So Many Projects
On my plate right now I am designing two websites for family and redesigning Crimson Haven. One project is And I’m happy for them all. Doug Watson Digital is the one for my uncle by the name of, you guessed it, Doug Watson. If you happen to be interested in employing an extremely talented artist for teaching, composting, video game art, or whatever you should definitely check out his site and give him an email.
For an entirely different crowd there is Splitpin Engineering Services which is the website for my dad, Dave Watson. At this very second it’s just a fancy online business card, but come the weekend there will be a new feature added, a digital parts manual. We came up with this idea while my dad was complaining that one of the most time consuming parts of his job was when somebody called his antique aircraft spare parts business saying something to the effect of "I need the whatchyamacallit that fits between the fiddly thing and that other gidget. My original plan was to just make one simple database and have a page where you could pick a manual, pick an item of interest from the manual and be given a diagram. Then you type in a number from the diagram and you get a part number complete with name and description. It all seemed so simple, till my friend Roo decided to have a day long conversation with me about the benefits of having a nice relational database. Which, to this day, I am not using any of the benefits he listed to me. But hey, how could I turn down an opportunity to try something needlessly complicated in the hopes that I’ll be glad for the practice in the future.
In return for doing these two sites I’ve managed to lay my hands on some very nice software and a touch of hardware which I most certainly could not afford if I were not a student. Among a collection of boxes labeled Adobe and Maya I also got a replacement for my reliable but diminutive Wacom Tablet Graphire1 4×3. Now I have an absolutely massive Wacom Intuos3 6×11. What an upgrade! What little desk space I have left! The space needed to lie the thing flat is a neccicary sacrifice. With two monitors and one dinky little tablet, running photoshop meant either only controlling one of my monitors with the stylus or having my strokes be distorted as it tried to cram all that screen real estate onto a square whose dimensions wouldn’t intimidate a sticky note. Since the whole point of me having two monitors was so that I could run photoshop and do something else with the extra monitor space, only being able to control one monitor at a time without dropping my pen and picking up my mouse was becoming very annoying.
The thing is amazing, it even has function keys on the left and right so I don’t have to take my hand to the keyboard to switch my brush tool to my scrolling tool or my eyedropper. It has a pair of narrow touch pads as well on either side which can be used for zooming or scrolling but mostly I find them too unresponsive to be very useful. I spent some time looking at the Cintiq as well, that being the tablet that is also it’s own monitor, a true digital canvas. I played with a few at the local Fry’s Electronics but was not enthused by the lag (although slight) and mostly the poor calibration. It worked fairly well as long as I kept my stylus in the middle of the screen, but if I took it to one of the corners, the cursor would float away from where my pen-tip was. It may be that the display model was just broken or they had not set it up properly (I messed with the settings a bit ot see if I could fix it myself and could not) but, it seems to me that if your going to have a tool with a pen it should be calibrated so that the pen tip is where your mouse is, and that if it isn’t, even if it’s just off by a tiny bit, I’d be spending my time hovering my stylus and trying to look under it to make sure the mouse was in the same place, and if I’m just looking at the mouse anyways, why not have a MUCH cheaper option and use a Bamboo or Intuos depending on the space you need, or… uh.. have available on your desk.
More personally I’m looking forward to heading back to Bradley. I expect the weather will suck mightily and my room mates may already be annoyed with me for not moving my stuff into the right room in time for their return, but I’ll have Gencon to look forward to as well as my next group of projects that seem to dwarf these two by a great deal.
First is a website for one of my professors, a blog/forum/news/political activist site. The second is for the geek community at BU, Psi-Phi, of which I am a member and currently Chief of Operations. This will be a blog/forum/news/everything geek site. I hope to use WordPress MU in both of them with some backend futzing about to get a forum working as well. This on top of what might be a whole other project as well! It’s going to be a busy semester, that’s for sure.