Red Monkey

May 13, 2008

JetPens, take one

A few weeks ago on Twitter, Mike Rohde made a comment about a great site he'd discovered, JetPens. Always on the lookout for the next sweet pen, pencil or marker, I headed over.

I have been looking for a simple pencil case that I like for about two years now. I've made do with some hard glasses cases (too short), a soft leather roll-up case in which the pockets were not big enough for the pencils and a host of other things. Nada trabajó.

Discovering JetPens led me to a beautiful pencil case that I have actually enjoyed. I also picked up a new white pen which I plan to use this week and a nifty new (okay, new to me) kind of water colours called Aquash.

Then Mike Twittered me again. JetPens was looking for a blogger to review their site and products - would I be interested?

Since, to be honest, I was planning on at least linking to them (if not actually writing about the site) when I finally got around to using my Aquash water colours, naturally I jumped at the chance to review the site and some products in exchange for some pens.
So, full disclosure here: they sent me some pens to play with and to review - and in exchange I'm writing two posts about them. One about the site (today's post), and I'll be writing another one going through each of the pens they sent me. Before I can do that one, I have a project I have to finish - hopefully this week. Oh, and also? If I hadn't already liked the site, I'd have turned this "gig" down. They didn't ask for a favorable review - they put no restrictions on this review and did not even ask to see it before I published it. If you've read my blog long, you know this - I ain't gonna sugar-coat it. Happily, there was no need to do so here as I was already a pretty big fan of the site.

First, I have to say that not only do I love their li'l logo guy, but I adore the site layout. Far too many art supply e-commerce sites are just too darn busy or messy. I enjoy perusing dickblick.com for the breadth of products they offer - but they need a complete site re-design as they are simply not easy to navigate. JetPens, on the other hand is easy to navigate and has a nice, clean look.

NOTE: if you're not interested in web design, click here and you'll drop down the page just a hair so as to skip my gushing over their design.
As a web designer, one of the features that impressed me about their site is the multitude of ways to browse - without being confusing. There's a left hand text navigation which sits below the search feature. That's generally where I start surfing, but JetPens also has a nice photo-browse set-up. Just below the tabs at the top of the site, they have a featured item and below that a Selection Guide in text links.

I love this Selection Guide. They've kept it small, to the point and fun. The first category is "I want..." and below that are 5 text links to popular categories of pens. Next to that is "I am a(n)..." and below that are 5 categories of people who might be looking for specialist pens or sets. The last category is "I want something..." with the choices being cute, elegant, ergonomic, rare, retractable.

Below the Selection Guide text links are small photos of different categories they offer - anything from fountain pens to highlighters to cases.

Okay, so they've got a tight design for their site - but that really only indicates how much thought they've put into their business - where's the follow-through? They've got a great selection of product. AND, unlike a lot of art supply sites I've frequented, JetPens allows you to enter a review of the products you've used - so you have a good idea what it is that you're ordering.

In addition, they've also got a Penpedia - this section of the site has videos and articles demonstrating or talking about various products. You can watch a short video on just how the NeoCritz Transformer pencil case opens up and stand on your desk. (I think the video was perhaps 15 seconds at most.) An article with great photos shows you how to "hack" a particular pen to use a different type of ink refill. One of my favourites is a nice image showing you just what different pencil hardnesses look like on the page. That used to drive me crazy when I was using a .3 technical pencil as the leads I purchased were usually 4H or 2H at best - and my teachers always complained that my work was too light for them to read.

They've got a forum for building some community - in short, this is a solid site selling some really solid products and they know what they're doing online. Too often, I see a specialty site who uses the default Yahoo Store and whose web design skills are back in the mid-90s. JetPens isn't like that. They're smooth and solid.

Their shopping cart applies the same good web and GUI design as the rest of the site. And, always a bonus in my opinion, they take PayPal.

And, they ship their items FAST. I expected my first purchase to take up to 5 days to get here since I did not choose one of the speedy (more expensive) delivery methods. Nope, was here in a couple of days.

The email notifications were easy enough to read and some of them are funny - worth reading instead of skimming quickly and tossing in the appropriate mail folder. I'd like to see them expand their copy writing on those emails a bit more and make all of them worth actually reading instead of verifying the shipment info. (Not long messages, mind you, but a couple of silly and friendly sentences.)

Some of my favourite stuff from JetPens:

• white pens - they've got a wide variety of these in different widths and consistencies
• gel pens - I have a distinct weakness for these and they have some really nice ones at reasonable prices - and, impressive to me, in a wide variety of colours and thicknesses
• good quality stuff - including my very beloved Sakura Micron pens - sadly, they don't carry Copic art markers ... but then they don't carry Prismacolor art markers either.
• a nice blend of good, writing pens - and some nice art stuff. It's unusual for me to find such a nice blend of product

Seriously, if you like good pens (which does NOT necessarily mean expensive, btw) - you should at least browse their site and decide for yourself.

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:13 AM | Comments (2) | Sketches | Stumble

May 10, 2008

Balcezak

I am both grateful that I checked my blog stats and looked at the Search Terms stats - and profoundly sad at the same time.

While I have heard some people put forth the claim that the internet is not truly growing larger anymore, but instead, is fragmenting off into specialist areas, today I was forcibly reminded that the internet is still growing larger and that it has shrunk our world considerably.

One hundred years ago, if you moved some thousand or more miles from your home town, you would be hard pressed to hear any news of anyone you didn't personally correspond with.

Yesterday, as I logged into StatCounter for a fast look at the statistics for my websites, I discovered a chilling blast from the past. The search term was pretty simple: "christopher balcezak suicide." I was instantly catapulted back in time.

My family lived in Austin, Texas for all of about five years. I started kindergarten there. By the time I was 10, I had lived in Austin far longer than any other city we'd lived in. It was and has always been the town I think of as home.

My first Halloween in Austin, I had to wear the damn pumpkin costume. I hated it. It had to be stuffed with pillows and my mother teased me constantly about being fat whilst I worse it. It felt like torture to me. But it was wear the pumpkin or miss out on trick-or-treating and this would be my first "real" time going out with a big group of neighborhood kids. I mustered all my bravado - and bolstered that by running to my room at the last minute and grabbing my beloved "baby pillow" (travel-sized pillow) and shoving that in the very front of the costume - a kind of hidden security thing.
(Note: ignore the smile. I was NOT a happy camper that evening.)

Mom walked me out to the group of kids with chaperones and dropped me off. Instantly, the troublemaker boy who lived around the corner from us started teasing me about being fat. I retorted with something about being well-protected and bet that I would not feel it if anyone tried to punch me in the stomach.

Yeah, I guess you could say I was baiting him.

Being a tough guy, he was sure he could make me feel it. I thought I was pretty slick. There was no way I was gonna feel his punch through two or three pillows right in front of my stomach - and I have a high pain tolerance anyway. Even if it hurt a little bit, I was not going to show it and his rep as a tuff guy would be shattered. With any luck, he'd stop picking on kids.

He hauled back, punched me in the gut - and one of the chaperones turned around just at that minute. Of course, to the adults, it looked like unprovoked aggression. They ignored the fact that I laughed at the punch (I really didn't feel it) and they sent him home.

That was my first memorable experience with Chris Balcezak.

While we lived in Austin, we went to St. Theresa's Catholic Church. This would have been the mid to late 70s - the church was opened in 1968, the same year that I and most of my friends were born.

I remember the long drives from our house through my beloved Texas hill country to get to church. Up and down the hills, trees and grass all shades of vibrant greens - bits of granite and limestone jutting out from the earth like the bones or teeth of some tremendous creature. The church was tucked in at the top of a hill, nestled into the trees. It was one of the most beautiful places I had ever been and I loved it. CCD (kind of like Sunday school for Catholic kids) was sometimes held in small classrooms, but was sometimes held outdoors - and I admit on those days I was far more entranced with the splendour of the world around me than I was the intricacies of catechism.

I remember the day at CCD when we were doing some stupid exercise outside and we were supposed to freeze when the teacher said some special freeze phrase or another. We did, but shortly thereafter Chris started wiggling and finally stood up. The teacher yelled at him - he was always in trouble for something - until he got her to realize that he'd laid down in a fire ant mound. If you know anything about fire ants, you know that to say this was "unpleasant" is a distinct understatement - those suckers HURT.

Being bratty children and tired of being bullied by Chris, one of us (probably me, to be honest) began giggling and pointing out that Chris had ants in his pants. This is the height of childhood chuckles, you know. Ants in the pants. I mean, it damages the rep of the neighborhood quasi-bully and it rhymes and it's something adults used to tell us when we couldn't be still. And Chris couldn't be still with all those fire ants biting him all over. Poor guy was in tears before he was rushed off to have the ants hosed off of him.

And, of course, we were all in trouble for not being empathetic to Chris' pain. Actually, I think our teacher was rather horrified by our callousness, but the truth of the matter was I don't think any of us truly understood the level of pain that Chris was in.

My last memory of this boy who lived around the corner from me for five years was when we finally, finally got a bus to come pick us up for school. Balcones Woods was some five or ten miles from Pillow Elementary school and our parents were tired of driving us - they wanted the school to provide a bus. Naturally, my bus stop was shared with Chris - and that was the impetus for my often leaving the house early and traveling up the neighborhood to other bus stops closer to the entrance of our subdivision. Our vice principal sometimes rode the buses in the afternoon - partly to mix more with the students, and partly to help keep the drivers keep better control over all of us young hooligans.

The first time he rode our bus, he sat next to Chris, which made all of us laugh (and sigh with relief). Chris was well-known for singing all of the mangled song lyrics like the schoolyard version of "On Top of Old Smokey." Sure enough, one of the kids from the back, called out for Chris to start us on that song. Red faced, staring at the floor and trying not to look at the vice principal, Chris stammered a refusal. To our surprise, however, the old fogey adult vice principal got the song started for us.

I remember looking back in shock - along with all of the rest of the bus - and seeing the stunned gratitude on Chris' face.

It hadn't occurred to me until then that Chris was something of a pariah at our school. To be sure, with his penchant for mercilessly teasing the rest of us and for beating the crap out of smaller kids, there was good reason most of us ignored him. But it didn't occur to me until that moment that Chris might be lonely as well.

For me, all through my life, Chris was a legend - the only neighborhood bully I really knew at all whilst growing up. He was not the quintessential evil bully. I don't recall him beating the utter shit out of any kid. I don't recall him doing any real damage - he was just a bit of a bully. He liked to get his way and he didn't really want to deal with anything else. He liked attention and he didn't mind too much how he got it. To this day, I can't think of my childhood in Austin without thinking of Chris.

So getting this search term hit on my blog was somewhat stunning. Surely this was not the same kid that I knew. I ran the search myself, only to find this snippet of text next to a Google search hit:

Dr. Christopher Balcezak, 34, died from an overdose of Amitriptyline.

That was from 2004. The right age. Still, surely this was another Christopher Balcezak. I clicked through.

Raised in Austin, Texas, Balcezak received his undergraduate degree at Notre Dame, then attended medical school at the University of Texas at Houston, where he graduated in 1995.

It all fits. Raised in Austin, went to a Catholic university ... this article was about the boy I once knew back in the 70s.

He disappeared on the way to making his rounds and was found two days later, in his pickup, in a grove of trees. Later, the coroner released that Chris had purchased a large quantity of Amitriptyline under assumed names all across town. He apparently drove his truck through a corn field and into the grove of trees where he downed a large quantity of the drug with a bottle of Boulevard beer. A Physician's Desk Reference with a place marker at the entry for Amitriptyline was found in the truck - along with a framed photo of his three children, aged 6, 3 and 1.

It's beyond strange, really, to realize that someone you knew some 30 years ago is now dead. It's jarring to realize that I don't know his story ... that I will never know why he chose to end his life just a few years into his participation in a good medical practice - when it looked like his life was just coming together. It was strange to read these articles and tease out bits of his life after I moved away.

Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4

It's beyond bizarre to realize that Chris did his undergrad at Notre Dame - and I did my grad work there some four years or so after he'd left the place.

While I remember bits of trouble that Chris started or was involved in, while I called his pre-fourth grade self something of a bully - he was not, to my recollection, a bad kid. He was more the "classical" rough-n-tumble kid. He smarted off without thinking - he reacted to most of us by lashing out, but not utterly beating the crap out of anyone. A punch maybe. Two punches perhaps, but for the most part, he was all bluster and bellowing and not the truly violent type.

I've often wondered through the years where Chris wound up.

Thanks to someone hitting my blog via that search term, I now know a small slice of his story. Makes me wish I knew more - it makes me sad.

His oldest is now about the age I was when I moved away from Austin. And his youngest is about the age Chris and I were when we first met.

If I close my eyes or if I stare off into the distance and let my eyes unfocus, I can see past Keith's house and across the side street to the corner where we used to wait for the bus. If I concentrate, I can see Chris standing at the corner, waiting.

I have to wonder why he picked that grove of trees ... I wonder ... I wonder if it reminded him of Balcones Woods ... of a simpler time ... I wonder if he loved those woods as much as I did, if it reminded him of home.

Requiescat in pace.

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:12 AM | Comments (3) | Struggles | Stumble

May 9, 2008

Doodle Daze

So, quiet week, eh? Perhaps on the blog, but certainly not life this week! I had another job interview Monday - my favourite kind, we talked for a bit and then Tuesday, I was emailed an assignment to complete. The catch was I had 48 hours to design, cut, and code a website of approximately four pages. They wanted to see creativity, use of colour, movement and sound. In 48 hours. Design a site look, cut the images apart and optimize them. Build at least one Flash piece - design, code. Put Flash into a page. Code all the pages. Write a rationale for the choices made and insert that on the pages. Cut a small sound byte to use in another Flash piece to demo sound. Forty-eight hours. Not a week of work, but nearly a week's worth of work in two days.

I was busy this week, working feverishly from Tuesday morning straight through until Thursday morning - and then attempting sleep and some finesse work later Thursday.

So, this week is also Doodle Week according to my bud, Claire. She's designated various days with various kinds of doodles, and while Animal Doodle day isn't until tomorrow, that's what I have to show today.

These are all sketch versions of images I'll be using in the baby book I'm painstakingly doing by hand para mi sobrino.

 

 

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:23 AM | Comments (6) | Sketches | Stumble

May 4, 2008

More Drew Moss practicing

After the vampire Batgirl the other day, I decided to practice the rest of Drew Moss' excellent page.

So, here's the center three panels:

No more rats for her. It's strictly bag lunches from now on. Yum.

She doesn't like to fight but happens to excel in it.

The Bat gives her a bracelet that feeds her hunger. He says it will make her normal but she is always hungry.

I think I'll try the rest of the panels later on this week or next ...

However, there's a slew of things bubbling up this week, so I'm not sure whether I'll have time or not.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:48 PM | Comments (2) | Sketches | Stumble

May 1, 2008

The Island Who Lost Its Name

It's true, Virginia, there really IS a Lesbos.

Seriously. It's a Greek island just off the coast of Turkey, near Ayvalik (which was a Turkish city filled with Greeks until about 1922). Today, it's often referred to as Mytilini - which is actually just the name of the island's capital.

And, they want their name back. They do not wish to be residents of the isle of Mytilini (which sounds vaguely Italian anyway), they want to be ...

Lesbians.

Wait, wait, wait. That came out wrong. ACK! Not "came out" like "came out of the closet" ... I mean, it didn't sound ...

Oh bollox.

It's simple. Waaaaaay back in the 7th century B.C., there was a woman named Sappho. She wrote poetry. Love poetry. Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos. She wrote love poetry to women. Hence, Sappho was a Lesbian lesbian. Or was she a Mytilinian lesbian? Maybe she was bi, we just don't know. At any rate, somewhere along the line, instead of being accurate and calling women who write love poetry to other women Sapphians, which would have been more accurate, they called them lesbians. And then, of course, they attached the word to females who were attracted to other females, instead of being more precise and only referring to women who wrote poetry to women as Sa - I mean lesbians.

So it's quite obvious that the entire process of naming women who happen to be homosexual as lesbians has been very much botched from the beginning. Or at least since the 7th century B.C. Or, to be more precise, B.C.E. (before the common era).

At any rate, the people of the island sometimes called Lesbos and sometimes called Mytilini would actually like to be called Lesbians now. Never mind that there are plenty of people who would prefer to NOT be called a lesbian, these people would like their name back.

It's been badly misused by the media in the United States. All throughout the 1980s, any news story involving Sharon Gless using began in this way: A crazed lesbian broke into Gless' home or perhaps Gless has taken out a restraining order on the crazed lesbian who broke into.

And anyway, why bother to divide the gay community into "gay men" and "lesbians" anyway? Shouldn't the gay community try to band together and show their numbers instead of subdividing into minute special-interest groups? What if the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s had subdivided into Africans, half blacks, quadroons, Baptists, Catholics, etc, etc, etc?

I say, let the island of Lesbos have their name back. I don't want it, anyway.

Now, if the Dutch start demanding "dyke" back, we're gonna have problems ...

You can read the BBC article here.

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:46 AM | Comments (9) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble