Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Announcing Animal Logo Wednesday











I used to not be able to draw animals. People would ask me to draw something, and I would say "OK, as long as it's not an animal or a girl". (Side note: I still can't draw girls without photo reference). I remember being very young and being very frustrated not being able to get the vulture on the paper to look like the drawing in my head. Another time, my dad told me to draw a monkey hanging from a limb with the words "Hang in There!" so we could send it to my sister in Ecuador. I spent hours, and ended up with what looked like a handicapped sloth if it had been turned inside out. But the letter turned out to be pretty timely, since she was literally hanging from a tree limb over a volcano when she got the letter, and would have fallen to her death if she hadn't gotten it.

Now, since my job includes drawing every animal in every style, I feel pretty confident. For every project, I'm supposed to do 2 different ideas (the more different, the better). And a lot of people request an animal drawing in their logo, even though we try to counsel them that illustrative logos are not the most effective. But that rant is for another post.

Anyway, every Wednesday I'll post two drawings for the same project, in black and white, so you're not biased by the colors. This week's is for a car wash, and they requested a turtle on wheels. You can vote on which is your favorite. Or not. I'm not here to tell you what to do.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

How to kill half a day while losing faith in humanity

My new favorite toy is this website that searches the statusses of Facebook subscribers. What's weird is that however weird I get for my search inquiry, there's always someone that has that phrase. What also makes it fun is re-discovering how retarded Facebook is.




















Tuesday, June 01, 2010

Lagoon

We chose to commemorate our country's fallen at Lagoon. It had been a couple years, and we wanted to try out the new aptly-titled Wicked ride. While we were enjoying my favorite part, Pioneer Village, we decided to get our family pictures done.

We had an interesting incident happen at the Ferris Wheel. By "interesting" I mean "disgusting to everyone around us" which is fairly common with our family trips.

As you may recall, Lagoon's Ferris Wheel line is lined with trees and bushes, with the occasional pile of vomit. There's a sign that says (I'm paraphrasing) "Don't get all impatient, it takes one year to actually get on, enjoy and then exit this ride".



The sign was correct, and after we had waited about 20 minutes and finally gotten to the front of the line, Oliver announced he had to go potty. We debated, and decided we might want to just have him go into a water bottle whilst riding. So I started emptying a water bottle off to the side of the line. Noone was looking at him, it was an emergency so we half-jokingly suggested that he "just go in the bushes".

In saying this, we forgot some important attributes of Oliver:
1) Very obedient and highly suggestible
2) urinates with the approximate force of a firehose
3) his tendency to pull down his pants to his ankles when urinating



He propped his penis up on that rail, and let it fly. It seriously shot out about 5 feet. The people around caught sight of that cute little bum, and everyone turned around to look, laugh, and judge. So his mom says "Oliver, stop!", grabbed his pants and pulled them up.

Big mistake.

His pants snagging on his unit, the urine stream became a urine geyser pointed upwards, spraying plenty of onlookers. It also caught our sweet little boy in the face, specifically, up his nose. He yells "I'VE GOT PEE ON MY FACE!!"

Now, you'd think that this would be a situation where Mandoo would be mortified with embarrassment. But we were laughing so hard, we didn't really have a chance to be appropriately embarrassed. His sweet little yells "I've got pee on my FACE!" just set us off and we could not stop laughing about it.

It was at this moment that the ride attendant, standing two feet away, announced we could now enter the ride. Oliver is sputtering and yelling, and he and Mandoo get on the gondola, while me and the other kids get on a different one. The guy tells her that she is on the wrong one, so she has to get Oliver, get out and join us on the other one, all the while hiding her face from the waiting crowd and laughing hysterically.

Once we were underway, we poured a water bottle on his face and washed him off with some tissues. He was in good spirits, cause he saw how funny we thought it was. That gives me hope that someday he'll forgive us. None of the people in line will.

Google wises up


Google dumped Windows. They're making all their employees choose either Mac or Linux. There's a Register article on it today.

I suppose it was a matter of time, after Google's chinese operations were hacked in January, and now with the direct competition with Bing. It makes sense. And as a Mac user who feels that Microsoft's only half-decent product was the XBox, it makes me feel a warm glow. The feeling of wetting yourself while tanning, I suppose.

I had to work on a PC for my first year of working here because of a chat program that let me chat with customers through out the day while trying to design at the same time. It wasn't pleasant. I was fixing my mom's PC and I asked why these anti-virus alerts kept coming up. She has to click through or ignore no less than 8 windows when she starts up that are telling her to update software and get rid of virusses, even though she takes it in about monthly to get it checked out and updated. I updated a few programs, then restarted, and all the warnings STILL came up. Nice work, Microsoft. Way to make a product that makes your customers insane with rage.

A lady that lives down the street was asking me what new desktop and laptop she should get. It was a rare opportunity to spout my beliefs, so I started talking about the advantages of the Mac. No virusses. Easier set-up. Her 8,000 kids would know how to use it immediately, since that's what they're using in school. She mainly wanted to use it for kids games and editing photos, movies and slideshows. I told her about Apple's iPhoto and iMovie (which are free, and far better than most Windows applications). During the course of the discussion I fell in love with my Mac all over again and went and bought some roses for it. Not red ones, you weirdo! That symbolizes romantic love! Pink for gratitude and happiness.