Since I have been unemployed the last three weeks I have been on a whirlwind journey of looking for interesting companies to work for and having interviews with said companies. Now that my resume is out there a bit, and I have had some decent interviews I got a chance to catch my breath a bit this last week. That meant I had time to catch up on some things.

Primarily my lawn and garden were pleased about this. I spent a couple of days weeding, spraying weeds, and mowing the lawn. It also got a bit of much needed water this weekend. I picked and ate my first crop of peas a couple of days ago. All in all the place is looking pretty decent, save for some weeds and the ever present ivy invasion.

I also spent an entire day working on my recently purchased motorcycle. The day I bought it I broke the turn signal switch. I temporarily manufactured a replacement and then bought a real replacement on ebay. My replacement broke the other day. It was the day after my ebay purchase showed up so it did its job. Yesterday I finally got around to putting the new switch on. Since it wasn't from the exact same bike it had a different wiring harness and wiring configuration. It took a few hours to figure out exactly what was what since I didn't have a wiring diagram for the new switch. Additionally the wiring diagram I had for the old switch wasn't quite right with regards to wire colors. I got it wired up properly but needed uranushertz's help to figure out why the left turn signal wasn't working. (Bad ground in the front turn signal lights.) After that it all went back together smoothly.

Now that I have rambled on about what I have been up to I finally get to the point of this musing. I have also been doing a bit of artwork in the last week. I finished a pencil piece I started last month and did a complete colored pencil piece in the last couple of days.

I also managed to modify my scanner such that there is no step on one side so I can more easily scan artwork bigger than 9"x12". The latest pieces are on 11"x14" (my preferred size of paper.) I have to scan them in two passes and stitch them together in Photoshop. This is a pain. It is particularly a pain because the glass is inset in the scanner necessitating a heavy weight being placed on the lid to make sure the artwork is flat. Since the color piece is in colored pencil this wasn't going to work. It would smear and ruin it. I figured out that the side bezels were just glued on the scanner so I could remove one side to allow the artwork to remain flat. I can't believe I didn't think of this years ago. It is still a pain to stitch two scans together but it is far easier this way and much less likely to ruin the artwork.

I actually scanned the color pencil piece a few times. I wasn't sure that it would work in color pencil so I originally scanned the ink drawing. That took a few tries to get the right level for the lines to show up in black and white. Then I had to scan it in color since it turned out decent. That meant I got to piece it together twice. With ink it pieced smoothly because I coule just slide it left and right. With colored pencil I had to flip it because I only removed the scanner bezel on one side. That meant it didn't piece quite perfectly. I had to cut one piece out and reposition it slightly. It turned out decent after a half hour's effort though.

I noted awhile ago that I was losing some detail when scanning at 300 dpi. Lately I have been doing all of the masters at 600 dpi. This really slows things down. It makes my computer feel slow. It even makes my network feel slow. Shipping gig psd files to the workstation from the windows box takes a bit of time over rsync/ssh. That doesn't even include how long it takes to save said files. I really need to build out a beefier windows box for Photoshop when I start actually executing on the web comic. 2.8GHz P4 with a gig of ram and a 7200 rpm hard drive just isn't cutting it. As I write this I just looked at my hard drive on the windows box. I am darn near out of space on it. Argh.

While I was writing my resume I reorganized all of my gallery artwork in a sane fashion. I also added in a bunch of missing art I found in other places on various machines and scanned in some new and missing pieces. Now all I need to do is finish writing my gallery generating software so I can display the new gallery in its organized format. Hopefully I will get around to that this week.