The text is still a bit placeholder, but I have the inks just about completed. Some exposition and gushy personal stuff after the jump.

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In the next two weeks, my wife and I are participating in walks for two great charities you might not have heard of: Farm Sanctuary and PAWS Chicago. Allow me to elaborate.

Farm Sanctuary is an organization devoted to sparing the lives of (and rehabilitating and fostering) farm animals. They hold a yearly walk on World Farm Animals Day and my wife and I will be participating for the second time.

PAWS is Chicago’s largest no-kill, cageless shelter. They also operate the Lurie Family Spay-Neuter Clinic, the nation’s busiest low cost/free surgical clinic. Since PAWS began in 1997, they have reduced Chicago’s euthanasia rate by over 50% and are putting Chicago on the path to be the largest no-kill city in the US. This annual event is extremely important to raising funds for PAWS Chicago’s life-saving programs.

If you’ve read this far, you can probably guess what’s coming. I know that not everyone has the opportunity to give. In the current economy (read: viking effigy of the “free” market!), that’s to be expected. If anyone does pledge to support either charity, I will send them along a small sketch as a gift. Just make sure to include your address and other details when making your pledge at one of, or both of, the links below.

My Paws Chicago donation page.

Both charities have been awarded the highest 4 star rating by Charity Navigator - so no worries about misappropriation of funds or any of the malarky.

I’ll be getting back to my regularly blogging schedule pretty soon here. It’s been a busy few weeks!

Painter just crashed on me. While saving a big document. An important, big document. Because Painter can be really unstable, I save iteratively. All is not lost. But, since it crashed during a save, my last version of the illustration is toast.

This happens a lot. I always send along a crash report to Apple. Today, well, I decided to spice it up a bit by adding some exposition to the comments area of the bug report form.

Dear Apple,

If there is anything you can do to make Painter more stable, please, I beg of you, do it. You see, all the way back to version six or so, I’ve been using it. No matter the operating system, amount of raw computing power, or patience you throw at Painter, it still crashes sometimes. And, often, those crashes occur during saves (like right now, during the save of a file I worked on for eight hours)!

I realize it’s not your job to make Painter less buggy, but maybe you can yell at Corel a bit? A stern talking to, maybe?

Thanks!

Well, I went and succumbed to the peer pressure of starting a Twitter account. Thanks to Max Holyoke-Hirsch for reminding me that I was a Luddite, har. Now that I am on it, I played with my profile and set the Braaains! Threadless design that I did as a tiled background. I might do that here. I think it looks pretty spiffy:

I get bored with my blog theme once in a while. I really like it, but I am the sort who likes to swap stuff out in an OCD way. Note the new lettering for my name up there!