Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog » Art

Blizzo in 12 Easy Steps

F. Morgan Whitney — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:40:58 +0000

So over on the Pink Asparagus blog Catherine did this mosaic thingy, where you take the answers to 12 questions, do flickr searches, and build a mosaic out of the results. It sounded like more fun than work, so I took a few minutes to do it.

The questions:

What is your first name? Morgan
What is your favorite food? right now? Pizza
What high school did you attend? East High School
What is your favorite color? Orange
Who is your celebrity crush? Jessica Alba
Favorite drink? Smoothie
Dream vacation? Danube Castles
Favorite dessert? Ice Cream
What you want to be when you grow up? Happy
What do you love most in life? Marriage
One Word to describe you. Difficult
Your flickr name. Blizzo

Originally three of the answers were all “ice cream”, but I went back and changed them so there would be more variety. Did I mention I like ice cream? I have never been one of those “ohmygodcelebritywhatshernameissohoticouldjustdie” types, so I just sort of picked one. For the thing I most love in life, “Amy” just got me a bunch of photos of random girls, so I changed it to “Marriage”. My Flickr name turned up an old picture of Mason that I shared on an SXC, a free community driven stock photography site that someone inserted birds into. Anyway, thanks for the diversion Catosaurus.

The results:

Diesel Sweeties, A Good Time to Catch Up

F. Morgan Whitney — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 14:42:45 +0000

One of my favorite web comics, Diesel Sweeties, is about to hit its 8th anniversary and 2000 comic mark around the same time. As a way of celebrating, the creator is releasing the entire archives in 10 separate free PDF volumes (though donations are appreciated). DS is a guilty pleasure for me, the perfect mixture of pop culture, intelligent humor, sarcasm, irony and prurient elements. The first PDF will be released tomorrow, then one a week after that. More about the free PDFs.

A new theme for a new year

F. Morgan Whitney — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 21:47:50 +0000

Some time ago I designed a cool new theme for my website, but then never got around to implementing it. The theme I was using before was fine, but it wasn’t very pretty. Anyway, I saw this Dilectio theme one on Smashing Magazine and it was orangish, which I love, and clean. Hopefully I will have some more time to write as my life calms down from the move/holidays/new job/etc.

Breakin’ The Law: Nested Links

F. Morgan Whitney — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 02:28:24 +0000

DISCLAIMER:I didn’t even bother testing this blog posting in IE, though in practice I have made it work in all browsers. If you are using IE, you can go here to fix the problem.

According to the HTML spec, nested links are illegal. Good, fine, OK. Personally I am having a hard time understanding why anyone would want to nest links. I mean, why would anyone want to do this:
Blizzo loves
Ajaxian
The problem is, however, that I can see a need for nested onClick events. Consider the following happy little onclickable characters, the box and the link. Go ahead, click them, you know you want to…

The Box	The Link
	Oh So Clickable

As my old drafting teacher used to say, “Peace, Love, Happiness Be”. This is all just great. The problem comes when the the sexual tension that has been building between these two for the last three seasons finally reaches critical mass and they become one. We don’t just get a dip in the ratings, we have a problem:

Oh So Clickable

What if when you click the link, I don’t want the div to change color, because in his contract he states he refuses to do color changes with anyone else on the set at the same time. Prima donna

’s. A little JavaScript can solve this problem, like so:

Oh So Clickable

The freeze_js variable prevents the onClick action of the

when the link is clicked, but it still changes color when you click on the div outside the link. You, in the back row, come up here and try it out for the class.

Oh So Clickable

So now that we have everyone playing nicely together, we may even get contracts for another 13 episodes. My question becomes… is this icky? Would you expect everything to fire off when you click, or just the one thing you click on? As web UI’s become more complex, how should we handle this problem? Huh, huh, huh?

Rockets Red Glare

F. Morgan Whitney — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:28:26 +0000

My friend Becker is working on some code to make commenting available on code documentation where it doesn’t exist presently (I wont ruin the surprise, when it goes live I will update you here). I came up with the name Rocket Doc-it for his application, and designed a logo to go along with it, which you get to see now. This is the benefit of being a Blizzo reader, red-carpet backstage all access passes to obscurity.

Intuos, and beyond!

F. Morgan Whitney — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:13:13 +0000

So I broke down and bought a tablet. I ended up going with the Wacom Intuos3 4×6. I could have gotten a 6×8 Graphire (the model below) for the same price, but I decided I wanted the higher quality one instead. This is a picture from their website, but its not totally accurate. My draw area is smaller, and mine only has the left set of buttons and controls.

My first test for the tablet was another coloring attempt of an illustration by Owen Giene. This time he dressed up Cecania as Ghostrider, after seeing and enjoying the recent film. Here is the before and after, but this time you can click on my color version for full size. The thumbnail looks pretty bad, so I wanted people to be able to see the full size.

It was a ton of fun to use, and the next day Mason wanted me to draw something from scratch, so I tried my hand at a fish. The sketch is *very* rough, and it will likely take me quite a while to get to a point where anything I draw will be of decent quality, but here he is in all his glory: