Dear Dan,

Dan, you are an inspiration. Thanks for putting your Moonlight Chronicles online! Yahooo! I applaud your effort to save the trees. I sure hope this method works for you. It sure is nice getting a daily dose of the adventures of the Moonlight Chronicles.

A big fan.
Will

Earlier in the year I was contacted by Noah Schoenholtz. Noah is an artist in Oregon and worked with the Oregon Community Credit Union to create this year’s Christmas Card for their customers. The card came out wonderful. Thanks so much for sending me a copy.

Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii); Illistration by Noah Schoenholtz; Photograph by Will Simpson

The reason Noah contacted me was because of an image in my Open Source Image Bank. The image below was used as a model for the card. Cool ay!! See what can happen when you give yourself away.

How I did it.

Above is my “Quicky Glass Globe” as I learned from Richard in Beeton, Ontario. Richard lives about 45 minutes South of my birth place Barrie, Ontario. My dad was stationed at Canadian Forces Base Borden back then. We migrated West to Calgary when I was only a few months old so I have no recollection of it.

Enough biographical drivel! Richard has blessed us with a great screencast using the Inkscape to produce the above graphic. He’s done the MacGyver and creates a mic stand out of tape, camera tripod, coat hanger and a pair of nylons. I had heard the there were lots of issues synchronizing sound with screencast in Linux but those problems must have been overcome. Richard has inspired me to give it a try. Now, I’ll have to come up with something to screencast.

Thanks Richard, I found it useful and the sound was just fine.

“Guard well your spare moments. They are like uncut diamonds. Discard them and their value will never be known. Improve them and they will become the brightest gems in a useful life”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Visit Glashaus by clicking on above sketch

One of my favorite voyeuristic pastimes is to look through artist’s sketchbooks, so I thought I’d point to some here. Peter Hoffman is a talented artist from Cologne, Germany. He has done some fantastic colorful and futuristic work with CD slipcover design but I think his more simple illustrations and sketches are fabulous. He captures the look and mood of his subjects in a way that draws you in especially with this pen sketches.