Any Color You Like so Long as it's Black

This was one of the most fun things that happened to me while I was in San Diego.

My workload for today:

• Flat at least 8 pages of Loveless
• Get new printer set up in office and print off two submission packages to mail first thing tomorrow morning.
• Take finished CMYK files and make jpegs for email submissions, along with folders on my server for more pages to view, rather than imploding someone's mailbox with too many images at once.
• Spend an hour learning CSS so I can revamp my website and get rid of frames altogether.

I'm back at work, with a ton of work either on my desktop, or soon to arrive and will keep me busy for all of August.

Along with work, I have a few submission packages to send out to several companies after talking to editors at various publishers. I don't leave samples with people at SDCC, it just means more stuff they have to try and carry back, while mailed submissions will at least make it to their offices.

Had a great time meeting a ton of wonderful people. Certain expectations and promises were not lived up to, but the great people I met and hung out with more than made up for it.

I didn't pick up many comics, surprisingly, as art books usually top my list of things to get. Some would normally cost me up to $100 after paying S&H, customs/duties etc. Four books I picked up were Spectrum 11, Exotique 1 & 2 (The World's most Beautiful CG Characters), and Painter: the World's Finest Painter Art. The latter 3 are from Ballistic Publishing, whose books are fantastic.

One TPB I'm really looking forward to is Lost Squad, from Devil's Due Publishing, out late August. I got to meet and talk with writer Chris Kirby Friday night at the Hyatt. I'd heard of this over the last year, but never been able to find copies in my LCS... they didn't carry much outside of the big two and popular manga titles.

My passport finally arrived, with two mailing days to spare. I had a tracking number, and watched it go to our old place, in spite of updating my address at the Passport Office.

But the passport is here, the flight and hotel booked, and I will be at SDCC from Tuesday to Saturday morning, when I fly back. I'd like to stay for the whole thing, but moving expenses went over the top, cutting my extra funds for the trip. At almost $200 a day for a hotel room, I decided it was best to cut the trip short a couple days.

I will be doing signings at Avatar Press, booth #2800. More info on that as I have it.

Over at gutterzombie.com, Colorist Dean Welsh has found a bug in the Paint Bucket tool: with certain percentages of C,M,Y,K selected, the Bucket tool doesn't fill areas with the correct color.

Using any of the following percentages in your color slider will result in the wrong color being filled when using the Paint Bucket: 99,97,88,86,79,77,70,68,66.

While not particularly annoying when coloring, it will be a royal pain in the ass for flatters using CS3 as some areas will not fill with the selected color when using any of those percentages.

Dean Welsh's thread on this CS3 bug at gutterzombie.com

After being tired of calibrating my monitor by hand, and spending so much time to get two monitors to look the same, I bought the Colorvision Spyder2 Suite.

Before I got this, calibrating was a pain in the ass. Before it was a multi step process in the Displays preference, and later steps could affect earlier steps, meaning you could calibrate several times before getting things right, and still end up with a slight color cast to your monitor.

With the Spyder2 Suite, it's a 10 minute process. Install the software, boot it up, attach the USB Colorvision Sensor (suction cups for CRTs, a cradle for LCDs), and then run the calibration. It asks a few questions along the way, then begins displaying various colors and reading them with the Colorvision Sensor. It goes through R,G,B and shades of grey, going from black to the brightest color (R,G,B) or white. Once it's done, it asks you to give the calibration a name, and then saves it. On a mac, it saves it in the Display Profile in the Displays System Preferences in the Color Tab.

It also shows you a before and after image that you can switch back and forth to see the difference between the old calibration, and the new one. It even sets a schedule to remind you to check your calibration again after set periods.

The Colorivision Spyder2 Suite kicks ass, and takes all the guesswork out of calibrating monitors, and is also recommeded by Chris Cox, one of the Adobe programmers.

Mac and PC compatible.

I had to spend an hour driving in 30°C+ weather today to pick up a replacement Speedpad today, along with new hearing aid ear molds. It was no bloody fun at all when you add mild sunburn and sunstroke to the mix. And yes, I was using SPF50 sunscreen, but driving down highways on a 50cc Yamaha Scooter felt like driving into a convection oven, even at 65 kph.

I was replacing the used Speedpad I bought off ebay almost two years ago. The scroll wheel button no longer worked, and the thumbwheel button I use for switching between the Airbush and Pencil tools in Photoshop CS had started sticking, and working intermittently.

But the new Speedpad works perfectly, and makes my old one feel like a used slipper with holes in it.

One of the great things about the Speedpad is that it's like a one-handed keyboard (keep your mind out of the gutter). I programmed with most of the tools and shortcuts I use in Photoshop for coloring, so I can keep the Wacom pen on the screen, and access just about everything I need with my left hand, keyboard wise. You can also record macros (i.e. several keystrokes at once), and the scroll wheel is set to increase and decrease the size of the brushes.

The Speedpad also has Shift States... in a way, they work like Command/Option/Shift to give each key four different functions. This also applies to the scroll wheel, so I'll be setting that up to change blending modes for the various brush, grad and pencil tools.

If you're a lefty, you're SOL... Belkin doesn't make one for left handed people, unfortunately.

Back to work now.

Moving was sheer hell. The less said, the better. Still setting up, but at least now I can get at the back half of the office.
Cable internet wasn't hooked up last Friday like it was supposed to be, but I'm finally back on-line and catching up on tons of email and work.

Next time you eat out, take out, or order in Chinese food, have fun with the fortunes inside the cookies. Add the words "...in bed" to the end of any fortune, and it still works, every time.

Let the government work on it.
CTV News article on Do Not Call List

Canada is finally working on a National Do Not Call List proposal. However, the government, in a fit of sheer idiocy has watered down the original bill thanks to industry lobbying and have undermined the entire reason behind a Do Not Call List.

Political Fuckwits have made the following exemptions to the Do Not Call List:

• Registered charities
  
• Political parties
  
• Nomination contestants, leadership contestants or candidates of a political party
  
• Opinion polling firms
  
• General-circulation newspapers
  
• Organizations that have an existing business relationship with a consumer
  
• Organizations to business consumers
  

In other words, all the fucking asshats I didn't want to hear from in the first place. Money grubbing charities with whiny operators, annoying telemarketers selling me shit I don't need with accents I don't bloody understand, and politicians and political parties who want to lie to me about how they're going to make a fucking difference and work 'for me'.

Here's my my suggestion to the CRTC:
A Do Not Call List should NOT exempt anyone!

In fact, I'd like to be able to add whoever I want to the Do Not Call List, from the nosy neighbor who wants to know why we have lights on at 4:00 a.m. (I bloody work for a living, and deadlines mean working all hours to meet them), to the idiot who keeps dialing my number by mistake.

I hate telemarketers with a passion. They interrupt my work, dinner and relaxation; they intrude on my privacy, and annoy the hell out of me with autodialers, a machine spawned by the sickest, most twisted minds possible. An autodialer may have 10 operators linked to it, but dials 20 numbers. The first ten suckers to answer get a pitch for some crap, while the other 10 who pick up the phone hear nothing. I've had as many as 12 calls in a day like that

I'm lucky now. I don't have to put up with that crap any more, as I have a cell phone, and it's illegal for telemarketers to call cell phone numbers... but some lobbyist is out there right now throwing money at politicians to allow them to irritate the hell out of cell phone owners. Until then, I have peace and quiet with my cell phone. You poor bastards with land lines still have to put up with this shit, unfortunately.

Holy crap! I've managed to forget I had a Gmail account for over a year. So I finally remembered and logged in to check it out.

Over 1,100 Spam emails in the Spam basket..... and these are automatically cleaned out every 30 days!
In 18 months, that means nearly 20,000 spam emails!

These people sending spam desperately need to have their guts ripped out with rusty, dull, red-hot hooks.