I can’t really take credit for this artwork — I saw this Chinese Health illustration of the image below, and had to redraw it for a shirt. Other than that, more sledding today, and I registered a new domain — I’ll post it when there’s something to see — to work on the book project. I’ve been slacking a little on that, and I figure if I post the interviews one by one, it’ll break it into manageable pieces and I’ll get this thing done on schedule…
Went sledding after school for a couple hours — after a friend told me at lunch about a childhood acquaintance that died sledding … ack … this definitely went through my mind when I saw a kid today slam into a tree head first at the bottom of the hill, to say nothing of every time Nefarious caught serious air… Significant moguls have been created and the hill is rather treacherous. I think Nefarious rode a total of seven different sleds — the kids always trade them around. I got recognized from the summer as well — one of the kids said, “don’t you have a tattoo on your eye?” Yeah, it makes you memorable. Other than that, I had a terrible fall, and I suspect that after the pain killers wear off I will find myself with an arm that will not allow me to get anything off the top shelf. Not that it will slow me down.
By the way, my camera — an Olympus Stylus 1030 SW — has more than paid for itself… I spent a little bit more to get a camera that’s solidly waterproof and shock proof, and already I’ve had it out dozens of times that would have destroyed my old point-and-click. Definitely a purchase I’m happy with.
Everyone’s asking me what I thought of the inauguration yesterday and the contracted speech (no, Obama didn’t write it — a 27 year old white professional propagandist kid did)… It will be very interesting to see how much actual “CHANGE” President Obama is able push through over the next few years. I think he’s more centrist than many of his followers see him as — he’s no Kucinich — but at the same time, I think he’s more dedicated to and capable of actually doing what he says. That said, as much as the neo-con figurehead/mascot that was Bush rode off into the sunset (that is, sold his faux ranch and moved into a whites-only gated urban community), the forces he represented — the rich — are deeply ingrained in the political process and still have an enormous amount of power.
Take the widely supported financial bailouts… In my opinion, they do very little to help the “little man”, since it’s all money borrowed — with enormous interest — from the people anyway. As I see it, the rich unsustainably stole enormous amounts of money from the system, and when the system collapsed, instead of being forced to put that money back into the system, they simply took by force the required assets from the poor in order to allow their crime to continue. One of the biggest reasons that I think Obama could be a good thing is that he’s the least indebted to the wealthy and the corporate, and the most recently poor personally. For the last hundred-plus years, the US government (and really, most governments around the world) has worked for one primary purpose — to move wealth up the class system, and keep it there. What I’m most excited about is that Obama may be a politician dedicated to reversing that trend while at the same time protecting the free market system.
Anyway… I’m continuing to work on the Kubla Khan children’s book… Today after school I’m going to pick up a couple more panels so I can get started on the next pages. I think I’m going to 90% finish everything, and then come back to them for the finishing touches. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to post-process them digitally or keep the process “pure”. I’m leaning toward the latter but there’s a lot to be said about the former.
I doubt this will be of immediate use to any readers, but you never know.
I was moving my sister’s blog, and one of the problems was that her previous site had crashed, and her old host was uncooperative in giving her FTP access to download it. Luckily most of the files were linked from another blog, so I had many of their URLs. What I had was a text/html file that contained the links, so I wrote a utility that goes through an html file and finds all the links off a given URL, and then downloads those files to a local directory.
Usage… you’ll be asked for a bunch of different things:
It’s pretty simple to use. It will do larger files, but on anything larger than a couple meg it’s pretty slow. If someone needs a version that does more files or larger files, wants a GUI, or needs custom web-harvesting applications, drop me a line. They only take me a few minutes to customize.
Download: linklist.exe (35k)
