly, with good things to say about it.
Update - I have a post at Google about this. check it out! Yep - I’m that same Abe Murray 
pretty cool, eh?
Comments April 20th, 2008
One year ago we welcomed Isaiah into the world. Crazy. Francesca and I have been parents for a year. What a wonderful year! Isaiah is walking, climbing, talking (a little), inquisitive, sensitive, overall a joy. Franny and I have grown together as partners, parents, friends. Sometimes stressful, always wonderful.
One year ago we didn’t know when he’d arrive. I remember wanting to know what our child would be like. Whether we were having a boy or girl. Now we know - I couldn’t have imagined it this wonderful. Isaiah is Isaiah, I can’t imagine another child that he would have been. Franny and I are truly rediscovering the world through his eyes.
I’ll leave you with another Isaiah quote - I find it fitting for a first birthday, because Isaiah’s arrival has helped me to slow down in life, to enjoy the here and now and stress less about the future.
Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die — Isaiah 22:13
Comments April 20th, 2008
I am finishing up a week in Orlando. My first, and quite possibly last time here. I had never been to Disney World, nor did I desire to go, not even back in elementary school when seemingly every other child had been. Turns out I didn’t really miss anything (aside from lots of country music and large Americans).
The good - kids do love it. Isaiah loved all the rides, all the water fountains, all the fun things to do. So did his cousins. And the trip itself was wonderful - Franny and I loved the time with her mother, her sister & family. Plus, Florida has beautiful weather.
The bad - commercialism. Overwhelming commercialism - everything is for sale, useless plastic crap, obnoxious strip malls. The parks were the worst. Sea World has stopped educating and is now an entertainment machine for ADD kids, passing out plastic crap that will pollute the ocean instead of teaching about plastic crap polluting the ocean. Not to mention Disney’s overall role in copyright extension (evil!) and their bought politician.
The creepy - tinfoil hat time. Every park requires visitors to give a fingerprint impression to enter. I bet large sums of money that these fingerprints are sold on to the government, tied to our credit cards & lots of other personally identifiable information. Remember kids, the FBI can’t legally compile this information on you, but they can purchase it from the free market where it is available! *Shiver*
An American Mecca - I am cognizant that the demographics encountered here are more American than my normal North-East surroundings, that I am outside of the mainstream in not wanting to be here. It is good to be humbled by this, to remember we are all different, and all equal. Especially if I want to build businesses selling to this large American market.
Comments April 19th, 2008
I am shamelessly promoting Shirley Bell - these are my two recent favorites - an elegant praying mantis (also on picasa), and a unique and beautiful dragonfly christmas tree (also on picasa). If you aren’t a Shirley Bell Designs fan yet, you should be
Comments April 17th, 2008
Winning isn’t about stickiness. Over the long term, the web services that win will be the best, winning by virtue of features and ability to please users. Businesses that try to win by trapping users like flies will lose to those that trust their customers to choose the best product, and trust themselves to provide the best product.
Example: disqus comment platform. I am using this on my Hidden Evidence blog, but not on this personal blog. Why? Because I am worried about data portability and the longevity of disqus. (See the first comment on this post testing the disqus system and voicing my concerns).
Disqus is awesome, it leverages the network effect for blog commenting, benefiting long tail blog owners (myself) and widely read blog readers and commenters (same me, different hat). As a blogger, I benefit from scale in commenting, user verification, and spam management. As a blog reader, I benefit from ease of commenting, and a centralized dashboard for my participation across the blogosphere.
Disqus is limiting and scary, it requires I entrust a critical portion of my blog (comments) to a third party, without any tools to switch between self management and hosted management. What if disqus goes away? Gets bought by someone else, who decides to charge, or degrades the service? They provide basic export tools, but that does me no good - I need the comments to stay with the posts.
Data portability should be designed in - if I knew disqus didn’t want my data as a tool to hold onto me, but instead wanted to earn my trust every day by being the best at blog comment management, I would jump on board in a heartbeat. Instead I’m testing the water, and have lingering concerns. Every web app should answer this fundamental need. Because if they don’t, others will come along that do. And they will win.
It’s all about trust - and trust must be earned, not won.
Comments April 14th, 2008
Why do most of us travel to work every day? Why do we work in large boxes removed from nature and family life? Why do we continue to propagate this system?
This all goes back to the Jefferson vs. Hamilton debate. Will humans be independent producers, masters of their own fate, creating an economy from many solid individual units? Or will we be grouped together into firms backed by capital, more efficiently producing in population centers and dependent upon banks and industrialists to provide for our jobs and life?
Hamilton won. And it made sense - there are costs to having a society of freelancers (read up on Coase if interested). Reputation is hard to assess if every work transaction is with someone new. Far easier if you are both employees of the same firm, etc.
But Jefferson’s world is superior, more in keeping with our natural state as humans. So while we may be limited to Hamilton’s world for the time being, we should be working for the world Jefferson envisioned. Technology can solve many of the problems that make firms more efficient, and enable us to shift back to a true capitalist society, where every single transaction, even at the level of individual daily production (even of knowledge work), occurs in a truly free market. Individuals only work if they so desire on a given day, and get paid effective market rates. Everyone would know and choose their contribution.
In this world, we wouldn’t need firms, or to live in population centers that strip us of our happiness and humanity. We could live in smaller rural communities. We could spread our efforts out between desk jobs and gardens, between the world of economics and production and the world of families and education and church. Behavioral studies find people are happier in smaller communities where they know one another. Why not shift away from urbanisation back towards communal groups that feed our souls?
Most importantly, we could all know how we fit, do what we were lead to do, and understand how the market rewarded it. The responsibility for taking care of ourselves (and of our local communities) would be more clear. I think we would all be happier and more confident in this world. I would, at any rate 
I want to work to help this world materialize. Technologies that obviate the need for workers to be in the same place excite me. Hence doodleboard. Technologies that allow participants to trade knowledge work in a free market are exciting (Elance, oDesk, Etsy, and others).
I believe this world will come. If people didn’t have to work in cities, would they choose to? Where would you live if you could work from anywhere? I think about this all the time! So please - if you have thoughts on this, share them. Criticize, critique, or agree, I want to hear it.
Comments April 11th, 2008
Problem - Phanfare is shutting down. This means my images are not loading all the time, as I used them for photo sharing and hosting. (Phanfare isn’t shutting down, they’re just changing business models, and their new model precludes image hosting & sharing).
Solution - moving to Flickr, slowly. So far have only updated my recent art posts, will have to work backwards through the other posts bit by bit. Upside: Flickr is cheaper ($25/year vs. $50/year for unlimited storage). Downside: Flickr sucks more (navigation / UI, slideshows, video support are all worse, less customizable). Integration sucks, but so did Phanfare’s.
Rant - why is there still no good solution? Why can’t I use an image management tool of my choice (Picasa, iPhoto, etc.) with the hosting / sharing service of my choice? Why don’t updates in the cloud automatically sync with my local instance? Why don’t iPhoto tags, filenames, and other metadata automatically percolate to Picasa Web? to Flickr? Why does Flickr not provide an iPhoto plugin? There are a lot of startups in this space, but they all miss the goal by a mile. I smell opportunity, I’m just sad that I’ve smelled this opportunity for years and it still hasn’t been filled.
Comments April 11th, 2008
I am rediscovering the world. Through Isaiah’s eyes. Do you remember the smell of grass, the feel of digging in dirt, the wiggle of an earthworm? Do you remember playing despite cold? When was the last time you were happily uncomfortable? Climbed in a tree? I am rediscovering the world through Isaiah’s eyes. What a joy.
Comments April 6th, 2008
I was raised Quaker. Quakers sit in silent worship, communing directly with God. We believe that if you listen God will speak, and help guide you in life. I love the philosopy, open-mindedness, and quiet of the Quakers. Moreso, I love the lack of priests - it’s just you and God. I attended Quaker Meeting until I was 18, but have only recently started re-attending with Franny (raised Catholic) and Isaiah.
I have never been “lead” by the Lord. Not quite true, but hear me out.
Reading Quaker literature, you read of the church founders having incredible spiritual moments where God spoke loudly to them. I’ve never quite believed this; certainly I have never had such an experience myself. I’ve lived my entire life bringing hard decisions to the Lord in quiet prayer, waiting for his advice and direction. And I’ve never heard any. So I’ve made the decisions that seemed right at the time, and life has been good to me. (Who knows, maybe my “feeling right” about a decision is how God speaks to me, if so it’s unprovable :-)).
I have been “warned” by the Lord. My extended family is Catholic, and I joined the Catholic church as an adult. The priest who confirmed me used to state that sins cannot be enumerated, they are personal, between an individual and the Lord. Sin, he said, was anything that caused a rift in your relationship with the Lord. I agree - it is my experience that when I have “sinned” (cigarettes, drugs, meanness) I have felt it injured my relationship with God. And there was always a voice, sometimes quiet, sometimes very loud, telling me where I was going wrong. That I should not be going down a given path. That if I continued, I would be unhappy and disconnected from God.
God, or conscience? So that’s it - God has never spoken to me. A little voice has told me what I shouldn’t be doing. God? Or my conscience? I frankly don’t know or care. I believe in the Lord, even if he never speaks to me. Even if there is only this one life, and then nothing but dirt and worms. My faith doesn’t require a rebirth, it doesn’t require miracles. It just is. I am just thankful for this life, for the path I have been able to follow, for all the random events of life leaving me alive, married, with a beautiful son, wonderful family, and caring friends.
Comments April 6th, 2008
I’ve finished the Francesca and Isaiah piece. Check it out here, or peek at the thumbnail below. I’ve had pieces of this composition floating around in my head for a while - I knew I wanted to draw Franny, even the pose & meadow setting, but couldn’t make it all fit in my head. I finally sketched it out and realized that Isaiah was the missing piece. I’ve wanted to draw the Laundry dress too - that was tough but well worth it.
Art process - maybe it’s just me, but I love the drawing process as much as the finished work. I love reading artists websites where they share their creative process with others. (1) you can learn from each other, and (2) it’s just great to see how everyone ticks. Plus I find the art itself beautiful at every stage. Click through to see my art process from sketchbook to this image.
Overview of the process: tools - sketchbook, pencils, MacBook + PhotoShop CS3 + Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet (11 x 9 inches). I sometimes start in a sketchbook, other times I just sketch directly in PhotoShop using the Wacom. If I start in my sketchbook, I scan into computer then finish in PhotoShop. I work at very large resolutions (this image was done at 70 x 50 inches, wound up at 250MB). This way if I squiggle a little while drawing, downsampling smoothes everything out. It also helps to be able to zoom in and do details at high resolution.
PS - Click the images to see the full size originals in my gallery.
1. Character sketches - sketchbook & pencil (or pen), or direct into PhotoShop. This image started in the sketchbook, then I traced over the image on the tablet.
2. Detailed Inking - Wacom & PhotoShop, regular round brush, stroke dynamics. Isn’t Isaiah a cutey?
3. Coloring - for real people, I match colors against photos. I use a big brush to fill in large areas, then add detail with various appropriate PhotoShop brushes.
4. Clothing (Sketch, Ink, Color) - call me strange, but I need to draw clothes on top of a body. Even if they totally obscure the body. So after I’ve completed my nudes, I add the clothes. For Isaiah’s simple onesey I didn’t bother with a sketch, but you can see from Francesca’s complicated dress that I started with the blue sketch, followed with black inking & lots of color / detail work.
5. Finished! Francesca and Isaiah are now done - that took about 3 hours. The dress took most of the time - I had to get the actual dress out to see what the patterns were.
6. Background started - if I can start with a photo I will, here I found a nice meadow picture that suited my mental image of the final product. I scaled it to match my canvas, and resized & placed my subjects.
7. Background sketch - I go faster with the background, so broader sketch strokes to help me place the color later.
8. Background color & detail - just like with the people, I add detailed ink, broad swaths of color, and then more detail. I use assorted brushes here to give the natural feel to the wildflowers and sun highlights on the trees. Again, I do color matching from the original photo.
9. Horizon and sky - the flattened image above doesn’t show this, but I left the sky transparent, allowing me to add a sky layer below the background layer. I then added a little gradient and some fluffy clouds, as well as a few horizon hills in darkening colors. Almost there!
10. There is no step 10. All done! Actually, I added a little shadowing and detail under Francesca & Isaiah’s feet to plant them in the scene. I’m more or less happy with this outcome - I’d had the idea in my head for a while and it finally came together. I may re-use the Francesca & Isaiah images in a simpler desktop image, but that’s for another day.
Thanks for reading!
Comments April 6th, 2008
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