Zeke

Someone asked to see a photo of Zeke (my mom's dog), so I'm posting up this one, which was taken a couple of months ago, when he was about a year old. The photo was taken by my sister.

A Screenshot for the UI Hall of Shame

Okay, I'm a reasonably intelligent guy, so I was able to figure out what I need to do, but one could be excused, upon a straightforward reading of these messages, from concluding that the goal is impossible to reach due to conflicting requirements. I can't install AD until after I run adprep, but I can't run adprep until after AD is installed (which is what will make this computer a domain controller). What? Gah.

Screenshot

Okay, I'm just going to post this screenshot here to demonstrate something.

Fall is here.

Fall has arrived, and you know what that means...

Winter is coming!

Now working on a serif font design.

Actually, perhaps serif is an inadequate term for this level of decoration.

Anyway, I was playing with design ideas for a serif typeface, and after a few rounds of messing around, this is where I landed for the first glyph, a lowercase a.

Update: After doing the next couple of characters, I realized that the a is too tall: I inadvertently designed it to the cap height. That probably means that the character would need to be redesigned if I decide to go ahead and finish the font.

Thoughts? Is this worth turning into an entire typeface?

Blooming Grove font picked up by dafont.com

A while ago I submitted a font I've been working on to dafont, a site that makes fonts freely available for download. They screen submissions before placing them on the site, so today I checked back to see if they'd accepted it. They have, and you can see it here.

The fonts on the site use a wide range of licenses, depending on the author, representing pretty much the full gamut of licenses that don't require payment up front. If you want to see ones you have to pay for, there are other sites, but dafont has the distinction of being the first result when you search for the word "font" on Google, so I thought that would make a good starting point for distribution.

In the case of Blooming Grove, I have released the font into the public domain. Personally I feel that this makes the font more useful, since it removes restrictions that might otherwise prevent it from being used in unanticipated ways. A lot of custom font licenses, for instance, are not compatible with @font-face embedding. In some cases (e.g., Larabie) that's a deliberate choice, which is the author's prerogative, but in other cases it's probably inadvertent. Jos Buivenga (of exljbris) has included special provisions in his license to allow @font-face embedding, which is very nice, but ultimately there's no telling what future use will come along...

Not wanting to face this issue with Blooming Grove, and particularly not wanting to potentially have to rewrite license terms as future needs arise, I have chosen to release it into the public domain, which should cover all the bases in one fell swoop. Need to add a cedilla so you can use the word "facade" in full-bore pretentious mode on your website and display it in a @font-face embedded slightly-modified version of the font with the little mark under the c? No problem. Need to bundle it with your application that uses the GPL version 4 with the anti-bundling clause? No problem. Currently, there's no GPL version 4, and even when there is, it very probably won't prohibit bundling with differently-licensed fonts. But you never know what the future holds. With public-domain material, it doesn't matter. You can use the font for whatever you need to use it for, no restrictions.

Oh, and I'm working on a bold variant, for which all of the main letters (both lower and upper case) are now complete. Once I get the numbers and the major symbols and punctuation done, I'll be putting it up alongside the regular weight.

And if the Open Font Library ever gets their upload facility working again, I'm going to put them there too.

Canning Season

It's that time of year again.

First, you get a few bushels of these things. We used, when we lived in Canal Fulton and had a large back yard, to grow them ourselves (mainly the roma variety, which give a higher yield of thicker sauce per bushel). These days we buy them, usually from the Amish. Roma tomatoes are preferred, but romas cost 70% more per bushel this year, so we went with the regular kind. Romas are worth more, but not 70% more.

Oh, you'll also want some of these and some of these.
You wash the tomatoes, cut them up, put them in the hopper, turn the handle, and run them through. I put up a short video of this on YouTube.

Out comes the juice, which you boil down for a while.

At some point you cut up the onions and peppers, then put them through the blender, with a bit of the tomato juice just to make them blend easier. They then get added to the rest of the tomato juice (no photo of this step yet), along with possibly some tomato paste for added thickness. (The tomato paste isn't necessary if your tomatoes make a good thick juice in the first place, another reason the roma variety are preferred.)

There are a couple of other ingredients as well. Maybe I'll post up our recipe at some point.

You put the sauce in jars (no photo of this step yet), then load them (again, no photo yet) into the waterbath canner.

Outcome: beautiful, glorious canned spaghetti sauce. Server over vermicelli, with grated parmesan on the side. It's also good for rigatoni, lasagna, practically any pasta, really. We were almost out when the tomatoes came into season this year, so we hope to do seventy quarts or so. You can't buy this stuff at the store. I mean, you can buy stuff that says spaghetti sauce on the label, but you don't want it.

Oh, here's a photo of my mom's new wooden stirring spoon. The old one broke, so we got this one from that place in Winona Lake that sells wooden kitchen implements.

How to drive a dog right out of his mind

In the photo, you can only see one. We don't know exactly how many were living under there, but we do know that at least three of the little ones where white, and at least two of the little ones were black.

Zeke (the dog) couldn't reach them, but that didn't stop him from agonizing. They were able to get clear back up against the edge of the house behind there, and also there was a space directly under the steps (to the left in the photo). So every time we let him out, he went crazy sniffing and sniffing all around the porch and refused to have any part of doing anything else (such as, for instance, the business a dog normally takes care of when you put him out, if you know what I mean). Sarah ended up taking him elsewhere, on the leash, a couple of times a day, for fear he'd destroy his kidneys holding it.

He didn't want to leave the bunnies and come indoors, either. We pretty much had to drag him in, and thirty seconds later he'd be whining at the door. We'd tell him no, and thirty seconds later he'd be whining at the door, every thirty seconds, all day, every day, for weeks.

They've moved on, now, thank goodness. (The photo was taken a couple of weeks ago.) I guess the youngins got old enough to move from the nest. We're very glad.

Dark Alley

We have, in Galion, an extensive system of alleys. Basically, these are poorly-maintained streets that run parallel to the regular ones, but in the middle of the block, between the back yards, rather than between the front yards and sidewalks. This one is always a bit dark, due to various shade-casting objects on both sides of it.

So yeah, this is what passes for a dark alley around here. Batman, eat your heart out.

This is another shot I took while experimenting with aperture settings, but this time, there's a wider range of distances between the camera and the elements in the photo, so theres' a much
more noticeable difference between F 2.5 versus F 6.4. This, if I haven't got the order I took them in mixed up, is the shot taken with the former setting. The other one is significantly less clear when you zoom in and look at the finer details.