Just a quick update on all things happening here – or not happening as the case may be.

It’s 2009 was a crazy summer at the Maruska household with an extensive house remodeling project taking up most of my time; which was inspired by the highly anticipated arrival of our daughter, Madeline; which in-turn has led to a pretty crazy autumn and winter as Jenn and I try our hand at parenthood. (It’s all good, BTW – we’ve been blessed with a well behaved co-operative little one – thank you)

This being the first week in a long while that I’ve gotten any quantity of sleep, I thought it a good time just to say hi and maybe spark anyone’s RSS feeds out there that may still be listening.

I plan on getting some new content posted at some point and re-kindle my relationship with Alias Design.

And speaking of design, it’s been a good year for that too with plenty of awards to be had by Teague – which is fodder for another post, another time.

Autodesk recently updated Sketchbook Pro for 2010 (almost whole year early!). I was on the beta team for this one and it was a pleasure working with these guys. They have done an outstanding job refining an already great program. The addition of straight edges and ellipse guides makes the tool a whole lot more useful to me in many ways. It’s maintained it’s simplicity, but gained much of the attraction that sketching in Alias has had for years. Definitely give it a try!

This was a sketch I did during the beta cycle on a particularly rainy Sunday here in Seattle. Enjoy!

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have a fascination with Lego and Star Wars and when the two met, out popped another hobby. For the past few months I’ve been noodling away on a studio scale prop replica of the Millennium Falcon. It dawned on me that I should really document some of the process – especially since my product design background lends itself to an entirely different approach to typical fine scale modeling.

So as not to distract from the content of this blog, I started another one. I’ve been frantically populating it with stuff as to try and make-up for lost time so forgive me if the posts thus far don’t seem very organic.

Enjoy,

J.

Hey all! As some of you may know, Jenn and I have been having issues with Blogger. Everything worked fine for almost two years, then suddenly we couldn’t post images and then, over the last couple weeks, we couldn’t post anything. The posts show-up in our dashboards but they never get re-distributed back to our server and thus to you.

After some attempts at contacting customer service with a miserable lack of results (thanks, Blogger) we’ve dumped Blogger and are now serving up our own Wordpress sites. Bear with us as we update stuff. I’ll be trying to maintain links to images, but the permalinks to articles may have shifted in the upgrade. Let us know how it’s working on your ends.

Cheers,

J.

Playing with Ecto. It’s a blogging application that hopefully will take a bit of pain out of using Blogger’s web interface…

This is a photo from the Seattle Art Museum.

Apparently, Blogger doesn’t allow for third party blogging applications to post directly to their service. Ecto doesn’t allow posting of images directly to FTP locations (like I usually do). It does, however, allow for posting images to Flickr and linking from there. It’s pretty painless.

It links with iPhoto too; which is pretty cool. I was able to post my Canon RAW files directly and it resized and converted them to jpegs automatically.

I’ll continue to give it a test drive until the demo runs out…