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Task Lists

X — Tasks, 28 March 2019

March 28, 2019 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Today is the Thursday of the last week of March. Today and tomorrow require execution of numerous items for March to be considered completed as initially planned.

AMG

  • Reformatted CDRL Attachment Items Template
  • ABS Training Elements
  • Special Parts and Parts Consumables File
  • Training Manual Material Master
  • Training Manual Warehouse Locations
  • FM Book Printing

AndrewKirksey.com

  • Logo Update…
  • -Fix “K”‘s implied Bicycle Stand Kick-out
  • -Create Color Scheme
  • -Generate PNG
  • -Upload and Replace as Needed
  • Sub Project Graphic Headers for Landing
  • Remove Contact Section at Homepage Bottom
  • Publish seven portfolio items, tweak three live items.
  • Begin polishing work on resume

Melody Orphanage

  • Tweak Tearsheets

Leer Street

  • Sample Collection Site #2
  • Soil Testing Site #2
  • Finish Fertility map
  • Plant PH chart…

Filed Under: Task Lists

Closing out Q1, 2019 — A Case of the Mondays, 25 March 2019

March 25, 2019 by Andrew Leave a Comment

For two months I’ve asked myself, what is it that January, or February, made possible that was not possible before? And, each month I’ve failed to sufficiently meditate on the answer. And by meditate I think that has more to do with keep useful records on what exactly happened throughout each of those months. So let’s do a quick recap since this is a quarterly review and then dig into march.

January

January saw my first serious observance of the Feast of the Epiphany. Without waxing too esoteric, it is the still (against all odds) beating heart of the tradition of New Years Resolution.

What Resolutions tend to miss is the reflection that guides our composing them in the first place. But the Feast of the Epiphany still contains that concept since it’s woven into the bones of the story itself: three Zoroastrian Astrologists, magicians, notice in their star charts the arrival of the God made Messiah on earth.

Their actions are guided by the centerpiece of the feast itself, the discovery. The epiphany. And so imbued with new knowledge they set out to find the king born in humble circumstances. With them they bring gifts that befit his fate, and with his arrival a new year can begin and thus another epiphany can be shared and a new quest undertaken. Within the Feast, Christ becomes a cardinal direction on the face of a clock who’s hands belong to our very lives. As we intercept and overtake the solstices containing God’s made man (Dec 25), or men made martyrs(Jun 24), men made fathers(Mar 19), or Angelic hosts who’d been there from the beginning (Sept 29) tradition expects us to notice, to remember, and then grow.

Resolutions work better when their links in a chain and not mountains to scale. And so, we find our star to guide us, (often it’s the second one from the right) and go straight on until morning.

My star to follow was that 2018 provided me with the gift of world shattering self-recognition. 2019 would be the year I set out to take responsibility for those places I had left untamed that required domestication.

When we approach anything, especially in a field like design we should be actively participating with the symbolic. These are worlds we’re having to render into new permutations and purposes. It’s good to have a mouth feel for their shapes and colors and resonances that run deeper than pixels. They are taffy and can bend, and they can also break. They can be traversed between.

Sometimes I consider diving back in with the larger community of graphic artists. When I do, I’m often struck by something I find difficult to articulate when I bother to give this even the most casual as possible regard.

If I were to try, I suppose I’d say that design seems to be a field in a perpetual tangle between ignorance of it’s past to liberate it’s future. It’s present is ultimately commanded by convention, by deadlines, and by a few gilded master-crafts persons who seem vessels containing the muses themselves. It has proven resistant to cults of personality because we’re all fighting each-other for the same crumbs as we enchant and elevate the banal into poetic visual song-craft that we’re 1099’d often for less than we’re worth to compose.

But then again I’ve avoided designer YouTube. I haven’t really looked at a Photoshop tutorial since 2009. These days I can be found on stack exchange dispelling some ignorance I possess concerning WordPress and PHP.

My experience has been that since I began to do this professionally the only goal was to try and make enough money to survive. And it’s this urgent purpose that denied me sufficient time to consider the source urgent cries for structure and conventions and hierarchies. I have, however been able to contemplate their mechanics in such a fashion that I’ve observed striking symmetry between visual design and music theory, but I have not had much time to consider why we bother in the first place.

In the meanwhile, as the years pass and technology changes and Adobe attempts to co-opt the tutorial community by bloating their production tier software with mandatory introduction tutorials upon every update, or continuous improvement processes that seem to only render hardware obsolescent with a greater frequency. We become enthralled to learning the next best process or technique or trend to set us apart from our competitors or set us among the respected and well regarded within the design community.

Technology, soft rides shotgun while the things which brought any of this into utility to begin with, like icons or archetypes or mythopoetics or polemics or hermetics or even Egyptian magic that ran ink across papyrus in perfectly spaced columns and rows in mass produced books of magic that played with cosmological thought forms that saw relationships between metaphor and metaphysics and so messengers between worlds could be creatures who flew or crawled—literaly traversing heaven and earth. Carrion birds became one of the first div containers of human culture, literally carrying the dead into the heavens. Ringing bells didn’t give angels their wings, vultures did.

These metaphors required unique and ordered constructs and compositions to contain the various constructs and compositions they took note of, and attempted to steer though word or thought or deed.

So January got me thinking about thinking about things.

Tomorrow, Feburary

February was a blur. I experienced a strange run in with a strangely politically motivated group of people who read advanced copies of young adult novels on twitter. I was disappointed with how in the moment of sudden and severe concern for a topic I had cared nothing about five minutes earlier that, I failed in my aim to recognize the person-ness of others and made some hasty comparisons that were a little off the mark when a variety of perspectives are considered.

My inaccuracy was that I had suggested that Harper Lee wouldn’t have been published in a modern environment, which is very likely true. Where I went off the rails is when I called someone a cryptofascist, which, I suppose most of the crypo I was referring to was how no one in all of this mess could or would explain what Wen Xhao had specifically done wrong. At that specific moment, no matter how hard you looked, there was little to any evidence of any actual controversy at goodreads when this first popped off.

Eventually I found an obscure tweet thread about coded racial language and some insensitivity towards someone’s situation that I couldn’t be bothered to remember because it felt so absurdly petty.

My takeaway was, that first, something was up with me not with the world. I was getting drawn into marketing level manufactured controversies. Second, in an effort to make sense of conflict overall, I fell a period of watching and studying a part of my childhood left largely forgotten, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. I doubled down on reading a theologian I’d been guided to last year who wrote on topics of stereotyping and prejudice.

I committed to try to read one book a week. I failed.

When it came to getting my passport replaced, I finally succeeded.

With the arrival of the passport I was able to complete a firesafe boxs worth of personal identification paperwork essential to live. It wrapped up a significant portion of a larger file system project I had started in August. (Next is getting a digital / physical 1:1 analog constructed for analysis and excel funsies; this is a soft goal however, and we can get to it when we get to it).

But with that major hurdle basically complete I was able to begin targeting areas of responsibility that are, at least for me relatively foundation. Portfolio websites, resumes, and fall backs. The earth had been leveled, now it was time to start building.

March

However, failure is not suggest total loss. In fact it’s in how I failed I gained a great many things I didn’t have at the end of February.

March was broken into four successive tasks. Portfolio Week, Resume Week, Tradeshow Week and the fourth week was up for grabs. Portfolio Week lasted three weeks as I worked out nuances to managing a genesis framework based website, found that my ability to generate mockups was hampered by the PSDCover’s extension’s resolution requirements (which cannot be tweaked) and my replacement PC’s meager allotment of 16 Gigs of RAM.

My Birthday came and went.

A sudden snap turn at the request of friends and I was learning podcast recording techniques. Building additional websites and planning a revenue structure for a yet to be realized local interview podcast focused on getting to know our neighbors and have crucial conversations that are hyper local. I find this exceedingly useful as an idea so I went all in on it.

I’ve also been working on this gardening project with another group of friends, and in my own time working on a bit of a nursery for a range of herbs and spices. I’ve begun building a database of information pertaining to the seeds and plants I want to grow this year. I intend to become fairly talented at gardening, canning, and harvesting useful parts of plants for various purposes. I’m also working on improving my field craft for back country hiking, and planning various trips over the summer to give myself something to look forward to that isn’t just work.

After a solid 9 hour design session Saturday, a session I recorded and am now going back through to edit with the intention of creating full blown ‘episodes’ where certain bits of design work get a ‘how it’s made documentary style treatment’.

I really like the idea of something that is in the tradition of a Picture Picture sort of ‘how its made’ documentary where light piano runs behind key points being performed for each project. I was also able to upgrade my equipment to something a bit closer to what I use at work. I wonder if only Dell XPS’ must make the leap from 32G of ram to 64? Is 48Gb even possible?

This is an experimental idea I’m still in the process of testing it’s viability. Video from the weekend is rendering at home while I write this, and I hope to be able to cut each project down to about no more than 5 or 6 minutes in duration.

I also started scoring my podcast with simple beats mixed with loops and some piano or lead synth additions tied on it. Depending on how long it actually takes to build one of these videos I’d love to sit down and sort of score the design process manually.

A chance encounter over the weekend has me thinking about how excuses I’ve made in the past and how to remedy them. I’m also looking forward to throwing my hat back into the ring with freelance work, at least analyzing better approaches to it and finding ways to properly capture improved CSS grid systems in a PSD environment, maybe tinker with adobe XD because why not, and working to dramatically improve my skills and talents as a designer.

I believe my reticence to self reflection kept me from developing any further and I think that it’s time to change that, if possible. I guess I need to seriously face the questions, “Can I do this competitively,” and can I really distinguish myself, and if so, what are some methods of doing so? Who are my guiding lights in this regard, and where do I plan to be come epiphany next January?

March 19th is the cardinal feast day for the second quarter of the year. It is the Feast of Saint Joseph, and he is the Patron Saint of Workers. He rises early, and we enter into spring working towards the heavy lifting of the summer ahead.

Filed Under: Progress Reports

Saturday Stream – 23 March, 2019

March 23, 2019 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Today we’re attempting to resolve some of the task items that weren’t finished this week for some reason.

My friend Alex, and his logo are up first. The original post can be found here.

Melody Orphanage

The idea for Melody Orphanage came to Alex around 1996-1997. It’s the colors he sails under when producing music.

I’m going to vectorize them first. Maybe do a trace and try and get a real sense for the troublespots are in his original drawing, or get a sense of what was pushing up against his subconscious when he was originally pressing pen to paper. Discovering what and how influences at the time might be at play with his drawings–and identifying ways to encapsulate and enhance their presence–is a soft goal with this process.

From there we can make more conventional logo and identify efforts.

I also am keeping fully in mind that an unconventional brand strategy might be the better fit for him.

Leer Street Community Garden

Earlier this week I collected soil samples from the site of the proposed community garden me and a few people are trying to make happen. The problem we’re facing is that it’s an abandoned lot. They were planning on building a clinic there once upon a time.

So, no one’s really been interested to know if anything can be done with the soil. With these samples, my friend Liz can finally begin planning how she will install the first set of garden beds. It’s nearly April, so we’re running out of time.

To keep track of what I was doing and a way to digest that information well, I made a hand-drawn sketch of the area and where about I was pulling soil from.

Using that map as a base, I need to draw a quick, but clean, vector map of the area. We’re going to include a heat map layer that takes the data I collected and applies it to a gradient map of soil fertility. We’ll do it one more time for the soil pH levels as well, although that shouldn’t take long because they seem to inverse of one another.

The distinction is made because while pH is measured on a scale of 0 to 10, fertility is measured on a scale from +1 to – 1, with 0 being the most ideal. Supposedly the Burpee soil tester can identify enough of the “18 nutrients essential to plant growth”, to make a call like this with some authority.

We also should keep in mind that while most plants enjoy a pH of around 6, a certain group of plants, which I’ll have to list out some other time, and maybe of serious interest to Liz because of what they produce (food and herbs mostly, think Basil) prefer a pH of 5.25-5.5.

I’ll be thinking about how to represent that data.

I’m inclined to trust the soil tester, because although most people who bought the thing didn’t get it to work, when you follow the instructions that came with it, and take your time, it does actually produce feedback.

So, I’ll try and find a really easy way of confronting that math problem without the requresite math background that probably has some way of expressing this value comparison.

After all of that, if we’re not too setback by the logo work, I’ll attempt building a permaculture survey map from data I collected for my house a year or so ago.

We’re going to create a version where Liz can rough sketch out how she wants to establish garden beds.

AndrewKirksey.com

Portfolio work abounds and we have a lot of road to hoe in this instance.

I’ll be selecting a few items from the portfolio database file and building quick action mockups from the PSDcovers, the problem is that this is extremely memory intensive. For some reason PSD covers deals with resolutions natively that I have an impression are much larger than any modern print production would actually use when printing highway billboards.

And while I ordered a ram upgrade this week, it won’t be here until Thursday. However some of the action scripts work better than others so it’s worth a try. The process is liable to crash the live stream, so we might just focus instead on item two, tweaking my personal logo.

It’s supposed to be an AK put together.

So what it looks like and what it’s supposed to be in fact are a little… more crypto than I at first intended.

I mashed a lowercase a from Claredeons and messed with the K side until I was fairly happy with it. So at the moment it looks more like a Y, which doesn’t bother me. I go by ‘Kirksey’ in a lot of circles and the emphasis on the Y, or long E sound in my name makes it make sense by virtue of phonics.

I had an idea about some small geometric changes I can make to the the tail on the ‘Y’ which should cause it to create a sort of illusion of a K with greater fidelity.

Filed Under: Task Lists, Uncategorized

End-of-Week Pre-Closure — Task List 2, March 21, 2019

March 21, 2019 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Urgently need to conclude this primary design effort. Major issue is a conflict with planning and development, or task orientation and “play”. It’s fun to develop new design ideas, and since for my personal website there’s no ‘sign-off’ or ‘approval’ required by the client, my hands are free.

My hands should not be free.

My objective is simple. If I make a task it gets concluded. Here’s my list so far:

AndrewKirksey.com

Site Navigation

  • ul li a:hover to match parent page highlight color
  • single-post animated orientation switch to glide across right hand margin at absolute position and unfurl on:hover.
  • single-portfolio animated spin needs to stop jumping to a float:right on html:hover

Aside

  • make Featured Post list (Previously) li:hover state should match more-link and .single .entry-title motifs (blog highlight is fine)
  • Note: We may consider this for portfolio-page-template loop but that page is meant to break with the rest of the stylesheet for the site so, maybe not.

Page, Archive

  • add 20~24px south of the margin to h1.decker, or .archive-title elements . whatever looks nice

About Page

  • Resolve image float issue near biography section.
  • Re-write top section for brevity. There are too many opportunities to find yourself on the about page to pretend like it’s just an accident.

Single-Portfolio

  • investigate why .content_entry (~approx) hr lengths imply a rogue padding setting or in congruent width when compared to kpf-portfolio-metadata area.

Single-Post

  • See Navigation Notes

Home

  • Highlights on nav still don’t match convetion
  • Cohere “From the Blog” a:hover to match site style. Maybe “Advanced Gutenburg” Plug-in Related. Better not be.

Global

  • Update Logo from black to #3F3E5F version, since navy is the new black moving forward.
  • Review and decide on Drop Cap coloration
  • Which occurs to me that there’s a chance we could use CSS wildcard selectors to assign a particular highlight color to a dropcat depending on post’s numerical value, making it like a little lottery. This is one of those pie eyed things that ate up your day yesterday, I’m fairly sure it’s doable supposing that wildcards don’t require spaces around them to function…

Mobile

  • Just fix floats and content margins across site. Shouldnt’ be more than 4 templates to adjust total. That feels like too many.

Backlog

  • Clean up code.

MelodyOrphange.com

Standby

Leer Street Community Garden Permaculture Map

Standby

Misc

Make various lists.

Filed Under: Task Lists

Herding Cats — Task List 1, March 19, 2019

March 19, 2019 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Project task list postings are currently irregularly posted. They are to support my organization of larger and discordant tasks list.

AndrewKirksey.com

Concern Items:

Global Items

  • remove a:hover gradient on .entry-title a element since gradient background and text hover attribute feels a little trying too hard and not hard enough at the same time.
  • menu, location highlight color needs to be different for every page.

Contact Me Page

  • Form shortcode floating right and not filling it’s space correctly. Check plug-in stylesheets?

Portfolio Item Archive Page

  • template requires CSS redevelopment and redeployment.

Single Portfolio Item Custom Post Type

  • template requires CSS redevelopment and redeployment.

Search Result Page

  • Search Result Loop requires standardized data format distinctive from portfolio or blog archive appearance
  • Portfolio-Item and Page entry types have uncaptured formatting issues. display attributes of post-content element consistently.

Blog

  • Archive title needs to be same as Portfolio archive title.

Aside

  • Genesis Recent Post Widget formatting has inherited style attributes from selectors targeting .blog .entry-meta and archive .entry-meta
  • It looks weird.
  • Might want to give the brief about bio another pass, and the ABOUT ME link makes arriving on the about page feel like I forgot I put an about me link on most of the pages on the site.
  • Text-Indent required on sub-category navigation lists.

Front Page

  • Rewrite front page intro area.
  • Fix homepage .wrap element to match dimensions of @screen media queries

Media Queries

  • Implement Menu style appearance on mobile to be full screen instead of dainty list of fat-fingered-doom.
  • Fix layouts for mobile

Melody Orphanage

  • Logo Reconstruction, Development
  • Solve for bbPress Add Media function inserting shortcodes rather than HTML5 audio object blocks
  • Find or fix style-sheet

Portfolio.AndrewKirksey.com

  • Decomission Site
  • Delete File System

Filed Under: andrewkirksey.com, melodyorphanage.com, Task Lists

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