Reflections

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

It's alive...!

http://www.elevenmillion.com

That thing you were supposed to check back in March for... Well, it's here. March, May, you know how it goes. Last week Robin and I posted some of our latest sweat and tears to ElevenMillion.com with a little hosting help from our friend, Mr. Fahrni. Our latest online venture takes us into the world of online advertising for the masses. It's one of the waves of the future. Buy a link to your website, we'll publish it for you for a quarter, a year or a lifetime!

So... browse on over to ElevenMillion.com and buy yourself an online advertisement. It's cheaper than Google, easy to do and could just send thousands upon thousands of web surfers to your site.

Keep an eye on it to see how it grows and morphs as we get more customers. Should be one of two things: completely stagnant or quite interesting over the next year or so. Time will tell if we've wasted our time. :-)

Thanks for stopping by!

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Giddyup!
(Not that Rachel will read it... but there it is. I am "The Giddyup Man.")

Did I mention it's cold out? Holy single digits Batman!

Monday, February 27, 2006

Wow. It's cold out.

Wow! Cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, cold, COLD!

It's all the way up to 19 degrees F here today. How about where you are? Did I say wow??

Check back in March... Exciting news pending... :-)

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Whoops. Missed December. (Mumble, mumble, let's post something before January is over, mumble, mumble.)

Happy New Year everybody!

I try not to get too technical here, but I'm going to today, because I keep forgetting how to do this, despite my computer hacking skills. This post might end up being a future reminder to myself for the next time I forget. I've done this several times over the last few years and keep forgetting the specifics. When you forget things, you have to derive them from scratch and/or look stuff up here, there and everywhere all over again. And the documentation's not that helpful when you are able to find it, so here it is...

Here's how to make an ActiveX control fill Internet Explorer's window via HTML and get rid of all the "ugly" blank space around it and the silly useless scroll bar:

<BODY
  BOTTOMMARGIN="0" LEFTMARGIN="0" RIGHTMARGIN="0" TOPMARGIN="0"
  SCROLL="no"
>
  <OBJECT
    ID="MyControlsHTMLID"
    CLSID="CLSID:blahblah-blah-blah-blah-blahblahblah"
    WIDTH="100%"
    HEIGHT="100%"
  >
    <PARAM
      NAME="MyPropName"
      VALUE="String value for the custom property named MyPropName."
    />
  </OBJECT>
</BODY>

Obviously, you'll have to replace the blahblah and the MyPropName with something useful.

And if you write your own ActiveX control using ATL, take this little piece of advice... Implement IPersistPropertyBag and add entries for any properties specifiable via "HTML param name/value pairs" as PROP_ENTRY lines in between BEGIN_PROP_MAP and END_PROP_MAP.

Wow. Now if I forget, I'll hopefully be able to find my own post with Google... ;)

Thanks for your patience. Less geek speak next time. That's a promise!

Thursday, November 17, 2005

Are you ready?

We patiently await tomorrow... We had a 3-movie-marathon at our house last Saturday. Can you guess which 3 movies we watched all in a row from 1:00 to 9:30? Here's a hint: we'll be on our way to the Boston area tomorrow with tickets to a sold out showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on the IMAX screen in Natick. Nothing like a dragon flying at you out of a six story screen, I'm sure.

Enjoy! I know we will.

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

I ran across a blog entry called "Most classroom learning sucks." How could you not read it with a headline like that? My wife home schooled our kids for four years when they were in elementary school, so I guess I have a natural bias to click on that one.

Funny how other people writing their real thoughts down and publishing to the entire world in this uncensored medium of the blog has become such a catalyst for thinking.

Thanks to my wife for encouraging me to transform this sketchbook into a place that will hopefully make some other people think, too.

More philosophizing later...

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

I started this blog at the insistence of my friend, Rob Fahrni, an incessant blogger, who is still, after a few years, posting, on average, many times each week to his blog. At the time, I was totally into learning how to draw and thought it would be natural to use this blog thing to share my sketches with friends, family ... the world at large.

I haven't had a lot of time for drawing since our family moved back to New York state, so my "Online Sketchbook" blog has stagnated. In the meantime, I've been reading various blogs semi-regularly and have had the itch to write about more than just my sketches. So, I've decided to transform this site into one where I can write about, well, just about anything.

Some folks label their blogs as a "spout" or a "dumping ground." I think I'm just gonna call this one "Reflections" for now...

Thursday, April 21, 2005

Wow... It's been a year since I had anything worth saying about drawing; or anything I could actually scan in and share up here.

One of these days, I will get to that Harry Potter drawing.

Until then, here's my yearly post to the ole blog. Today's Thursday; don't forget to check out movie line of the week over at Rob's place.

Later

Wednesday, April 21, 2004

I have not been quite as active a drawer as I'd like over the past few weeks and months... There's one idea that I've had for a drawing since last summer that I hope to get to before I see someone else's sketch of it and ruin my mental picture. In the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, there's a scene right near the beginning where Harry is rescued out of his room in the Dursley's house by a bunch of wizards and witches who turn out to members of the "Order of the Phoenix." J. K. Rowling brilliantly describes these wizards as Harry sees them when he comes out the door. They are standing crowded on the staircase and as you read her exquisite writing, you get an incredible mental picture of what they all must look like standing there like that. I hope to draw it from that description and then eventually see my drawing brought to life when they make the fifth movie.

There you have it: one of the goals I hope to achieve before the fifth Harry Potter movie is released. You'll see the picture posted here when I get around to it...

Au revoir pour maintenant, (ttfn)

Monday, March 08, 2004

Ah, Seattle. I've lived in the shadow of the Emerald City for nearly eight years now. Here's my sketch of what is arguably the most recognized building in the entire Pacific Northwest... the 1962 World Fair's "Space Needle."

Nothing like the smell of a good pot of coffee in the morning. Unless you work in Seattle, of course. If you do, then walking past Monorail Espresso smells just about as good. ;)

Tuesday, October 14, 2003

Nature is always a good source of sketch subjects. Here's a drawing obviously called Tree1:

If you rent a Vespa scooter from Jet City Scooters and ride it over the Magnolia bridge, you can find this very tree located outside a school building up in that Seattle neighborhood. Jet City Scooters will deliver the rented scooter directly to you anywhere in the greater Seattle area. Then they'll pick it up when you're done with the rental period. Finally, scooter rentals for the rest of us! Right here in Seattle.

Let me know if you need more specific directions... I could look up the address and get a MapPoint map of this tree's exact location... but I'm too lazy to do that now. Maybe next time I'll be more ambitious. More likely not.

Stay tuned!

Tuesday, October 07, 2003

Happy birthday Lisa! I won't tell anybody how old you are today. Let's just say I'm still older... Not old, just older. (Track #6)

Here's another gecko I drew; this one came off of a cap that I wear when we run sometimes.

Speaking of running... Robin, Nathan and I ran our first 5k road race on Sunday. The "Issaquah Rotary Run 2003" was part of our annual Salmon Days festival here in town. Results were recorded by Perfect Time Events. (Check out our results live on the web by clicking on the hyperlink and scrolling down to the 2003 Issaquah Rotary Run.) We came in right smack in the middle of the pack. I ran it in about 27 minutes and Robin and Nathan came in around 30 minutes. Woo-hoo! Go Cole fam!

TTFN

Saturday, September 27, 2003

How about a Gecko? Rachie loves this one...

I drew this one based on the back of a t-shirt that I brought home from Maui last time we went. Ah, Maui... It's been more than a year since we ran along your beautiful beach and tasted the fresh papayas at our outdoor breakfast table listening to the gentle sounds of the surf. We'll be back again someday.

In the meantime, at least I have a picture of a gecko to take a gander at every once in a while...

Mahalo for listenin'...!

Friday, September 19, 2003

Happy Anniversary, Robin! I love you! 16 more years of fun and adventure start today.

Here's my best nose capture to date... These lips and nose are precious to me.

I strive to be able to capture her whole face some day with my paper and pencil. A little bit of progress at a time, right?

Sunday, August 10, 2003

Blog, blog, blog. I don't have time to blog... ;)

I've been trying to get some new sketches posted to blog about: what can I say, quite often there's more to do than there is time in a day. I've got several unfinished sketches nearly done, some done but not scanned in yet, and some others still that ... let's just say ... you won't see them on this website.

My daughter took a Monart class and prodcued seven masterpieces this spring. You can check them out on the web at http://members.aol.com/DLRdave/Art/RachelMonart5thGrade.html.

This one was first: Hedwig, the most famous owl in all snowy owldom.

More to come...

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

OK. I have to get this one posted before April expires at midnight... Oops. Missed April on the east coast. Oh well.

My daughter and I did a one-shot "Monart" lesson one night at a homeschool association meeting. We copied a chameleon under the instruction of, well, the instructor.

My daughter did this one:

I did this one:

Click on one of the images for a larger view...

Next post is ... well, OK, I have no idea what my next post will be because I haven't sketched it yet. Guess you'll just have to check back later.

Hasta,

Thursday, March 13, 2003

Whew. Time flies when you're not having fun, too.

Two months have gone by since I posted last... I did these sketches as a Christmas gift to my sister. She said it was OK to post them here. This is my niece and my nephew. Copied from great photos of them.

Click on one of the images for a larger view...

Next post is a pair of pictures that my daughter and I did at an art lesson.

Stay tuned...

Monday, January 13, 2003

This is a quick sketch that I did of my daughter while she was watching TV this past Thanksgiving. It took me about an hour and because I was doing it quickly, it doesn't look exactly like her. It's close, but something's not quite right.

It's much easier to get realistic looking drawings when you can take your time and copy something that's static and unchanging. Live subjects are more difficult because they squirm and wiggle... ;)

Anyway, here it is:

Click on the image for a larger view...

Coming soon: some even better "photo copies"...

Monday, January 06, 2003

Happy New Year!

Back to the book:

Click on the image for a larger view...

This is a practice sketch of a line drawing published on p. 179 of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.

The human face makes an excellent drawing subject from any angle!

Next: a live subject profile.

Tuesday, December 31, 2002

I'm also interested in fractal images and all of the software concepts associated with making pretty, computer-generated pictures. This is a black and white image created in Frackle, a Mac and Windows fractal creator that I wrote. Followed by my hand drawn sketch of it... I did this one just to practice copying shapes correctly. Both made by me; vastly different creation techniques. Which is a nicer image?

Click on one of the images for a larger view...

Who says computers aren't artistic? ;)

Maybe one of these days I'll blog as much as my good friend Rob; but then again, if I blogged as much as he does, you might not be able to keep up with reading these posts... See you in '03!