I got a short, 2 to 3 week, contract job at Studio3 doing digital retouch on product shots for a consumer item that’s launching soon. Although I can’t really talk about the specifics, the one item I’ve seen looks like it might be pretty successful. I’m doing clipping paths, dust/cleanup, and color correction for proofs. I guess in the last round of proofs there will be some critical color work done, but I’m not sure how involved in that I’ll be.

It’s funny, I interviewed and did a Photoshop test at Studio3 on Thursday of last week and then one of the owners called me on Friday night, leaving a message about needing someone unexpectedly for the coming week through the end of May. He called me again Saturday at 9:30 in the morning. He said that they had been interviewing and testing people for future projects that would require help and that it just happened that this project came up. He was very kind and said that he felt I was a good candidate and he even said I was over qualified and that he’d understand if I turned it down, but it worked out: I needed some freelance work to pad my portfolio (plus I love retouching) and Gwynn and I needed a legitimate excuse to motivate us to get our own baby sitter, finally.

In other news, Gela broke the world record in the “Hanging onto the Shower Curtain Rod, After a Bath” event, this evening. The standing record was 4.5 seconds and tonight she held on for 7.47 seconds, thus beating the previous record by over 1.4 seconds. That record was set back in 1987 by one Daniel M. Jabowski, from Ellington, CT. Danny was 1 year and 5 months at the time.

Good night.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

We had some errands to run today and we ended up at one of my favorite spots to buy used records. It’s cool because it’s not really a record store and I don’t think a lot of people know that the place actually sells vinyl, since the store always seems to have some great and eclectic records, usually for around $2. I would imagine that their selection would be much more picked over if people knew about some of the things I’ve found there.

Here’s what I bought this afternoon:

• Blood, Sweat & Tears: Greatest Hits
• David Bowie: Starting Point
• Dire Straits: Brothers In Arms
• Elton John: Honky Chateau
• Elton John: Madman Across the Water
• Jeff Beck: Wired
• Joe Cocker: Mad Dogs & Englishmen
• Procol Harum: A Whiter Shade of Pale
• The Rolling Stones: Hot Rocks 1964-1971
  

I was disappointed by some of the things I saw today, though. They had a copy of Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, but when I looked at the album it had deep gouges going across both sides, like some literally took a knife to the surface of the record; it was obviously unplayable. They were asking $5 for the album, which tells me that someone saw the cover and slapped a price tag on the jacket without looking at the actual vinyl. It was pretty sad.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

In 1992 I was one of the guitarists in our high school jazz band and we went to San Diego, along with the marching band, for a large regional or national competition. While there, we went to Sea World and did other touristy stuff around town. After one of the competitions, there were a few bands playing a free show at, I believe, SDU.

We had some free time, so we all went down and watched the show. I remember there was a really mellow Grateful Dead-esque band named Jambay, who’s CD I may still own. One of the other bands was Rage Against the Machine. All the members of the rhythm section of the school’s jazz band were metal heads (as shocking as that might seem) and we were all blown away by RATM as Zack de la Rocha screamed “You’ve got a fucking bullet in your head!” and Tom Morello made sounds with his guitar that were other worldly, using only pedals. Their performance was so raw and vibrant…they had the whole crowd getting into the music and the message it carried.

I was sold. I plopped down the last few bucks I had and bought the cassette they had for sell. Even the black and white cassette cover was crazy; xeroxed stock quotes littered the cover as a background, with “RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE” floating above the stock quotes in bold, all caps sans serif font and rotated at an angle . There was an unlit match, that had been hand taped to the cover, as a finishing touch.

According to the bio on the official Rage Against The Machine webpage, the band recorded, produced, and released the 12 track cassette in 1992. A very impressive 5,000 copies of the tape were sold at shows and through their fan club. Most of the tracks on the tape later became the rough sequence of songs for the band’s self-titled, major label release on Epic records. Three songs on the cassette have never been re-released.

I had an entire home’s worth of stuff sitting in storage for almost a decade. Last year I had all that stuff shipped to me from El Paso. A couple of night’s ago I was going through the boxes, looking for a bunch 4-track recordings I made back in my youth, and I stumbled across this:

The tape still played and sounded just like I remember it sounding on that long bus ride back to sunny El Paso. It’s funny to think that now anyone can slap together some drum and bass loops on their computer, sing a few lines, add some effects, and then burn a CD of their work, all with very little overall effort. Knowing that makes me appreciate this tape just a little bit more.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

April 19th was Record Store Day and I missed it completely, unfortunately. The indie stores that participate usually offer sweet discounts and some limited releases (this year there were limited 7″ and 10″ from REM, Built to Spill, and a few others), plus it’s just a cool way to promote vinyl. I believe that anyone who enjoys the subtleties of music should own a turntable…as a bonus every fifteen minutes, or so, listening to music becomes interactive!!

Speaking of limited releases, The Black Keys album “The Big Come Up,” is now available as 2 sets of limited color pressings via Alive Records. The 2 albums are pressed in pink and yellow and each is limited to 500 copies.

I’m slowly getting away from the whole colored vinyl thing, because it’s been my experience that most albums sound pretty crappy on colored vinyl — my copy of The Beach Boys’ limited edition Pet Sounds LP set was horrible and that made me very sad. However, a few of the colored pressings I’ve gotten from Southern Lord records sounded pretty damn good. Maybe’s it’s just the luck of the draw.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

How time flies. This is my daughter 1 year ago, about 10 minutes after she was born:

Gela this past Sunday, at 1 year and 2 days old:

It blows me away. She went from barely moving and hardly able to keep her eyes open to walking and trying her best to talk. I once was able to hold most of her body in the palms of my hands, now I grunt when I try to lift her up.

She’s turned my world upside down and made me see everything in so many new ways. I could never imagine how significantly she’d change my life, specifically my outlook and my goals.

She’s the greatest thing I’ve ever been a part of.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

I spent 30 minutes on a bus from downtown to south Seattle and for the entire ride I listened to two high school aged kids bragging to one another about how gangster they were, even though they both looked like choir boys.

One talked about the adrenaline he gets when he fights to which the other responded that he doesn’t even get adrenaline rushes when he fights anymore, he just laughs. The whole conversation seemed to weigh on upping the last sentence spoken by the other: you punched someone? I got shot at! You got shot at? I shot as some fools. You shot at someone? I know a dude that tried to blow up his school, so they expelled him from the state. (I’m not making the last one up…they didn’t arrest the guy, they expelled him from the state.)

Slowly the conversation got more and more inline with gangsta stereotypes: talk about being shot at, drive-bys, various gangs in the area, people they know outside of the city and state who are in or started gangs, how other local gangs are lame, random theories about the gunshots they heard last night and whether they were AK-47 shots or whether the shooting was done with a “MP,” since a real gangsta needs to know the differences…cause seriously, I know I don’t want to get hit with a blast from an AK-47, but getting shot with an MP, not so bad.

Anyhow, at one point one of the kids was talking about how he was totally going to kick some other dude’s ass, “just now,” but the bus showed up and he couldn’t pop the kid because he’d miss the bus. The bus we were riding comes every 10 mintues, which I seem to recall being plenty of time to talk trash and throw some punches before walking away shaking from the adrenaline referenced earlier.

My favorite part of the conversation, “So that dude you were going to fight, he’s goes to a public school, right?” I took this to imply that the well dressed and well spoken gangstas were private school kids.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Today seemed really long, but not for any particular reason.

Gwynn (my wife), Gela (my daughter), and I ran some errands and we visited our friend Jeni, mostly to hang out and catch up and, a little, because Jeni wants me to re-redesign a logo for the plumbing business her and her husband, Brad, own.

I designed them a few logos a while back, then they decided to change the business name; which they ended up not doing, and finally they decided they’d like to go a different direction with the look and feel for the logo. Here are the rough logos we stopped at before the ‘almost’ name change back in September 2007:

It was cool hanging out, sketching ideas, and brainstorming. We ended up staying there almost 3 hours. When we got home I spent about an hour and a half or so doing some research and rough sketches of some of the ideas and themes we talked about. I’m not sure how it’s all going to turn out, but some of the concepts we all came up with have potential.

At 9:30pm or 10:00pm I decided I wanted tortillas, so I did what any self-respecting tortilla wanting person does: I made some tortillas. I used the recipe from “How To Cook Everything” by Mark Bittman. His recipe is:

• 1 1/2 cup flour (plus some for rolling the tortillas out)
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons lard/butter/oil — I used Canola oil
• Water to make dough
• Profit!

They turned out alright, maybe a little too flour-y, but they didn’t take very long to make at all. My tortilla desires have been fulfilled.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

For the last several days, I’ve been trying to update my blog to use a layout I created. Each time I sat down to work on changing WordPress’ default template (named Kubrick), my brain would seemingly click off and refuse to concentrate. It was as if looking at CSS and PHP was the same as those crazy anime scenes that gave all those kids seisures. Half the time I would just stare blankly at the screen waiting for something to happen. I kept searching for tutorials with the hope that maybe there was some super easy way to do what I wanted and that, somehow, I’d skipped over it the last time I did the same exact search.

Fast forward a few days, several glasses of iced tea, and a lot of research later and here’s my newly updated blog. Of course once I figured out the bigger picture, like using my own header image or using a custom background for the page element only, the little details started to kick my ass…like, how to make that whole header image a link and why that custom page background didn’t seem to be repeating correctly. I found work arounds to most of the problems I encountered.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Sometimes there are artists and musicians that have a certain intensity and the ability to amaze us with that intensity, even if it’s not necessarily something new and unique. Eva Cassidy was one of those people. She was an amazing singer and musician who passed away before she really had a chance to make it big; she died of melanoma at the age of 33. Fortunately, there were a small number of live shows that were recorded and some studio sessions, that have been released since her passing. In my opinion the best release is the album Songbird.

The album is a series of covers, which can usually be a pretty hit or miss affair, but not in this case. Each song is a showcase of her singing and guitar playing. The album just about covers the litany of musical styles one can think of from standards to modern pop. The songs never sound trite or forced and her voice is soul crushing at times — I mean that in a good way. Check out this audio clip at LastFM of the song “Autumn Leaves.”

Her rendition of “Over the Rainbow” is the best version of the song I’ve ever heard performed; it’s simultaneously haunting and upbeat, that dissonance sets it apart. I’m still blown away that anyone can naturally sound that good without ProTools or vocoders. If you still have doubts, watch this live clip of her perfoming the song:

So if you like bluesy female vocals, with a slight jazz edge to them, check out Eva Cassidy. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Freelance has been good to me and I enjoy it, but things have slowed down to the point that new dust is settling on the old dust. On Friday I had one in person interview and two phone interviews all for full time employment. One of the phone interviews and the face to face were for graphic design positions and the other phone conversation was for a production job. We’ll see how things go. I’m still keeping my eye out for any solid and serious image retouching positions.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

The Canon Powershot SD850 has all the features you need in a compact digital camera and it takes great pictures.

I bought this camera to replace a Nikon Coolpix which, unfortunately, was stolen over the holidays. I’m always hesitant to purchase items based on online reviews, but this Canon seemed to have such glowing reviews on every site that I figured I couldn’t go wrong. So far, that’s been true.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

I just spent the last two hours wasting my time trying to install Movable Type. I wanted to give it a try, to see if I preferred it over Word Press and, more generally, just to check it out. I made three different attempts to upload and install the software (20mb unzipped); each try failed for the same reason. The whole process is bloated, the set up and installation is not user friendly for both geeks and non-geeks alike, and the small sampling of online support files Movable Type has available are outdated and flawed, to say the least.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Since I started my freelance business, I’ve been inundated with a vast array of business offers, credit cards, and various business to business services, all of which arrive weekly per the U.S. Postal Service. I’ve had offers to have “Nick Raimondi Designs” embroidered on sweaters and golf bags for all my employees and for myself, of course. I’ve even had design firms offer to help me with all my graphic design needs, which I’m sure would instill tons of confidence in my clients. I get a kick out of this kind of junk mail, because I’m the furthest thing from their demographic and, usually, the types of products these companies are pushing aren’t products I’m even close to needing.

Today I received a catalog from a company called Uline Shipping Supplies. As usual, I chuckled when I saw the large array of boxes listed on the front and at the strange collection of products inside, as I flipped through it. Later when I picked it back up and started actually looking at the kind of products they actually sell…holy friggin’ crap, this place is amazing. I’m being totally honest.

Anything you could possibly need that’s either shipping, warehouse, storage, food/beverage, office supply, or retail merchandising related, they have.

You need baggies? They got ‘em.

What’s that, you need a variety of rubber gloves to suit different purposes…oh yeah, they’ve got those.

Say, weren’t you just asking about expandable packing foam?? You were? They’ve got it.

Excuse me? Do I know where you can get Chinese food containers? Why, yes I do!

Do I know a place that sells a box cutting knife with a glow in the dark fish skeleton on it?? Actually, I do…seriously.

Like I’ve said before, it doesn’t take much to amaze or amuse me these days, but this place is awesome. I’m pissed that I don’t do more shipping, retailing, and merchandising. This place makes me want to find excuses to buy metallic silver sharpies and scales that not only weigh but also count parts. The fricking scale counts parts, ladies and gents.

I need to figure out how to buy a warehouse.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Being a freelancer can be an amazingly rewarding experience, while being an incredibly stress inducing and mind numbing experience. In addition to juggling clients, being your own IT support and customer service desk, and taking care of those little secondary things like completing projects and finding clients, you have to deal with billing…namely invoices.

I’ve used all sorts of time management and accounting software and from a design standpoint, all of their automated invoices suck. Yep, every single one. The layout of the invoices in those programs are rarely end user friendly: the ability to modify the invoice to match your company’s image and brand, especially fonts, is very limited and, generally speaking, the invoices aren’t nice to look at at all — which sometimes makes the difference between that invoice getting paid in a timely manner or whether it gets forgotten and ignored for weeks. The only real plus in using the invoices provided with software is that the programs do all the nasty calculations for you. Numbers can be evil for those on the arty side of things.

I wanted to find a way to make an invoice that I could customize with graphics, that would allow my choice of fonts, that would do any calculations for me, that could be easily adapted to both billing and quoting, and, most importantly, was as automated as possible.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

This kind of old news, now that it’s almost April, but the first two Metallica albums, Kill ‘em All and Ride the Lightning, are going to be re-released* on vinyl by Mobile Fidelity on April 15th. These releases are meant to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Kill ‘em All…which is just crazy to think about!

These are new half-speed masters from the original analog tapes. What’s even cooler is that the albums will be released in two flavors: a regular 33 1/3 or “the deluxe” version on 180 gram vinyl, mastered at 45 speed. I’m probably going to try and get the 45s, if not both versions.

Additionally, MoFi is releasing Master of Puppets and …And Justice for All (with some bass hopefully!) sometime in June 2008, with the same treatment.

* There was a box set of all the vinyl Metallica albums released a few years ago that featured all the albums from Kill ‘em All through their self-titled “black album,” but apparently these new MoFi releases are newly remastered.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Recently I needed to make a map of driving directions from my house to multiple destinations. I knew that an option on the popular online map sites probably existed, but I’d never looked. I checked MapQuest, but it didn’t seem to have anything close to what I was looking for. Beyond that, it seems that lately MapQuest has been a little on the lacking side when it comes to giving accurate directions. I ended up checking Google Maps and found that they had exactly what I neeeded…and a lot more.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.

Good morning,

This is my first post, a test of how this system works and what I can try to do to change things.

Originally published at Screaming Ink. You can comment here or there.