Domestic Geek

Ok, I said the other day we needed a powerwasher and today Marcus bought one! I cleaned the wheel wells on my car, washed crap off the outside of the house and since it was an electric model I even brought it inside to tackle the soap scum in our shower. w00t! That thing is cool!

When I was in design school, the woman that taught our prepress classes was amazing (she owns Phases Design Studio)! A lot of designers really don't get the technical side of things and their eyes kind of glazed over when she talked. She also held people to strict, high standards and that put a lot of people off. After I got over the initial fear of her because of rumors of how mean and unfair she was, she quickly became one of my favorite teachers ever. She has such a wealth of knowledge about how computers worked, prepress issues, design sense, font problems, etc. I used to love picking her brain.

I remember a piece of advice she gave in class one day and it echoed through my mind yesterday as I was dealing with yet another set of problems caused by designers that do not really understand the tools they use. "If you want to be a really good graphic designer, one of your first jobs out of design school should be in a prepress department." I received a similar piece of advice from Joelle over at Moxie Design Studios awhile back regarding being a web designer. She suggested that if a person really wanted to be a great web designer, they should start out in a web production company. Wise women both.

I guess my whole point here is that if you're going to truly master a craft, start out somewhere where there are lots people who have been doing it a lot longer than you and be open to picking up as many tips and pointers as possible. I know my thirst to understand how and why things work and my ability to ask the right questions is gaining me knowledge that, while making me a better prepress employee, ultimately makes me a better designer. It's kind of sad that we don't really have true apprenticeships anymore.

The day before yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. His daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, made a video duet with her deceased father (ala Natalie/Nat King Cole) to the tune "In the Ghetto." It was done very well. I may have to get this song...it and the video are available on iTunes.

Van Halen announced this week that they will be going back on tour with former front man David Lee Roth beginning in September. If a date is announced for Denver, I'm going to go. All shows that have started ticket sales are sold out.

I'm not sure how good they will be as they haven't toured together in decades and former bassist Michael Anthony has been replaced by Eddie's son Wolfgang. This will probably be the last round for these guys, so I'd better see them now.

I've seen the "Van Hagar" version of Van Halen a few times, but never with DLR. I totally hated that incarnation with former Extreme vocalist Gary Cherone. That's the one VH album I refused to purchase.

I was a huge VH fan in the '80s and early '90s. I had all their albums on vinyl and the very first birthday gift Marcus ever got for me was all of their CDs. Awww, how sweet.

You know, back in the day, expandable themes were kind of cool. If you're not familiar with the term, it means that a section of a site can expand or contact as you make a browser window larger or smaller to fill the space so that the whole site fills the window. That was fine for the days of 800x600 or even 1024x768 resolutions, but right now I have an Apple Cinema Display with a 1680x1050 resolution. Most times my main browser window fills the screen. Do you have any idea how much of a pain it is to read a blog entry that spans almost that entire entry sans sidebars? It's a royal PITA! Even better are the ones that have two columns: one that floats right an one that floats left with no set width for the whole page. It leaves a big huge freakin' while hole in the middle of their site. Not pretty, let me tell you.