Daily Archives: April 10, 2007

My Card

Posted on by
17

Every once in a while someone asks me for a card, or they want to know the address of my blog, but neither of us have anything to write on. The people that ask for the blog address inevitably ask again later. I figure having a card to hand those people will help.

For the last couple of days I’ve been spending a bit of time poking around in Baby Photoshop, and I think I’ve just about hit the limits of my graphic design abilities, such as they are. Here’s what I’ve got:

Muddled Rambling's business card?

Obviously this image isn’t actual size, I made it bigger so you could see the words better at screen resolutions. I started with my name much smaller and over to the side, but then I made it stand out more so people who look at the card later will be more likely to remember where it came from.

Of course, I’ve spent way more time on this than I should have. The first step was searching for fonts. I don’t have the original photoshop file for the logo at the top of the blog, nor do I have the fonts. There are some excellent sites chock-full of really cool free fonts, but I couldn’t find two of the ones I had used originally. Oh, well. Then came a long process of shifting things around, tweaking color and transparency, letter spacing, and on and on.

Photoshop was a little annoying while I was working on this. When I saved and reopened the file most (not all) of the text layers were converted to bitmaps, which meant it was much more difficult to edit them. Perhaps I should have used The Gimp from the get-go. It has it’s own annoying features, but now I’m afraid to close the file in Photoshop for fear of more bitmap conversions.

So what do you think? I’d very much like to hear from anyone who has an opinion about this sort of thing. I’ll be test-printing today to make sure that the smaller text is easily legible. (The part at the bottom reads “Sucks less than most blogs!”) The background text has a couple of holes in it, as well. Any suggestions for short words or phrases that apply to MR&HBI that I could fill in with?

Thanks!

Help Wanted

Posted on by
1

I’m not sure why it was I was reading that part of the newspaper. There wasn’t much in sports, I suppose, and the headline that a major cleric in the middle east is calling for the violent removal of US forces didn’t really seem like news. They know we’ll be leaving eventually anyway, so by speaking now they can take credit later. I have a pretty fertile imagination (lots of bullshit), but I cannot imagine any scenario in Iraq that even vaguely resembles us ‘winning’.

Which is to say, I was reading the classifieds this morning. There is a section in the Albuquerque Journal job classifieds called “Drivers Wanted”. They mean truck drivers, of course, people with special training and special licenses to haul freight or get cement to the site on time. Nestled among these was an ad by Dave. It seems he is a vietnam vet and he and his buddy are heading out in an RV to see America. They want a driver.

OK, OK, I’m not going to take the job. (I might keep scanning the ads for the two Victoria’s Secret vets looking for a driver.) That it would be pretty stupid for me to drop everything and hit the road for a few months is kind of a lost argument on me, and when it comes right down to it I’m probably better off hitting the road with strangers than I am with people that I would regret never speaking to again. But.

Just how unmoored am I? Do I even have a frickin’ keel? Free is nice; rudderless is lame.

I am a boat, not a raft. I am sailing unknown waters, but I’m still steering. There are clouds building on the horizon, a big blow is heading right for me, but I have a rudder and a keel and even sails, if no engine. Hitting the road with a couple of strangers could be the stuff of the next great American novel, but I’m already saturated. I simply can’t afford to do something like that. I’m behind already, not just with writing but with keeping up with friends, getting a 1.0 of Jer’s Novel Writer out, getting short stories to magazines and partials to agents, and to drop all of that now for a road trip would be pretty damn stupid. People joke about my inability to plan, but I do have a plan; it’s painted with a 4-inch brush and favors the distant future over the immediate present, but it’s a plan. To punish the nautical metaphor just a little more, I’m on the open sea, fresh water is running out, but I can see the stars.

I’ll be calling Dave in the morning, just to find out what the story is. You know, out of curiosity. Just to see where they’re coming from, and if they know where they’re going.

Thanks!