Webster Art

Iphone on a budget $15 a month for service

One of the excuses I like to trot out for failing as a fine artist is that I am a geek. Instead of drawing for an hour a day like a real artist, I will read about smartphones or computers.

I’m always trying to get the best phone for the cheapest price. For a decade I argued with Verizon and AT&T about their plans. I wanted them to let me pay for what I used, instead of a two year contract at a high rate just because I had a smartphone.

For the last two years I’ve had a Republic Wireless Moto-X. It costs $13 a month. I can upgrade to 3G data for another $13. So it’s nice and cheap. My wife and my sister’s family all have Republic and they are a fine company. They were one of the first to challenge the big wireless providers. They are a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), meaning they don’t own any cell towers. Out where I live they piggyback on the Sprint towers, with a fall back to Verizon. Service is great.

Because it looks like I may have a full time gig again next quarter, I decided to reward myself with a new iPhone. I’ve had 3 Android phones but have always wondered what an iPhone would be like. Plus, as a web developer it’s helpful to have an easy way to test on both operating systems. My wife has Android.

So I walked into the Apple store in Tacoma and bought a brand new unlocked iPhone. Republic doesn’t allow anything but their custom built Androids. With a new unlocked iPhone I could take it to any wireless provider because it has all the modern antennas…meaning GSM and CDMA.

For $9.00 Ting sent me a GSM sim card and my problems started. My brand new iPhone wouldn’t work at the house. The GSM network out here relies on T-Mobile and we live in a dead zone.

I measured my signal strength using an app and it was -140 dbm which equals a dead phone. On an iPhone,  dial *3001#12345#* to check signal strength. I called the guys at weboost and he said I was out of luck. Their $400 cell phone signal boosters top out at -108 dbm. He said that right under a cell tower you would get a signal of  -70 dbm.

I thought, no problem, I’ll do wifi calling since the GSM (T-Mobile) network was fine in town. This phone and that network doesn’t allow it. Next I tried google voice, since I still have a number dating back to my wifi phone days with an iTouch. Oops, VOIP calling is blocked. Finally I tried Skype, and that worked, but it costs money to call my wife because she doesn’t have data for a free Skype call. Or, she would have data if she would pay extra to Republic. But she insisted that my phone problems weren’t her problems, and why should she pay extra?

I couldn’t argue with that, and besides I thought there must be a way to get my iPhone to work cheaply, at the house. I went on a big quest to the big cell companies who have decent towers out there, seeing if they had finally lowered their rates. Verizon,  Sprint and AT&T are all still singing the same song. You have to pay a minimum of $40 a month for a smartphone…even if you bring your own unlocked phone-device (BYOD).

One of the reasons I went with ting is they have real people that answer the phone. Check out this video:

When I called Ting, someone answered right away and he spoke English! He said a CDMA sim might be better as that uses the Sprint network…and Sprint piggybacks on Verizon. Verizon has the only good towers out here in the sticks. Ting sent me a CDMA sim for free, second day air, to replace my GSM sim.

New website version 4.0

I have uploaded my new website. I started working on it before the holidays by studying some new programming tricks. I didn’t want to use an image slider built by someone else so I built my own from scratch using a combination of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. I do pull from two different script libraries: jQuery and Greensock. But I wrote all the functions in my js file.

The thumbnail function on my gallery pages is all built by hand. I have never seen anyone do it before quite the way I did it…it may be unique. I got ideas for it’s construction from both Pinterest and the “new tab” function in the Edge browser. It’s still not perfect. For example, I wouldn’t mind if they animated in from the side like most gallery plug-ins. However, many of those plug-ins are buggy when viewed on phones. This one is simple enough that it works smoothly regardless of viewport or device.

It uses the old [a name=””] function from last century to move from thumbnails to full size image. But built into that is the masonry presentation of the thumbnails, paired up with animation on the full size images.

In case you don’t know what masonry is…it is the presentation of different sized thumbnails or action boxes in a web page. They align in even columns, and wrap based on the size of the viewport. Mine are very responsive to the viewport width, using both JavaScript and Media Queries for control. On larger viewports my script automatically delivers full size images 1080 high, under the assumption that:

if (you are on a full size computer) {//you have a fast connection
image shall be 1080px tall
} else {//you are on a smartphone with slow connection
image shall be 700px tall
}

But before that logic executes, you only see thumbnails. You have to click a thumbnail to trigger the above logic.

I believe that the full size images load in the back ground…though I’ve not investigated that.

Web design is fun stuff. Now that my site is up I’m going to continue educating myself on some of the newest technologies. These are things I have delayed learning because I was too busy teaching stuff like filmmaking. I’ve just begun studying GitHub version control, and after that I will start drilling down on custom WordPress development. It would be super fun if I could make this self hosted WordPress site look just like the rest of my website. A bunch of my students have done well with WordPress, and many employers do custom WordPress as a matter of course.

I already have an Apache server running locally on my Windows 10 box for testing this site with it’s PHP includes. And I used to have Apache running on my MacBook for developing my locally hosted WordPress site. Now I just need to dig into the PHP side of WordPress to build my own custom theme, and convert this blog over to that theme.

If none of this made sense, please accept my apologies. I’ve been buried in geek speak lately. Click the links above to painting or rock climbing to read something written in English.

Switching gears

Chimney Rock, Jtree

I’m back at work from my Winter Break. I have one class this quarter. The reasons for my low class load are complicated, and best not discussed here. I can say however that enrollment at our college is down 14% across all programs. Enrollment in state technical colleges like ours is directly related to unemployment, which is also very low at 5%.  The one class I do have is fully enrolled. I love sharing my passion for the internet and all the clever things you can do with code.

Because of my reduced class load, I’ve decided to stop painting and focus my energies on web design, which has a better chance of earning me money in the short term. Painting full time was a dream I’d always wanted to pursue. And over the last year I got that chance. True, I was working 2 days a week, but that left 5 to paint, and I painted a lot…to the point where making art felt like work. Doing it full time literally took the fun out of it. I felt like every painting had to suceed because of that burning pressure to get good enough for a big show in a gallery.  Many, many of my paintings were just plain bad. In my wifes words: “A sixth grader could paint that”.

Chimney Rock, Jtree

I did do some really nice work, and I treasure those moments of happiness when my paintings were going well and I knew I had a winner. But I never felt they were good enough for  a large gallery. I think a couple years in a fine art program would do the trick, but I really can’t afford to pull that money out of my savings…especially without a guarantee of sucess.  So for now at least, I’m spending my days off  studying new web technologies, and  updating my front end web skills to current standards. I’m not that far off, but my website definitely needs an overhaul.

I have a working demo here, but I can’t link to it because it’s been taken apart when the site when live. (edit 2-27-15)

It is fully responsive to changes in the viewport width, and features some unique transitions between thumbnails and full size images. I used to use a prebuilt jquery slideshow plugin. However this new webpage uses a thumbnail function that I wrote almost entirely from scratch. I’m still working some bugs out, but it’s been lot of fun creating a gallery page using my own code and ideas.

Specifically, the two main new functions I’m using are flexbox and column-count. They enable me to have variable height thumbnails that wrap in columns. I merged that concept with parent columns built with flexbox, and have nailed the classic: “In search of the holy grail of web design“…without using floats, or positioning.

In case you don’t know, the holy grail  in web design is to get 2 fixed width columns on left and right, with an expanding liquid center. It’s easy enough to do with floats and positioning. Since tables died out, I’ve been teaching that style of interface design for 10 years.

I’d been hearing from my students that there were new technologies coming online that made it easier. Things like the grid systems, and prebuilt web aplications like WordPress, which I use to manage this bog. They manage the columns for you, so you can concentrate on content.

But when I heard from a student last quarter about Flexbox, I decided it was worth a look.  I studied a couple training lessons at www.lynda.com and realized the browsers had finally matured enough to support real graphic design style column functionality.

I’ve got that nailed down pretty tightly, and I’ve got it fully responsive.

My Christmas break was super fun, and we had a great time down in jtree this year. Here are a few pictures, including recent backcountry snowcave camping trip. We got back from Cali’, and immediately went snowcamping.

Chimney Rock, Joshua Tree

Me climbing F8, Joshua Tree

Sue in the Iron Door cave, Joshua Tree

Craig playing banjo on top of Chimney Rock, Joshua Tree

Craig hiking to the top with his banjo, Joshua Tree

Sue following a 5.8, Joshua Tree

Me with my painting New Years day 2016, Joshua Tree

Sue digging the snow cave

Sue at our snow cave

My daughter cooking dinner

Coffee is ready

Updating my website

It’s weird to be updating WordPress about updating my website. Huh.

My current website is about 8 years old. In its day it was cool. And it still works, but is not reponsive.

I’ve got two fully responsive pages working on the prototype design for my remodeled website.

I’m planning to combine the interactive thumbnails on the home page with the scrolling full size images on the landscapes page. It will be  a great exercise in CSS and Jquery. And it will all be custom work, not someone elses WordPress plugin.

I recently learned about Flexbox. It’s amazing how efficient, and easy it is as compared to the positioned floats and divs we have been using over the last 10 years. It’s been fun updating the textbook I wrote for my students.

Writing technical manuals

In the fourteen years I’ve been teaching web design I’ve rarely found a book that works for long. The web changes at a rate that exceeds the publishing industrys ability to create content. There are always a few books that are ok, not great, but useable for a couple years. The challenge I face as an instructor is tailoring someones technical manual into a textbook fit for my classroom.

From my first year, I’ve had better results writing my own curriculum. That is assuming I can stay current with the rapid changes in web design. Once I get some good content written, I focus on polishing it up so that it works for my students. But a couple years later I poke my head up and look around and the web has left me behind. Like a rabbit watching a train disappear in the distance, I realize  I’ve got some sprinting ahead of me.

The latest change is that someone found a nice solution to the http://alistapart.com/article/holygrail problem. First we used tables for our interface design structure, then we switched to floating divs with absolute or relative positioning, and finally flexbox came on the scene. Display: flex; was expressly designed to solve the “holy grail of web design” problem. Without further ado, here is a link to the newest 10 pages in my classroom textbook on web design.

Programming again

Well it’s been a year of only teaching two days a week. I had hoped that I would be a good painter by now. You would think that having 5 days a week to paint would have made a huge difference. I did do some nice work but my oils are still not ready for a gallery.

This week I decided to spend at least one of those days working on my back up plan: programming. I’m still going to paint a lot, but it’s time to brush up my skills in web development. In my classes  I’ve been using the textbook I wrote 3 years ago. It works great, but in the meantime web languages have continued to rocket forward and I need to catch up.

The latest, and biggest change to my corner of front end design is something called “display: flex;” There used to be display: none; – display: block; and display: inline-block;

What display: flex does is solve the problem of equal height columns as it pertains to interface design. I’ve been solving that problem with Photoshop background images and nested divs. For the columns I’ve been using the classic float property.

Flex makes that all go away. Now you can align elements in a similar fashion to how we used to do it with tables last century. With flex the divs stay where you put them, and they are fully responsive.

I can tell I’m going to have to re-write my book all over again. I am so not looking forward to that.

Part of the reason I’ve not been writing here in this 18 year old online journal is that I’ve been climbing a lot. It’s been a month since my vacation ended and I’m still climbing well. It’s been pouring rain, a lot, so I can see the writing on the wall that presages the end of climbing season. We will still get a few trips in, but it won’t be a regular thing. Winter can be a cool season though. I have lots of hobbies (music, art, ping pong) to develop, plus programming, and we may do some backcountry skiing.

I do love the sound of a hard rain on the roof. There is something very nice about that sound.

Web Animation for iPhones

I have taught Flash since last century. I’ve been gradually phasing out Flash in favor of it’s replacement: javascript.

Here is a new banner I taught to my animation class this quarter:

http://www.websterart.com/html/due-next-class-day/banner-vert.html

The animation is a loose copy of this one on the Greensock website.

He has built his own javascript library. It runs parallel to the open source jquery movement, and even mixes with it, if needed. Making things move can be a fun way to earn money.

Painting dad’s shoes

Over two months have passed since my last entry. I’ve been doing my usual blend of climbing, painting and teaching. We lost another of the family elders a few weeks ago at age 90. A week later, his grandaughter had a baby. My brother coined a nice phrase: “The grand circle of life goes on.”

Dad’s Shoes

I have a Facebook business page now:

https://www.facebook.com/websterart2

And I started an instagram account:

https://instagram.com/markhwebster/

My most recent art can always be found at the root of my website:

http://websterart.com/ 

I wonder at times why I bother with this blog. One lasting reason is because it is so easy to forget huge chunks of time. Reading back over this blog reminds me of what I did. I can go back to 1997 via this online journal, and as far back as 1971 via my paper sketchbooks. My sketchbooks are places where I draw, and write down my thoughts. They can be fun to look at, like an old family album.

Yesterday I picked up some art supplies in Seattle, as well as some epoxy resin to make a foot mold for the shoemaker who is going to build me a pair of custom rockclimbing shoes.

Making the foot molds works very well, though expect to blow at least $150 on two feet. Especially if you make  a mistake, as I did. I didn’t mix enough Alja-safe and was only able to cover part of my foot. One thing that did work well was I bought some clay along with the Aljasafe and sculpted a “dry dock” one inch larger than my foot into which I could mix the Aljasafe.

I’ve been custom modifying my rock shoes for the last 10 years to fit my wide feet. But my last pair blew out in two months. I destroy the engineering of the shoe when I cut them down, and the quality of materials in commercial shoes varies widely. My usual problem is blowing through the sides of the shoe above the rand.

I’m hoping this custom pair will last at least a year. At work we’ve been building an animated banner. I used to do those in Flash, but needed to teach animation that works on smartphones. Make stuff move has alway been fun, and doing it using cutting edge programing code is especially nice.

Here is some of the code we’ve been developing:

.from(“#webster”, 0.9, {opacity:0, y:50, ease:Elastic.easeOut, delay:0.5})
.to(“#wrapper”, 1.5, {opacity:0, scale:0.5, ease:Back.easeIn, delay: 0.5})
.to(“#banner”, 0.1, {backgroundColor:”#dadada”, delay: 0.3})
.from(“#diagonal”, 0.5, {x:-600, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:0.3})
.from(“#callUs”, 0.5, {x:-350, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:0.5})
.from(“#phoneNumber”, 0.5, {x:-300, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:0.1})
.from(“#showTime”, 1, {x:-900, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:1})
.from(“#sentenceOne”, 1, {x:-900, ease:Cubic.easeOut, delay:0.2})
.from(“#sentenceTwo”, 1, {x:-900, ease:Cubic.easeOut}, “-=0.5”)
.to(“#banner”, 1, {backgroundColor:”#666″, delay: 1})

Programming in Javascript is a lot harder than Flash. You don’t get the friendly timeline on which to visualize your movement. With scripted movement you have to do a lot more guessing. I suspect there will soon be something that does it all for you, so the designers can have fun too, and not write any code. I’ve heard that Adobe Edge does some of that, but I’ve never tried it. I’m soured on Adobe in general after they stiffed me for $120 when I canceled my account.

Tacoma Old City Hall painting

I finished my painting of Tacoma’s Old City Hall. Simultaneously there was a community push to save the old building from neglect and abandonment. I posted my painting on the “save old city hall” page, and the guy who runs it liked it so much he made it his profile image. A week later Tacoma bought the building priced at $4,000,000.  That got me thinking that I need to start an open artist Facebook account to promote my art. My current Facebook account is just for climbing friends…people I know and like personally. I have it locked down tightly for privacy. As a teacher (part time), I try to be careful about my professional image. But that does not serve me well as an artist. I will work on that.

Here is the painting. It took me three Friday afternoons to finish it. Below it is my latest Nisqually painting. This is the first time I’ve painted down there in oils.

Tacoma’s Old City Hall

Nisqually Delta, 9 x 12 oil on board

I’ve got 3 hours in a new painting of Stadium High School, which I will post later.

Mother’s Day bouquet

Mothers day bouquet

I have a long standing tradition dating back to my high school years: whenever a bouquet of flowers appears in my home, it gets painted. Doesn’t matter where it came from, or who bought them for what occasion…they end up in front of my easel.

So when Lisa bought her mom a nice bouquet for mothers day, it took me about 2 days to realize I needed to paint them. Simultaneously I’ve been getting more comfortable with oil paints due to all my recent plein air work, and I decided this was a perfect opportunity to step up to the larger canvas size of 16 x 20.

I promised myself that I would approach some galleries in Tacoma or Seattle as soon as I mastered oil paints. After nine months of constant painting I think my skill with oils has matched or maybe even exceeded my skill with pastels. It’s been a long road. There were weeks when everything I did was terrible and I dispaired of painting anything beautiful ever again. But something in me refused to give up. When a painting failed to fly, I plugged in my belt sander and ground it back to masonite. Three coats of gesso later, I was ready to try again…and again.

Each time I finished one I’d show it to Sue, my best critic, and carefully watch her face as she examined the work. She knows beauty when she sees it, but I think she may be biased by her desire for me to return to computer programming, with it’s more reliable paychecks. Getting a favorable review from her is challenging. I think she sort of liked this one, or at least thought it wasn’t too bad.

Here are a few more of my recent plein air paintings. Painting outside taught me to work quickly.

I have a lot of memories here. Dad worked for the Supreme Court for 25 years. I wasn’t sure they would let me stand on the lawn and paint here on a work day. I was literally 100 feet from the governors mansion and security was tight. Fortunately the State Police seemed to like my painting, as did a bunch of people in very expensive suits.

Olympia State Capital

We drove up to Pt. Townsend where there is good access to boats.

Pt. Townsend boatyard

I’ve also spent 3 Fridays working on a painting of Tacoma’s Old City hall. That was fun. I spent so much time there I started to make friends with the homeless people who hang out in the park, and the nearby restaurant offered to let me hang my paintings. Last Sunday I painted the West Point Lighthouse in Seattle. They need a few tweaks before I can show them. Mixed in with all this painting I’ve done a little climbing…but my main focus this spring has been painting.