Avram's journal

Here’s a reason to be glad to be back at the office: A couple of the project managers were leaving, and we had a little going-away festival, complete with a piñata strung up from a ceiling fixture. Below you can see one of the departing managers having at it with an aluminum pole. Originally she was blindfolded, but those pictures didn’t come out so well.

( Photo cut to preempt whining )

Yes, she was swinging that thing blind, surrounded by monitors and co-workers. We were all gathered around with that feeling of mixed dread and anticipation — Hope she doesn’t whack a monitor with that, but wouldn’t it be kinda cool?

I’m in the middle of a big, important project at work, the sort of thing where I’ve been cleared to work overtime. Looks so far like that won’t be necessary. See, my Big Trick at work, the one thing I can do better than anybody else, is what we call “draping” — using this obscure program that straddles the gap between 2D and 3D and lets us map patterns onto flat photos so as to make them follow the apparent curved surfaces. There are a couple of other guys who can use the software, but I’ve logged at least one order of magnitude more time than they have, so I’m just vastly more experienced with it. The current project involves a shitload of draping.

Fortunately, at some point we ponied up a few grand for the SDK version of the software, which lets us automate it. So one of the programmers got this running, and the upshot is that while somebody still needs to do the skillful end of the job, the mindless repetitive part can now be handled by a computer, the way things oughta be. What I feared would be a day or two of tedious donkey work turned into a couple of hours of me typing two commands and then doing other things for five minutes while they executed.

Inspired by this, I’ve finally installed cygwin, and on Monday I’ll give GTK+ and the GIMP a try, and I’ll see if I can’t automate the rest of the donkey work.

Anyway, turns out there’s no Games Club tonight, so I walked down to Union Square, parked my butt in Starbucks for a while, read some more of my current read (Karel Čapek’s The Absolute at Large, because Nick Tosches’s King of the Jews had become unbearably tedious), did a bit of sketching, fed my notebook fetish (and my fantasies of getting shit done) by picking up a Miquelrius gridded notebook at Barnes & Noble, then hit Virgin and picked up four CDs for $10 a pop.

( More art below the cut )

The long work hours continue. I’ll be working Saturday again this weekend.

Yesterday’s comics haul included Mother, Come Home by Paul Hornschemeier, collected in paperback at last, and the first volume of Amy Kim Ganter’s Sorcerers and Secretaries. Neither of which I’ve read yet, so I can’t tell you what I think of ’em.

And while at Jim Hanley’s Universe I ran into tinpan! That place is great for running into people; I’ve also seen goraina there. So Tinpan and I were chatting about comics and I wanted to recommend Joel Priddy’s Pulpatoon Pilgrimage, but there were no copies left. (Looks like Amazon has a few.) Here, make do with Priddy’s drawing blog, Beeswax. Make sure to go back to the beginning for nautical reference sketches and scans of his latest work in progress.

Hey, Tinpan, remember what I said about Dave Sim and Robert Crumb’s brother? Turns out I made an LJ mention of it on the same day that I wrote about Pulpatoon Pilgrimage, almost four years ago!

One annoyance on the elliptical cross-trainer was that my underwear kept sliding down my butt. It wasn’t till later in the day that I noticed the brand name — John Henry. It’s a good thing I’m not superstitious; that’s an ill-omened name to be wearing while pitting one’s endurance against a machine. And he died with a hammer in his pants, Lord Lord!

These past few days at work I’ve been doing similar. The particular part of the project I’m working on now is something I was convinced was impossible as late as last Thursday (having spent most of that day and the day before trying various approaches and failing). Finally on Friday I came up with a new approach, and slowly but surely, the difficult designs are yielding to a combination of intelligence and effort. I’d forgotten how good that feels.

Now that I’ve got some money coming in, I can afford to buy more than the trickle of comics I’ve been allowing myself. Work is right near Midtown Comics, where I was within $6 of earning $20 of store credit, so I picked up volumes 2 and 3 of Uzumaki, the trippy Japanese horror comic about a town haunted by spirals. Good, creepy stuff, and the story ends in three volumes, so you don’t have to go buying dozens of books to follow it.

On Tuesday I visited the Compleat Strategist to see if anything interesting and new was out (yeah, some, but nothing I felt like buying), and then stopped off at Jim Henley’s Universe and got issue #6 of Raina Telgemeier’s minicomic Take Out, and issue #2 of Comic Art magazine (with the Jack Cole girlie pictures).

I’d been sure there was a bunch more stuff I wanted to get, but at Cosmic today the only thing I saw that interested me was Absent Friends by Paul Grist and Phil Elliott. Haven’t read it yet. I looked around for the second Courtney Crumrin book (which I’d thought was out by now), but didn’t see it; likewise for a couple of manga volumes I’d been thinking of getting.

Friday:

I’ve got some freelance photo-editing work, starting Monday.

Dumped a big check in the bank. It won’t clear till Monday, leaving me with no money for the weekend. Killed four hours in Manhattan by reading In Green’s Jungles and sketching Starbucks customers.

( Sketches )

At Games Club, played Overthrone. We figured it out despite the badly-written rules. An entertaining game with some cute mechanical bits, but with a large luck component.

Not one, but two games of Puerto Rico! And the second game was played with only four players, which was exotic for our crowd, where the game is popular enough that you can have two five-player games going at the same time.

I blew my last two dollars on a bagel with lox spread on the way home.

Saturday:

Gaming at drcpunk’s. She did a pretty good job of jumping between the multiple fight scenes. After, she, Beth, and mnemex treated me to sushi and sashimi as a week-early birthday present.

DrCpunk and Mnemex are also getting rid of a bunch of books, and I wound up coming home with a bag full of them, including Arkham Asylum, which I’ve never actually read. I think I was avoiding mainstream comics when it came out.

One thing Jersey City’s teaching me is how good the transit was in NYC. Not just the transit itself, but the support services. Specifically: the maps.

There doesn’t seem to be a bus map for Jersey City. Each borough in NYC has a map showing all of the bus routes, overlaid on a street map of the borough, so you can find your start and finish points and then see what routes go by and where the intersection are. No such thing here. We’ve just got route maps for each route, so you’ve got to already know what route goes where, and gods forbid you need to transfer, ’cause then your decision tree starts branching out into mystery space.

It looks like there’s one bus route that goes past where tomorrow’s interview is, and it doesn’t intersect with any other bus route. It looks like there are two routes that go near me. Do either of them go within a few blocks of that first bus? I don’t know, and there’s no easy way to find out. NJ Transit’s website is supposed to be able to advise me, but when I use that form, it claims there are no routes near my origin.

As far as I can tell, from consulting an actual map of Hudson County and guesstimating where the light rail stops are (’cause they’re not marked, though the PATH stations are), it looks like my options are (1) walk three-quarters of a mile or so east to the light rail, take a two-and-a-half mile train trip to a spot three-quarters of a mile or so northwest of my destination, and then walk from there, or (2) just walk two miles south. In the snow, all uphill both ways, no doubt.