Work is good when it’s used as an agent of self improvement.
Blog
-
June
Best month of the year. Each day is wide open. Seems like this June stretches on forever.
-
On Teaching
This spring, I’ll be teaching my age-old 2D Graphics course. Every time I teach it, I spend waaaaay too much time wondering what I should include in the course content. I change it every year.
Adobe is the go-to graphics software company, and that hasn’t changed since they bought Macromedia long ago.
I started off in 2001 with one of the best books ever written on this stuff, Luann Seymour’s Design Essentials.
Not sure what Luann is up to these days, but it isn’t, and hasn’t been for a long time, making awesome books. Unfortunately, the text stopped updating after a few years of said awesomeness, and as much as I’d like to keep assigning it, Adobe has moved on. Last spring, I assigned the closest thing I could find to Luann’s Masterpiece, and it fell waaayyy short. My course ratings dipped lower than ever.
So I’m back to my age-old question: What are 2D Graphics? How do I teach students about 2D Graphics? What book should I assign; or do I have to write my own book?
-
Nancy the swimmer
So Nan has decided she doesn’t want to swim. Well, she’s always complained about going to swim team but I finally caved and stopped bringing her. I guess that makes me a bad parent. I just got sick of fighting with her, dragging her out the door with a grocery bag of wet towels, suits, goggles, and caps, any of which was likely to be missing and therefore a culprit for another crisis at the pool.
I get it; I hated it too. Somehow I kept going, though. Do I regret it? Probably not. It led to my success as a lifeguard, all those years making easy money sitting around. I try to dangle that carrot in front of her, telling her she’ll never have the easy life I did, that waiting tables and bagging groceries is for chumps. She doesn’t really care though. At least now.
-
Testing out WP 6.5
Hoping to find:
- Renaming blocks (or at least groups)
- Yes!
- Better font management
- Yes!
- Native lightbox
- wawa
- Styling links
- wawa
- Renaming blocks (or at least groups)
-
Fontself is pretty cool
Made it a lot easier to make fonts. I hate having to export glyphs to another program.
Website: https://www.fontself.com/
Here’s my first attempt:
-
Stickball
We used to play this all the time growing up. I don’t see kids playing it anymore.
Other sports are easy to get pickup going. You can play one-on-one hoops. 2-hand-touch only really needs 4 players. Same with street hockey.
Baseball is so fun to play, but you never have enough kids, or equipment, or a field. That’s why stickball was invented. Heck, all you need is two kids, really. Offense and defense. One kid hits. One kid pitches and fields. Pitching, fielding, hitting; that’s baseball in a nutshell.
You don’t even need a field. You need a building, one with a nice flat wall (don’t they all have those?), with a parking lot or grassy area in front (again, don’t they all have those?)
I’ve been on a stickball obsession lately. I decided to act on it a bit today, and did a little shopping. Dick’s: various balls (they didn’t have handballs, which is what I really wanted. When I was a kid, the handball truck came around every day after school), hockey tape, orange cones. Michael’s: decent sidewalk chalk (gotta make sure it washes off). Home Depot: three different options for the bat; a dowel, a railing, and a broomstick.
Lastly, I registered stickballgame.com. Stay tuned on that one.