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Dog Days

12 Aug

Been a busy time lately and this blog has been a little neglected, sorry about that. Last weekend Nicole and I camped and hung out with her family in Tide Head, a village in northern New Brunswick. We climbed Sugarloaf, a nearby mountain that is a ski hill in winter and mountain bike trail in summer. We went for a nice run on the trail near her grandfather’s camp, and today ran Nicole’s first race: 5 miles in Marathon by the Sea, 56 minutes and change. Not bad.

Work has been busy too, requiring a bit of overtime, which has caused my backlog of webcomics to suffer. I had hoped to stay about a month ahead of the “press” date for Time Wounds All Heels but it’s dwindled down to a week. So, most of my spare time now is spent drawing in Manga Studio, which is fine with me. Jack is spending the week with my parents on PEI and I am taking tomorrow (my 44th birthday) off, so that should help a bit.

Speaking of Jack, I took him to the new Wimpy Kid movie yesterday. It was all right. I don’t expect much from these things. They teach basic lessons about not lying to your parents, being a true friend, and so on. There are a few laughs, mainly couched in mortifying the main character.

I’ve gotten a bit of reading done too; finished Ian Rankin’s The Impossible Dead, the second in his new series of mysteries centered around Det. Fox of “the complaints,” the internal affairs department of the Scottish police. I should soon finish the antepenultimate book of his Inspector Rebus series, “Fleshmarket Close,” and then will read the last of those in time for his next new book, in which a retired Rebus apparently meets Fox. Other than that I have mainly been reading webcomics and blogs, and the occasional zine; I picked one up today called Hollow Round of Skull, edited by Jill Davis LeBlanc of Rothesay, that looks pretty good.

There isn’t much new on network TV to watch; Burn Notice and Longmire, mainly. So, I’ve been rewatching old MST3K episodes or catching up on other stuff in the background, like Paul Scheer’s NTSF:SD:SUV::, The L Word on Netflix, old Dr. Who on the BBC iPlayer, and so on. Plus bits of the Olympics, I guess. Probably the nicest surprise has been WB animation’s Scooby Doo: Mystery Incorporated, which is very smart and funny stuff.

That’s about all I can think of to say for now. The summer’s going fast. :(

Good Week, Big Week

7 Jun

For those who don’t know, the post title is a running gag from the Back to Work podcast by Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin. You may also know Merlin from the You Look Nice Today sort-of-comedy podcast.

Anyway, this is a “back to work” kind of week in the sense that my job – I am a technical writer for those who don’t know – tends to be cyclical. The amount of work I have to do is fairly steady in a given week, but some weeks are bigger than others; the weeks with “deliverables”, where the works in progress are released for public consumption. Typically, I would have one of these weeks a few times a year; currently I have one this week and one next. So, it’s a busy(ish) time.

I remember getting into a minor argument with a former APA-mate who had never gone to college. He was characterizing students as spoiled, wealthy kids who avoided the real world while working stiffs like him got on with life. I was in college at the time – perhaps a little spoiled but certainly not wealthy – and argued that while it was true that many freshmen treated college like a party (and washed out as a result), a true academic would spend far more time than the typical work week on their classes, papers, research, and so on. My friend countered that he often worked longer hours than the typical work week, as do many people.

After college, I had a love/hate relationship with the world of work for a long time. Unable to find work as a supply teacher in a glutted Ontario market, I worked retail and enjoyed solving problems for my customers, eventually managing a couple of stores. After I moved back to New Brunswick, I retrained myself to be a graphic artist and worked in the advertising department of a company owned by a Giant Family Company in the area. In retrospect it was a good first job but at the time it was also often aggravating, even toxic, due to the bureaucracy and waste and double-standards and general stupidity that was all too easy to find.

So I moved on, becoming a technical writer in a succesion of contract jobs and self-employment. The situations were of varying quality; none as bad as the Giant Family Company, but they all had their share of aggravating qualities. It is quite common for tech writers to work at home, for example, and while I am sure many see this as a perk, it can also be pretty necessary for actually getting things done. It used to drive me crazy that for usually arbitrary reasons, past employers would require me to sit at a desk five days a week, 9 to 5, whether I was busy or not. That’s what they called productivity.

Thankfully, I don’t have to deal with that anymore. My current employer, despite having its head office a couple of blocks from my apartment, assumes that I will work at home. They trust me to be an adult and meet my deadlines. I manage my own time, working with teams from around the world, which means that sometimes I am on the phone with California at 8 PM. Another day I might knock off a little early. It’s not a job about how many widgets you can make in an hour. My employer respects and appreciates me, and vice versa. What a concept, huh?

Settling In

26 May

Yikes, three weeks since my last post. It’s been a busy time, primarily concerned with the birthdays of the two people I love most in the world (Jack turning 10 and Nicole turning 25), driving up to Kingston, and driving back with Nicole and the cats. As I write this we are one small happy family together under one roof for the summer, with regular visits to and from Jack. I like traveling, and enjoyed the trains to Kingston, but I am glad to have the break. Regular relationship commuting resumes in September.

For now, Nicole is looking for summer employment and reading for her comprehensive exams in the fall. I am working as usual during the weekdays and spending my off-hours with family and friends, getting some drawing done, and trying to slowly pull the trigger on some long-overdue publishing efforts as described on the “In Progress” page. I’ve also been enjoying some gaming, from SSX, Rocksmith and Lego Pirates of the Caribbean on the PS3 to Temple Run on the iPad. I’ve also been enjoying an iPad app called Epic Win that combines the dry duty of a to-do list with rewards and levelling up in an RPG.

Thanks to Free Comic Book Day and the local library sale and other bits of splurging, my books-to-read pile grows ever larger, from Borges’ Ficciones to Jim Woodring’s The Portable Frank to an omnibus of mystery novels by Peter Robinson. I also downloaded a bunch of classic SF novels in audiobook form for the recent transprovincial drives. Maybe I am feeling sympathy pains for Nicole’s comps reading, but lately I have been feeling like I should be reading just a bit more in the way of literature, especially the classics, and not just genre stuff. I may try alternating between the reading pile and a Canonical Work of Literature in English. We’ll see.

Speaking of reading, I recently lucked out with a couple of impulse buys at the comic shop. The first was a thing called New Mutants Forever by Chris Claremont, Al Rio and Bob McLeod, a 2010 miniseries that picks up directly after where Claremont left off over 20 years before. It was quite a trip to be transported back to that version of the Marvel Universe, before all those horrible ’90s “event” crossovers. The other was the first collection of Locke and Key, by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez; an above-average ghost house story for the YA audience and above. I wasn’t always on board with Rodriguez’ artwork but I would certainly like to read the next volume and see how it plays out. I hear good things about Hill’s other books too.

I was really bummed that I had to miss this year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF), it was just not possible to do with all the other stuff going on that week; I am determined to make it next year, which is coincidentally the tenth year, and perhaps even exhibit if I can get my shit together with the cartooning and the publishing and the flavening. In the meantime I will be appearing at the inaugural instalment of a local con called Harbour Con-Fusion in July. After a reasonably successful attempt at doing a commission for a friend, I will be attempting to add that to my rotation as well. Once I have a portfolio of samples ready and some rates worked out, I’ll add a page about it here.

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Picking Battles

22 Jan

I’m doing a lot of tinkering lately. My job is in one of those holiday hangover phases where there aren’t a lot of actual bottom-line deliverables to work on, so I am in R&D mode, tinkering with command lines and virtual machines and XML templates and all kinds of crazy shit that I only half-understand. And I like it. I always enjoyed tinkering with computers under the hood, it’s a fine hobby, I just wouldn’t want it to be my full time job. I would hate to be that guy that the rest of the dev team looks to when a critical line of code needs to be fixed. But tinkering and R&D are good times, to me anyway.

Speaking of, it looks like I am making a game. It was originally envisioned as a board game, but I am actually going to try to work out the algorithm and maths and probability involved by creating a digital version in XCode first, just so I don’t have to make an artboard mockup and roll a set of dice a billion times for playtesting. So I will get the algorithm working first, THEN build the mockup, and have friends over to try it, because after all, an algorithm can only tell you if the math works, it can’t tell you if something is fun or not.

Note to self, start working on algorithm to determine whether or not something is fun. ;)

I’m going to sound like a shill for a few minutes because there are a couple of products that I use all the time and I think you should too:

PATH – a social networking app for the iPhones and Androids and probably other outlets. I use it on the phone to take and upload photos, occasionally note what music I’m listening to, update my status to Facebook and Twitter simultaneously (I think it does a couple others as well), and you can “check in” to locations if you’re into that kind of thing. The interface is lovely, it is a pleasure to use, it is basically everything I had hoped Google+ would be. I hope they don’t clog it up with a bunch more features because it is really great the way it is.

EVERNOTE – this is becoming like those hot sauce commercials for me, I use this shit for everything. Work notes, personal notes, ideas for creative projects, scripts, just everything. And I feel like I am only scratching the surface of what it can do.

MANGA STUDIO – continues to be a kickass experience, especially when used in combination with the Wacom Intuous4 tablet that my sweetheart got me for xmas.

Hmm, what else is going on? The holidays were good. I’m writing this on the train back to Saint John after spending a couple of weeks in Kingston after driving Nicole and the cats back. She and I are rapidly approaching our 3rd anniversary and are leaning toward a destination wedding in about a year from now as opposed to the usual affair in Saint John the following summer. Money is tight but not as badly as it was for a while last year; I am hoping to do some saving and refinancing soon that will give some more breathing room.

I’m looking forward to seeing my boy again. :) He and I will be taking the train up to Kingston for his March break, with a day trip to Toronto to visit the Lego store and perhaps the Science Centre and whatever else we can squeeze in.

I am excited to try Apple’s new iBook publishing tool, iBooks Author. It might give me the kick in the ass I need to get the Sunday Night in Cinema 3 book out there, as well as an update of my MA thesis, both of which I was going to try to get done this year.

Because of all this publishing, game-making, travelling, media-consuming and so on that I want to do this year, my desire for an iPad is reaching critical mass. We’ll see how that goes. I can write one off, right? ;)

That’s about it for now, I will do my best to keep this blog “fresh” for a change. If there’s something you want to talk about or comment on, don’t be shy!

The Portable Life

18 Sep

I am writing this on a Via Rail train that runs from Montreal to Toronto. In a couple of hours it will be dropping me in Kingston, where I will spend a little under a couple of weeks in my new second home, enjoying the company of the vivacious Nicole Slipp and continuing to work remotely for my employer.

Last week was kind of crazy. My work is structured so that there are Big Deadline Weeks every quarter  or so, and it just so happens that this week coming up is one of them, so last week and the week before involved a lot of voluntary overtime to make sure that I would be ready. This was especially important because I knew I would be taking Friday off to move out of my old apartment, where I lived for almost 6 years, and into the new place on Queen Square North.

The effort is paying off at work I guess, because I had a performance review last week and it went quite well; and my feedback was positive in return. It’s strange for me to have a positive feeling of job satisfaction after so many years of jobs that start off well (or not) and then decline so that, as one employer put it, my heart is no longer in it. I feel like I am getting on well with the customer too. So, good. I have a contract renewal coming up in November so hopefully that will go well too.

The move was a long day. I picked up the van at 9 AM, did some errands and started loading it at 10. The first load was packed to the gills with banker’s boxes and small stuff, finally finishing the load-in at 12:30 and then parking it at the new place during a lunch break. While I unloaded the van for the first time the cable guy came and set up my new internet modem/router thing, old home phone, and new basic cable. Anthony joined me in the late afternoon to help move the heaviest and/or most awkward stuff; the couch, TV and mattress. After he left I brought over the rest, mostly furniture, and was done around 10. I did some cleaning at the old apartment and then loaded another vanful of furniture and bags of stuff to give away to Value Village, dropping it off there and grabbing a late drive-thru supper. I was pretty tired and sore, cursing stairs and books but generally glad to be done.

The next day I shifted a couple of last things to the Salvation Army, returned the van, and went back to the old place to do some more cleaning until Anthony picked me up. He gave me a lift to Moncton so I could catch the train, with visits to comic shops and Pumphouse on the way. The train from Moncton to Montreal was a long trip but very pleasant; I was even able to get some drawing done with my Wacom tablet.

One slight drawback of this trip is having to bring two laptops.  With any luck I can make some adjustments to my Mac soon so that I can log in to  my work on it. Two laptops plus power supplies and art supplies and books to read plus the Nikon makes for a heavy backpack. If nothing else it’s a good reason to get an iPad, right? ;)

Anyway, very much looking forward to this visit, and in a different way looking forward to getting back to Saint John to catch up with Jack, set up the new place, and hopefully relax a little after the Big Deadline for this quarter has passed.

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