Any Color You Like so Long as it's Black

Flatting and coloring Black Summer #4, and covers for Black Summer #4.

Flatting 100 Bullets #88, Green Arrow & Black Canary #2, and 20 pages from the 110 page Joker Graphic Novel.

I don't see many days off with this workload, or even much sleep, as Black Summer pages each take 7-10 hours to flat and color.

Any spare time will be put into more work on my new website, but as always, work and deadlines are the top priority.

The Canadian Dollar closed above parity at $1.0052 US today. I mourn for the days when the US Dollar was worth $1.575 CDN.

Must now charge clients in CDN dollars to avoid going broke as the turd that is the US Dollar does the swirly around the toilet bowl of the financial world.

Only good part of this news is that as the US dollar sinks lower, Canada will be able to buy the US in five years and turn it into cottage properties.

Just not too bright though, according to the signs posted in our complex.

I'm currently building the various coloring galleries for my new website. The new galleries are taking a fair amount of time, with entering in all the titles, descriptions, and credits.

These galleries will also be entirely flash based. I'm using Adobe Bridge CS3, along with Adobe Media Gallery to create them. I use Bridge to enter all the metadata for each of the images, status (whether I can show it yet or not), and the order I want the images in.

I've had to custom tweak the XML, hmtl, and JSINC files to get the galleries to work the way I want, which is one of the things that has taken so long - learning new languiages.

So, one of the reasons I went to all flash-based galleries is so the images will always fit your browser window. The galleries are scaleable, so whether you view them on a 13" laptop or 30" screen, they fill your browser window without the need for scrolling the image to see it all, and it doesn't resize your browser window in order to fit the images.

To see an example of how the finished galleries will work, you can take a sneak peek at the one I created for Doktor Sleepless covers.Doktor Sleepless gallery.

I still have several more galleries to enter information and find images for, plus some html to update and finish. But hopefully within a week or so, everything will be finished and uploaded, replacing my current website.

Canadian Private Copying Collective's (CPCC) is trying to help record companies steal your money again.

The CPCC has filed a motion with the Copyright Board that the levy be $5 for each MP3 recorder with less than 1 GB of memory, $25 for each device with more than 1 GB but below 10 GB of memory, $50 for each recorder with more than 10 GB and below 30 GB, and $75 for each recorder with more than 30 GB of memory. That would take the price of Apple's 30GB iPod to $365 from $290, a 26 per cent increase.

This is the second time the CPCC has sought to include iPods and MP3 players within the levy system. The CPCC first tried in 2003 but the levy was struck down by the Federal Court of Appeal, saying a digital audio recorder or device such as an iPod/MP3 player is not a medium to which the levy can be applied.

The Canadian Private Copying Collective's (CPCC) proposed levies on iPods and MP3 players that could also be applied to cellphones and personal computers in the future if the CPCC is successful.

http://www.londondrugs.com/Cultures/en-US/Content/CorporateInfo/NewsEvents/iPod+MP3+levy.htm

Write your MP and let them know CPCC cannot take your money to help prop up greedy record companies with their over-priced CDs and record stores.

Don't let the bastards take your money. If this passes I will *never* buy music on a physical medium again.

Whys does a 2-CD album like Pink Floyd's "The Wall" cost almost $30 on CD, while you can buy Bruce Springsteen's 3-CD box set with 40 songs on it for $9.99 on iTunes? Because they're greedy pricks trying to rip off consumers for as much money as they can.

I finally got my copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium upgrade installed, updated, and running.

Photoshop CS3 Extended has a lot of new features which I haven't even had time to look at yet. But my favorite new feature is an annoying warning dialog box you can finally turn off.