Quick News

OK, let's take a break from my personal stuff for a while. There's yet this ongoing story developing about my fiancee's engagement ring that I'll eventually mention here but for now I'll deal with it and tell you all about it later. It's so ridiculous it's funny. It's a good inside joke for the two of us now.

Back to work...

Photoshop Lightroom Beta will expire at the end of this month. If you've been running it like I've encouraged you to, I think the beta software will automatically stop booting up after the 28th of Feb. I think the official version will be $199. Yeah...ouch. But don't think for an instant any professional grade software will come cheap. I know a LOT of professional photographers are considering this a staple program now to do all their post production work. It doesn't replace Photoshop...more like it overlaps in some areas but it does some things better.

Talking about photos, I may have the opportunity to go practice my photography this coming February for the kid's aloha run that takes place a day before the actual Aloha Run event. A client of mine is trying to find some amatuer photographers to take event photos....I figured it's a good opportunity for me to have some fun at someone else's expense. I'll be paid enough for lunch money and gas :) But at least it's only a little over an hour of "work". Perhaps if I get better this year in photography, I can convince myself to finally throw down some hard cash for that Canon camera I've been wanting. If you live in town, own an SLR camera, and you have nothing to do that day...you should come do this too. It will be fun and you get some practical field experience. Contact me and I'll put you in touch with the organizer.

There's quite a few courses being offered this season down at the University Pacific New Media program. I think I'm considering taking a few just to keep trying to boost my skillset. I think I'm most interested in the typography courses as well as some intro photography ones. I've taken courses from PNM before. They're pretty good albeit most of them are just one-day courses...which means the information you get from them can easily disappear of you don't regularly put them into practice.

Sappiness Below -- You have been warned.

End of another short "vacation" week with my fiancee. /sigh.

It wasn't as much of a vacation as either one of us would have liked. We managed to cram what could have been months worth of wedding planning into this one week. So it was quite exhausting for a few of these short days. There were some sketchy parts here and there where we vented a tiny bit of frustration on one another...but overall I think we got through it all just fine. I think wedding planning must have been created as a couple's first big challenge together...that's the only rationale I can think of for all this crazy things that has to be prepared beforehand.

Here I am on our last night together and I can't sleep. I lay there watching her sleep peacefully and I wish I could be like that character in the show "Heroes" where I could wish time to pause....just a little while.

No worries about project deadlines, fattening waistlines, endless bills. No concerns about taxes and business advertising. No fears about wedding details and future goals. No concerns about friends and family members in ill health. No angers, no frustrations, no pain...

Just pause.... so I can just lie here staring at her just a little while longer.

How sappy huh? Yeah, just typing this part of me wants to throw up haha. Well life moves on. Back to work! All 5 months of it. Hopefully I can bury myself by being so busy these months will fly by!

My ear is all ok now. Yes, having a nurse at home each day to help me administer the ear drops helped. But I'll tell you what...having a nurse at home to help you may sound good at first, until you realize most of your medical visits in your life were never really any fun. They usually involved some pain and a lot of jabbing. Well, that about sums up what I got under her care...pain and jabbing. :)

Getting better

Third time's a charm...I go see my mom's ear doctor, Dr K Chun, who turned out to be INFINITELY better then both of the prior doctors I went to. Yes, I had to wait about an hour before actually seeing him, but when I did he actually spent the time to talk to me, look at my symptoms, do a through check of everything, including the back of my throat and nasal passages, etc. Now here's a doc that makes a difference!

Anyway, turns out it isn't a fungal thing in my ear so much as it has been some kind of chronic irritation led on by moisture getting in my ear and staying in there too long.

I got more brain matter sucked out of my head again and this time I go prescribed some antibiotic drops to promote healing. At least this time I didn't get tossed out with a "OH, you have some hearing loss....bye!" statement.

It's nice to have my fiancee here with me now too! I have my very own drop administering care assistant! That's pretty cool! Without her I'll probably get the drops everywhere but IN my ear.

Vacation

As of today, I'm officially on VACATION! January 19th - January 28th. If you need to reach me for new projects or if you need any help with existing projects, please email me and I may periodically check my messages during this period. But unless it's an emergency, you may not hear a response till after the 28th. Thanks!

Today...a member of my business networking group suggested I dress in more "business-like attire". It's a fair request...he wasn't mean about it. I was dressed in my Lowe Studio tshirt with shorts and shoes. Something I've done many times before.

I guess as we are becoming an "official" chapter, he was concerned that we should all look more professional. Honestly? It rubbed me the wrong way. Those who know me know I HATE being told I can't do something. I don't take to authority too much. It's probably one of the main reasons I'm even in business for myself in the first place.

But, that little voice in my head told me to calm down, he was making an honest request and I can see that in a group like this, my appearance not only affects me anymore, but all the other business people in the group. SO....OK, I'll find myself some decent collared shirts for these meetings.

But it came to mind as I was sitting here this evening: what happens when I revert to doing the things to my appearance I did for many years? I have clients who knew me from the past and are still asking me why I don't have the colored hairdos, piercings and other things I used to do. I went through my whole college career with a mohawk for goodness sakes!

What happens when I finally get that sleeve tattoo I've been waiting for the past few years to get? No amount of cloth will be able to cover these issues up!

Well, I guess I'll tackle that when it comes. Frankly.... I don't give a beeswax. If they can't hack it, BYE BYE! Hopefully I get new business because they like my work...not because I look like every other monkey in the Downtown zoo. EEEP EEP.

Mutant

So the ear still isn't 100% yet. In fact, just yesterday in the wee hours of 3am in the morning I woke up and I couldn't hear anything out of my right ear. I drove myself down to Queen's ER to see of a doctor could look into it. They flushed it out again and sent me home about a couple hours later.

I don't know what it is...although a comment from my fiancee DID bring up a possibility. She reminded me I went swimming at Lanikai with my brother right around Christmas time -- roughly the time I started noticing problems with this ear. Now this is just speculation, because I had been to Lanikai at least a couple times prior to this incident and had no other problems. Plus this didn't feel like an infection. But I won't rule out that it could have been infected with something in the water. If it's true that's kind of sad...I always saw Lanikai as one of the more cleaner beaches on our island.

So my fiancee is coming to town at the end of the week. Yeah I'm super excited about it, but it's just my luck I feel a little zit breaking out on the tip of my nose. AAAAH! How's that for luck...3 months away from my girl I'm relatively zit free, and now when I finally get to see her, apparently my nose wants to grow a 2nd head. Summammabeetch. Well, I'm applying everything I can to stop this sucker in its tracks. I thought these kinds of problems only affect people in puberty?

MMM hmm... I'm turning into a 2-headed deaf-ear mutant. Turn away I'm HIDEOUS!!!

15 minutes later.

So I've been having some small problems with the hearing from my right ear these past couple of weeks. It kind of feels stuffed up like it does when you come off a long flight. Everything is a bit muted and my voice echoes in my head a little.

I don't think it's an infection because there's no real pain and no funky fluids come leaking out. EWWW. I think it's possible I just used a Q-tip to aggressively and maybe pushed some ear wax inside. EWWWW.

So yesterday I go see an ear doctor. Boy what an experience. I kidd you not, I was there for about TWO hours. Yet during this time I maybe only had face time with the doctor for no more then 30 seconds. Here's roughly how it went...

9:45 am.
I reach my appointment right on time. Stood behind a retired elderly woman who apparently felt like she had to fill in all her forms at the front desk. I manage to eventually get around her
to grab the forms, fill in all my paperwork, and sit down to start my wait.

15 minutes later...
I get my name called. I walk into a hallway that felt like I was going back in time. I SWEAR nothing has been touched in this office since the early 1980's. I saw chairs that my parents used to use when I was in elementary school. I saw an old Okidata dot matrix printer on the side (similar to the first printer I ever owned on my 1st PC)! I get invited to sit in a room surrounded by formica floors and walls straight out of a bad episode of the Brady Bunch.

15 minutes later...
Doctor comes in. I never met him before. He quicky shakes my hand and says, "Oh I heard you are full of it...." I assume he's referring to ear wax. EWWWW. How do you answer something like that. I figure the safest way to just prevent a long discussion about my personal hygiene would be to just mutter a brief "uh...yeah!" He looks in both ears.... and then walks back out. The whole thing took no more then 10 seconds....

15 minutes later....
Nurse comes in. Shovels something like a fireman's hose into my head to "irrigate" my ear canal. As if my head isn't filled with enough water already? Then... later she puts this tiny thing that's kind of like a vaccuum....I suppose it's used to suck up what little remains of my brain matter. She leaves.... tells me to wait for the doctor.

15 minutes later...
Doctor comes in. Asks me how I was doing. "Oh, ok...but it still feels a little weird doc". He looks at my ears. Tells me maybe we should take a hearing test... 10 seconds. He directs me into another retro room where the window drapes looks like they may have adorned the walls of Elvis's den.

15 minutes later...
I get a hearing test. Of course I can't hear half of anything after having just had a head full of water and a giant air vacuum sucking up all my ear cilia. I get taken back to the first room.

15 minutes later...
Doctor comes in....looks at my chart and says "Oh, so there's some high-pitched hearing loss... bye" Uhh.............................................. so.................... WTF!? On the way out he tells me not to use Qtips anymore.

I really don't know what I got out of that whole experience except that I don't need to buy Qtips anymore. My ear is still a little stuffed up today. I'm hoping it will eventually just pop out ok after a couple more days. /sigh.

Pencil Art

Cool pencil art! Neat huh? It makes me feel itchy though.... uuuugh. *scratch scratch* More here.

2007 Shopping List

I've been looking over the list of things I need for my business this coming year. You know, the more I'm doing print work like I wanted, the more I concede I have to get tools and equipment I didn't really care about that much in the past.

If there's things that a web-designer or programmer doesn't care about, it includes things like color calibration software, professional fonts, pantone books, etc. These things simply don't matter in the online environment. Now I find I need these things more and more...and they don't come cheap.

Pantone Book
Every print designer has one of these. I've been using my dad's old one all this time but lately I found that some of the colors on it are off. I think it's faded! What good is a faded pantone book I might as well use my eyeball to calibrate my colors. I can't believe how much these things cost though....my father once told me printers used to give these things out for free.

Monitor Calibration
Reluctantly, I think this is yet another tool I increasingly need to get so that my print & photography work looks exactly like what comes out on my printer. I've been able to get by using the aforementioned faded pantone book when I submit things to the printer, but it's getting really irritating not being able to print samples for myself at home to make sure things look good.

Canon 30D / Nikon D80
I still can't decide on this. This will probably be my last purchase at the end of this coming year as they don't come cheap. I keep checking on the prices of these things hoping that they'll just magically announce a 50% sale price on these cameras and I can scoop one up. I think this year I'll have a couple of opportunities to actually do some paid photography work...nothing big and fancy, but just a little money to do something I'm starting to like more and more. Why not?

A good chair
My back has been killing me lately. I think my mother may have been right about putting some investment into getting a really good chair. I still can't wrap my mind around spending close to a grand for an office chair, but if I'm spending hours and hours sitting here, I think I better get this before I end up with a serious back problem. I think the cheapest ergo chair I've seen so far is about $500 down at Fischer for a generic-brand ergo chair. I gotta try sitting my ass on one of these Steelcase chairs to see how they are. I think there's only one place in town that carries all these types of high-end chairs.

A good table
For anyone that's been to my home office...you know I barely have any table space. When I spread my things out to work, it's usually a combination of using parts of my table, my sofa, and the floor as my working space. Kind of sucks. On the other hand, no sense getting a table now if I may move after getting married. Besides I still can't find a good table that's simply big, wide, and flat...without a whole lot of drawers & do-dads getting in the way. I may just get this next year in 2008.

New computer
My current PC is starting to choke up a little. Not bad though, I've been using this thing since building it back in 2003....and it still runs all my Adobe suite applications without too much of a fuss, but as my files and photos are getting increasingly bigger and bigger to manage, I notice I sometimes have to watch out how many things I can run at once before I get some big error on my machine that screws everything up for me. There's a possibility I may consider an Apple this time....I hear the ones with the Intel chips demonstrate significant performance advantages with Adobe products over the PC counterparts. OK...that's a big selling point if true. In the past I actually thought a lot of programs ran super slow on the Apple machines in my former office.

New Software
I think Adobe will be releasing CS3 versions of all their programs this year. Which automatically means a few hundred dollars in upgrades this year. Sucks to have to keep up like this all the time, on the other hand, newer software versions usually means an improved workflow as new features are added.

Oh my that's a long & expensive list of things to get. Well, time to buss' ass this year huh!?

Random Thoughts

I'm in a ranting mood today.... caveat emptor.

Why do people type little star censors on their swear words? Like... F***, S***, A**hole.....
As if somehow that makes it all that much more easier to read? If someone takes offense to those words, do the asterisks somehow hide these words from their comprehension? You KNOW they're saying it in their head just the same like the rest of us. Just type it out....Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. AHHHH, it feels GOOOD! Try it. It's ok to be a filth mouth every once in a while...let loose! Express yourself.

I feel sorry for smokers now. They're treated like lepers. Not to say I don't mind the fact I can go anywhere now and breath in fresh air, but honestly even before this law was passed here in Hawaii I didn't have too much of a problem with second hand smoke anywhere I went. It's not so much the smoking habit that I want to see continue....but I feel bad that a group of people are losing another liberty. I don't think it's wise to pick and choose what we want our government to start taking away from us...even if it's a bad stinky habit with no redeeming value.

If I wanted to take away things that were harmful and irritating to me all willy-nilly, I'd take away big SUVs with tinted windows before taking away smokers.

Tipping.... who here tips because they WANT to, and not because they're afraid they'll find some extra "sauce" in their next order of Spagetti? Why am I compensating for the fact restaurant owners do not want to pay their employees what they deserve? For god's sake raise the menu items 15% - 20% so you can pay your pizza delivery guy that extra buck or two to drive that pizza to my doorstep. This is not a money issue at all....it just a stupid U.S. custom that's changed from a reward of excellent service, to an undeserving expectation.

It's not even consistent -- why does the waiter who drops 1 plate of rib-eye steak on my table during a 2-hour dinner deserve a huge 20% tip, when the kid at McDonalds busting ass to serve 50 people in that same 2 hours get no tip at all?

What the FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK? Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Sexy Type

No, I'm not turning this into some porn site. Take a closer look, this female figure is all created with type. I'm impressed. A friend of mine referred this site to me. Apparently it won some kind of creativity award.

Typography is one of those areas of design I've been trying to brush up on over the past few months as well. I picked up one or two books on the subject during my last trip to Hong Kong. I'm glad I did too....as I'm picking up more print work now I have to deal with it more often.

In art school they make you do creative projects with typefaces like the ones above. I never saw any as sophisticated though.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year ya'll. What a whirlwind 2006 was. I have a gut feeling 2007 will be a year to remember as well. I'm going on at least 2 trips away from home, getting married, and trying to survive the "sophomore slump" 2nd year of my business. Whew I'm getting tired just thinking about it.

This year's celebration was pretty low-key -- just me and my parents. My parents offered to make anything to eat this night and I requested my favorite...my dad's very own MaPo Tofu recipe. For the benefit of my readers (you know who you are), I've taken pictures and tried to remember the recipe for you guys.

Keep in mind this whole process takes my dad under 5 minutes to make this whole dish. So while I'm busy cranking out the photos, I am only going by memory here what's thrown into this thing. Forget about the measurements for these things because he just eyeballs everything. You're going to have to do your own trial-and-error to find out how to make this.

He starts off with the meat. Here he's cutting up chicken. Usually he uses ground pork. This time he pulls out chicken and tells me it's the "better white meat." I guess it all tastes the same but personally I like pork. Either way you're supposed to cut it with bigger chunks because of the texture.

Garlic. He used 2 cloves. Smashed it with the flat end of his huge ass cleaver, and diced it. Threw it unto this giant wok and seared it to golden brown. Is that "searing"? Remember I'm a non-cook here so my terminology might be off. Basically just cook the buggah until golden brown but don't burn 'em.

OK so you toss the meat into the pan with the garlic and you cook that up a little. Don't stir it too hard because you want it to be chunky and bind up a bit. Don't overcook it as well.

Now you get the SOFT tofu (don't get the regular tofu, it has to be the soft one), and you dice them up into the wok. Yeah my dad does it the fancy way with the cleaver action on the hands. If you chop your fingers off in this method don't blame me.

Same thing with the tofu. Don't stir that sucker too hard because you don't want it to fall apart on you, then you'll just get white oatmeal mush.


Add the green onion.

Soy Sauce,

One red chili,

Some salt. Some sugar. God knows how much. You see that spoon? That much.

Black pepper.

Fresh ground white pepper.

And then finally some starch to thicken it up a bit.

That's it. You got yourself a smackin' good dish of MaPo tofu a-la-baddass Lowe family style. Forget the stuff at restaurants this shit is the best. Look at that............mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Shit I'm hungry again.

Yes I realize my recipe here is probably not going to tell you how to make this. Perhaps in another year I'll get the actual measurements next time.

Happy New Year everyone.