Posts in category Making Good Art

The Hunt For Good Books

May26
2013 Rob Written by Rob

We had a great time in Hawaii. It was a desperately needed vacation for both of us – and us together – and we’re home much relaxed and with recharged batteries.

Whenever we’re traveling, I don’t feel like our trip is truly complete without a bookstore hunt, the funkier and more independent the better. In Kauai, it turned out that there were only two real bookstores, and one of them – Borders – was long closed by the time we got there. So we tooled over to the other side of the island (oh the suffering, the suffering.. miles of Pacific coastline and lush green) to visit the Talk Story Bookstore. Without a doubt, it met all my critical funky and independent book browsing needs in Hawaii, and when you’re in the area I strongly recommend checking it out.

Actually finding the right book, that’s a different challenge.
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Posted in Diversions, Everyday Life, Travel

On Care and Feeding of White Whales

Jan25
2013 Rob Written by Rob

So for the last twenty years or so I’ve been reading a book. I started reading it somewhere around 1994, and have yet to finish it. It’s my white whale. One of them, anyway.

The book is Magister Ludi, by Hermann Hesse. It has barely a plot, is basically four hundred pages of prewar German existentialism, and I’ve never managed to get beyond about half of it. Every couple of years I take another swing at it, figuring that eventually I’ll either plow through and be free of it, or finally get the more sublime underlying message that scored it a Nobel in 1946. And every time I get about a hundred pages in and get distracted by some other book and back on the shelf it goes.

Been doing this now for almost half of my life, and now I’m doing it again.
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Posted in Faith, Work

Mind Over Matter and Magical Elves

Aug07
2012 Rob Written by Rob

Faith’s an interesting animal. It can lead you to do some pretty stupid things, can inspire you to accomplish some pretty amazing things, and just get you through some pretty crappy things. Some believe it moves mountains. Others argue that it only really distracts, deludes and makes money for the dishonest. I dunno – when people manage to ship the equivalent of a Buick through 352 million miles of bitter cold, radioactive emptiness to perfectly land, via rocket-powered hovering skycrane, exactly when, where and how they planned with spectacular precision, I think it’s fair not to shitcan the faith concept altogether.

But then you got morons who walk on fire and get themselves burnt. And who later, while suffering serious burns, insist that their failure was that they weren’t in “peak state”. I’m sure basic thermodynamics played a role as well, but whatever.

Obviously one breed of faith gets better results than the other.
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Posted in Faith, Family and Friends

Things To Do

Jun19
2012 Rob Written by Rob

Around here, we work on a monthly cycle. We also work on a per-project hourly basis, which means that we only get paid (though, paid well) for actual hours spent working on specific projects that turn into real deliverables. That means spending a lot of time trying to figure out each month how to stitch together existing deliverable opportunities in such a fashion that, in the end, we still get to do cool things like pay bills and eat food. It usually works out, one way or another.

Mid-month is the low gravity point in the cycle. By this point, we’ve gotten invoices out and things are at their most quiet. We’ve successfully completed another mad-dash sprint to the billable finish line, gotten deadlines out, and it’s time to start again.

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Posted in Work
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