It’s a lazy Friday night at the casa, which is just fine with me. This has been the first night this week that I’ve just sat and done basically nothing. I’m not going to lie, it’s kindof awesome. Three nights with school, a couple of hours into the drawing I’m working on on Wednesday; it’s been a long week.
I probably should be drawing something now – something, anything, like a new Lego Gaga or the piece I need to put together for the sketch blog my friend Tony and I have started (well, he started it – I set up the site for it on Tumblr but he’s the only one who’s posted anything to it so far). I haven’t been able to get into that mindset of “it doesn’t matter if you’re in the mood or feel ‘inspired,’ you loser – just do it.”
I did get a crapton of pencils in the mail today, so I should continue doing things with them. 
I used up one of my Derwent 2B pencils working on my “Jade 2.0″ piece (which was awesome; I haven’t thrown a pencil away because I had used it up since the mid 1990s), and there isn’t a store anywhere near here where I can just go buy one new one. Ace Hardware here in town sells Derwent pencils, but they’re like six bucks for four of them. So I went to eBay and found two sets of 12 that included 2Bs for about five bucks each. I also bought a 12-pack of Staedtler Mars 4H pencils for the grand price of one whole dollar. I’ve never used them before, but I figured for a buck I’d try them out. If I like them I’ll start buying more 12-packs on eBay (that never seem to sell for more than a couple of bucks on actual auctions and not buy-it-now listings). Then, when I run out, I’d rather buy 12 of one hardness of pencil than 12 pencils of various hardnesses to get the one I need. I’m going to be swimming in 8Bs until I die.
What I’m studying
I have to go out of town for some supervision training on Feb. 10; sometime between now and then I have to finish this enormous online course that’s supposed to take like 12 hours to complete. I guess I’ll be starting that tomorrow. Blah. I can think of about a hundred billion ways I could be more excited about that — especially since my evenings are dominated by school during the week as it is.
What I’m eating
Took the family out for pizza tonight; we hadn’t gone out to dinner in maybe a month. We have been trying to eat better at home, etc. — basically no bread or pasta, mostly meat, veggies and fruit, etc. We ordered what we always order – pepperoni with half sausage and half mushrooms. For the first time ever (and we’ve eaten at this place hundreds of times, no exaggeration), they messed up our pizza – it was all pepperoni, but the half sausage and half mushroom were both on the same half. We sent the pizza back, but they let us keep the messed up one (because, what were they gonna do with it, right?). So, now we have enough leftover pizza to feed an army. Good problem to have.
What I’m reading
I read this Chris Sims piece at Comics Alliance today comparing Rumble in the Bronx to Superman Returns. I wish to hell I could write like this.
This has been a rough week for me. Work has been stressful, which made it difficult to focus on school in the evenings, which in turn made it way harder for me to focus on the two relatively simple assignments I had due this week for school. I got them done and I think they turned out just fine, but getting them finished required a lot more energy and effort than the final product warranted.
The application window for the job I’m currently holding closed Monday of this week at noon; I think that has a lot to do with how I’ve been feeling this week. I know that I have passed that invisible line in the sand and have moved beyond “just continue what my old boss was doing” and am now squarely in “this is my job.” It’s intimidating. The job is still incredibly fun, there is just more and more and more stuff every day added to the pile. It’s testing the limits of my ability to stay organized and maintain proper to-do lists. But, mostly I think it has to do with that Monday deadline coming and going. Before Monday the job was just mine, and I didn’t think too much about the process of trying to keep it permanently. But, it’s game on now. I could win it, I could lose it; that’s really happening now. Again — intimidating.
I had lunch with Helen at her school today. They’re having a special week of activities that included the ability for family to come by and join our kids for lunch, so I met up with her for boiled pork, salad, corn and an apple. She was over the moon happy that I was there, and she and I had a lot of fun. She’s such an awesome kid.
For example, she totally loves playing “Dragon’s Lair” on my iPhone. It’s simple enough that she can beat most of the levels on her own (she only has problems with two levels, including the last one, and that’s mostly because the way the controls are coded for those levels makes successfully completing them extremely challenging), and yesterday she and I beat it for the first time. She was so proud of herself, and I got to spend all day today knowing I had a six-year-old daughter who beat one of the iconic video games of the early 1980s. I even bragged about her achievement on Facebook. As I say – awesome kid.
National Hockey League goaltender Tim Thomas of the Boston Bruins is currently making some waves for his decision to ditch out on his team’s visit to the White House to meet the President, a tradition in sports after winning a championship. He released a statement yesterday regarding his decision, and it was posted at NHL.com.
I saw it today; here’s a screen grab from the top of the post:
The sharing numbers are really fascinating. 2,000 “likes” on Facebook, only 350 retweets and only 31 plus-ones for Google+. Thirty one. We have heard quite a bit about how quickly Google+ has grown, but for this particular post its number of engaged users is essentially inconsequential – the Facebook crowd is almost 65 times larger, and even Twitter has outpaced it by a factor of 10. Thirty-one plus-ones.
This is your prototypical “n of one” case, and is by absolutely no means any sort of overall judgement about the engagement levels of the users of these three services. In this particular fringe case, though, the staggering differences between the engagement level of the three on a pretty high-profile story really caught my attention.
I spent about two and a half hours playing around with iBooks Author tonight, trying to figure out various things about how it works. For 1.o software, it’s actually not bad at all. What is implemented works and works pretty well, but there is plenty of room for expansion. Right now, I have nine pages of the latest issue of Horizons, in iBooks on my iPad, and to just be able to push a button and make that happen is pretty sweet.
• Tables of Contents are auto-generated for each chapter when you add a new chapter to the document. Author is built specifically for textbooks, so you’re forced into preface/chapter/etc. terminology with no apparent way to change it for publications where those sections make no sense, like a magazine or a catalog.
• The Table of Contents pages for each chapter are difficult to edit, mostly because there is a photo for those pages that you cannot delete. If you don’t want to use a half-page vertical photo for each chapter, you have to move the photo box off of the visible area of the page. You cannot just delete it.
• There doesn’t seem to be a way to automatically generate even a starter layout (your elements, but obviously not positioned correctly) for whatever screen orientation you don’t start with. The program defaults to landscape; so if you want to support both orientations and also have a portrait mode for your publication, you have to build it entirely from scratch. So to support both, you’re essentially forced to build two completely independent books instead of one.
• There is no support for creating or importing custom colors. The only available colors are obtained from the system-level color picker.
• You cannot link text boxes and flow text in between them. If you have text that requires multiple pages, you have to paste the entire story on the first page and then cut off the bottom, then paste the entire story on the second page and cut off the top. This is a huge drawback when you consider having to build portrait and landscape modes entirely separately, especially if you’re working on a document of any size at all.
• Custom shapes are a pain; you are limited to picking points with a pen tool. But, once you’ve created the shape, there isn’t a hollow-arrow type cursor that lets you select individual points to edit each of the shape’s vertices. You’re stuck resizing the entire shape with the regular cursor. This is a page layout program with word processor-level controls; Apple will need to add some pro page layout features for this to really take off.
• I didn’t see a way to customize the appearance of the widgets. For example, the chrome around the photos for the gallery widget is enormous and, beyond deleting the text so those areas are all blank, there didn’t seem to be a way to get rid of the chrome entirely or pick an alternate chrome that allowed more space for the photos. As it stands right now, the chrome takes up a ton of space. It’s probably OK for very large photos, but for smaller photos it really takes away valuable space that should be afforded to the actual art.
Lots of little nitpicks for 1.0 software, I know; I don’t want to make it seem like I’m down on it either, because I’m not. What I was able to achieve in just a few hours while I was mostly just trying to learn to navigate the software is pretty remarkable, I think. I have nine pages of this magazine running in an eBook version on my iPad; on Friday, any notion of an “electronic version” of Horizons began and ended with “well we have a PDF version.”
There is a lot of initial work to get going here, but I suspect that once I get the hang of the software I can build a custom Horizons template and use that to save a ton of time in the future. It’s like anything else – do a ton of work up front to save yourself time in the future.
There will be some hacks who put publish terrible stuff with this – you’re going to see a lot of “magazines” coming from schools that are just full-page JPEG images dropped into Author and uploaded, which will be horrible. But there will also be some phenomenal work done with this as people get a chance to get used to it and discover how to push the boundaries of what the software can do. This is really exciting, and there really is unlimited potential for very cool stuff to come from this ecosystem.
Now the fun part will be to wait and see how often Apple issues updates for iBooks Author. They should be in possession of a significant list of feature requests for future releases, and I wonder if the speed at which Apple is able to release updates and add new functionality to the software will be an indicator of how seriously they’re really taking this project. Are we going to see frequent updates and lots of activity? Or will this be relegated to “hobby” status for Apple, like the AppleTV used to be? I suspect the former, so the wait is officially on for the first software update.
Now to plan my next iBooks Author projects — a completely unauthorized encyclopedia of IDW’s G.I. Joe comics. That’ll be fun. 
Conversations with an almost-two-year old
Millie, looking at my phone’s lock-screen picture of Helen: “Sissy?”
Me: “Yes! That’s your sissy.”
Millie: “Megan?”
Me: “You want to see pictures of Megan? OK.” (I find a picture of her on my phone)
Millie: “Megan!”
Me: “Honey, Megan is your sissy, too. Can you say Sissy Megan?”
Millie: “Yuck!”
iBooks Producer update
I spent about 10 minutes with iBooks Producer yesterday and was able to drop in some graphics from the front cover of the latest issue of our alumni magazine and have something presentable in just a few seconds. Today I’m going to try and spend some more time with it and get at least a story or two and the Campus Notes section laid out. Not sure it’s necessary to do the entire issue yet, since I’m just trying to figure out the software and see what the build process is like. But if it ends up being as easy as building the cover ultimately was, then I’ll probably go ahead and build the entire thing just to see how it looks.
What I’m reading
I finally got around to reading this week’s issue of Batman yesterday morning; what an absolutely fantastic read. In the previous issue, Batman was drugged by an assassin, and this week we got a look inside Batman’s head as the drug caused confusion, disorientation and hallucinations. As the story moved on, the reader first had to turn the book sideways to read the pages; then after a few pages, you had to read it upside down and turn the pages in the opposite direction you typically would — paging backwards to advance the story, and eventually the book ended right-side up again. It was an absolutely genius layout trick, involving the reader in Batman’s spiraling journey into drug-fueled insanity right beside him. The fact that the story so far in this series has been really fun to read and Greg Capullo is doing absolutely beautiful work on the art is just icing on the cake. This was a brilliant comic book.
It was proof that in the hands of exceptionally talented creators, print still maintains some significant advantages that digital will have a really difficult time overcoming.
I also read the first issue of IDW’s new Transformers series, “More Than Meets the Eye.” It’s the first of two concurrent series IDW has launched to continue their Transformers universe; the second series, “Robots in Disguise,” launches this Wednesday, I believe. The art was quite a bit different than what the Transformers books have had in the past – it was very reminiscent of the look in the Transformers Animated TV series; long, thin, angular limbs and basic shapes without a tremendous amount of detail. It was a good look. Interesting premise for the series, too; it was an entertaining launching point for a new series and I’m curious to see where IDW goes with it.
In other reading, I’d like to try and make a dent in my “to read” pile today. I’m going to try and catch up on Batgirl, which shouldn’t be too bad since I only have two issues to read, and I think I’m going to grab my entire nine-issue run of Moon Knight and just re-read that from the beginning since I’m probably at least four issues behind on that series.
What I’m watching
I’m going to try and camp out in the bedroom as much as I can today and watch the NFL conference championship games. I can almost guarantee I won’t be able to watch both games in their entirety; having kids running amok makes six uninterrupted hours of football basically impossible. If I had to choose, I hope I get to watch most of the AFC game between the Patriots and Ravens, although I suspect the 49ers/Giants matchup on the NFC side might actually be the better game.
What I’m playing
I actually stole some time with the big TV to get some Playstation 3 time in yesterday morning. Granted, it was only about an hour, but it was about an hour more than I’ve had in the last few months. I got through a level or two in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II; that’s a fun, but frustrating game. I’m only about six hours into it, in total, but it feels similar to the first one in that as your character gets more powerful, your opponents keep pace with you so you never feel like you can dominate a group of enemies. There’s always an opponent with a counter to whatever powerup you just received, it seems. Ah, well. It’s still an entertaining game.
The three-day weekend last weekend did not give me much to post about, and this week has been a whirlwind. So, again, despite best intentions, 10-day gap. I need to put more effort into the “just show up every day” notion of maintaining this beast. I’ve been keeping up with Facebook and Twitter (mostly because they’re very fast and seem to be more suited for quick off-the-cuff updates), but I’ve (obviously) found it difficult to pop in here to keep things going here. There are a lot of things I post on Facebook that I could expand upon pretty easily if I’d bring those things into here; I’ll start trying to be better about that. “Just show up every day.”
Stuff I’m watching
Television time is a rare commodity in my house, as the screen is usually filled with “Barney show” for Millie and some combination of cartoon or Skylanders for Helen. About the only thing I’ve been watching remotely regularly is Tuesday-night Fear Factor with Helen; it shows Mondays at 8, which is after her bedtime, so we usually start watching it around 6:30 or so on Tuesdays after Millie is in bed. We totally love it. I have great memories of watching the first run of Fear Factor with Megan when she was little; the fact that Helen likes watching it with me too is just awesome.
Beyond that, Melissa and I have started watching a ton of The Tudors, the Showtime series from a few years back, on Netflix. We’re a few episodes into Season 2 at this point. At first I thought it was OK, but as the show has gone on, I have grown to really, really hate it. There are no likeable characters in this show at all, and it just gets to be a grind to spend an hour watching people be horrible to each other in every conceivable way. It’s exhausting and not really a lot of fun. The only redeeming quality is the set and costume designs.
In significantly brighter television news, Archer was back last night with its Season 3 debut. It’s sitting on my DVR waiting for me; I’m going to try and watch it tonight. It guest stars Burt Reynolds. As himself. It cannot possibly be anything but amazing.
Stuff I’m reading
I’m still trying to get caught up on my backlog of comic books. I have nice piles of stuff to catch up on. Morning Glories #15 was this week, and as the middle part of a three-part story there wasn’t a whole lot to it – mostly some background and further character development, but this continues to be one of the most intriguing things I read each month. It’s a fantastic book.
IDW started a digital-only Transformers series this week, too – 99 cents for a 15-page book. It’s an interesting experiment, especially considering they used one of the same artists that was doing the “present-day” half of the “Chaos” story arc in the main ongoing Transformers print series. I’d have expected them to go really cheap and have bad art, but it’s pretty solid. I’ve given it a couple of flip-throughs on my phone (and guided-view on your phone is the absolute worst possible medium for reading comics; even built-for-digital, this one is bad), but haven’t really read it yet. Also on my to-do list for the weekend.
Batman #5 and Birds of Prey #5 out this week as well, along with Cobra #9. I’m a couple of days behind on my review of Cobra due to grad school, but it’s almost complete and should be ready and posted later tonight. It’s really a great comic; it’s still early, but so far IDW is hitting a home run with the current “Cobra Command” storyline.
Stuff I’m drawing
I was able to get a couple of hours in on my “Jade 2.0″ drawing that I’m working on for our faculty-staff art show. I still have a lot of work to do; it’s maybe a quarter done. But, I am on the verge of throwing away a nub of a pencil because I used it all up – I haven’t done that on a drawing in maybe 15 years. It’s a pretty great feeling. I still haven’t nearly had the time to get much done on the sketch blog idea that my friend Tony and I devised; he’s been working on something, but I’ve barely concepted an idea for what I want to draw for our first entry. I hope to have some time to do that this weekend, too.
Both of my classes at Winona State kicked off last night — instructors in both sent out syllabi, and opening assignments should be available this week. Neither of them are particularly different in structure from the two I took in the fall; one even repeats the “you must post on the discussion boards three times a week, once as a question response and twice in response to fellow students” format from the fall, although for a significantly larger percentage of the overall garde. That class has a final exam, as well – a 60-minute timed test at the end of the term. The other has a 15-page paper (although with 12-point, double-spaced type, that 15 pages will fly by in a hurry).
Books for both courses are on order as well; I threw about $90 at Amazon.com tonight and was able to get both books I needed. Looks like I’ll be able to sell them back to Amazon for a reasonable amount of money, too. Amazon store credit will be a dangerous tool to wield.
Tonight on Netflix, I watched “Tucker and Dale vs Evil.” Starring Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine, it’s a pretty solid spoof on the “rednecks in a scary cabin in the woods” genre of slasher movies. The spoof is, the rednecks don’t kill anyone and it’s actually the stupid college kids on their camping trip who turn out to be the evil ones. Tudyk and Labine are really good as the film’s titular clueless rednecks, and there are some fun gore effects. If you are into horror movies, “Tucker and Dale” is definitely worth a look.
I have had some time over the last few days to do some catching up on the enormous stack of comics I’ve fallen behind on since Thanksgiving. Rather than reading everything chronologically, I’ve taken to grabbing four-issue runs of a particular series and going through them all at once. Last night I caught up on DC’s “Supergirl” and “Birds of Prey,” four issues each. Earlier in the week, four issues of DC’s “Demon Knights.” Good stories, all, but I’m trying to find titles to stop buying in order to get a more reasonable pile of things each week — both in terms of the money I spend, and in terms of the things I’m actually reading and am really into. For these particular three series, I’m really tempted to stick with “Birds of Prey” beyond the first story arc. I like the new team that has been assembled for this series, and the art isn’t bad. “Supergirl” is solidly second; Mahmud Asrar’s art is beautiful, but the story is mostly character intros so far. I’m still on the fence with it. “Demon Knights” is in about the same boat; I’ll probably drop it after the first story arc wraps up. Great art, but I don’t really find myself all that into the story — particularly since its lead character, Etrigan the demon, isn’t really the main character in the book. He’s more like a member of an ensemble.
Books I’ve quit buying – Marvel’s “FF,” for no real reason. Marvel’s “Daredevil,” because I somehow missed the sixth issue. Marvel’s “Ultimate X-Men,” which I thoroughly enjoyed the first issue of, but just couldn’t justify adding another book to my pile every month. Likewise with the new “Ultimate Spider-Man” series. I need to make some decisions about most of the DC stuff I’m getting, and cut that down to maybe six to seven titles, tops, and get a monthly reading list in order.
If I had to guess, the books that will make the cut among the DC “New 52″ would be “Batman” (fantastic, all around – the story so far is great, and Greg Capullo’s art is amazingly good); “Animal Man” (see: Batman); “Batgirl” (good art, want to see where Gail Simone is taking the story); “Birds of Prey” (see above); “Action Comics” (which I loved early, but need to catch up on); and “Justice League,” simply because Jim Lee is doing the art. For a lot of these, I should just quit buying single issues and get trades from places like Thwipster. Long wait, but much cheaper and much less paper to find a place to store.
Many fun things to report today:
• Melissa and I finally were able to see “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” tonight; we tried to watch it shortly after Christmas, but it was sold out. Tonight, success – and was it ever worth the wait. It’s been awhile since I sat through a movie that I absolutely loved everything about as much as I did this one; probably not since “Black Swan.” I haven’t seen the original version, and I haven’t read the book. This movie is fantastic though. Even the opening credits are amazing
• The three-pack of previews before the movie tonight were all of stuff that I’m probably going to want to see – “John Carter,” which will be two hours of non-stop CGI alien punching from the looks of it, should be fun; “Prometheus” looks more fantastic every time I see a trailer for it; and “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance” which is going to be record-settingly horrendous, but also awesome. Nicholas Cage is funny like that.
• Millie came into our bedroom today while I was watching a bit of the start of the Broncos/Steelers game and says to me “Andy, come.” Both Megan and Helen went through phases where I was “Andy” and not “dad,” (Megan did that for many, many months, in fact; Helen’s phase was significantly shorter) but neither of them started at 21 months. It was kindof awesome.
• I backed a successful Kickstarter campaign for the first time! I threw Sean Demory, who was on quiz bowl teams with me at Manhattan High School and is an all around awesome dude, $20 to help publish his book, “Zobop Bebop.” He wanted to raise a thousand bucks and ended up with $1,700. Congrats, Sean! You can check out the Kickstarter page for his book here; I”m looking forward to seeing his book in November.
• Spring semester of grad school starts tomorrow. I still have zero relevant emails from either school or instructors, and no classes have been posted on the eLearning website yet. Awesome.
• So, Tim Tebow, eh? 300 yards on 10 completions… Ridiculous. New England will probably still beat them by four touchdowns next weekend. Atlanta did a lovely job playing dead for the Giants today, too.
• I saw no signs of molten lava. My world view is shattered.
That’s the news, and I am outta here.
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