A study of a memory of a thing never made. Da Vinci's Jungle Gym

Through an incredibly lucky set of circumstances I was bouncing around Milan after a gig. Friends and I stopped by a Da Vinci museum, which rebuilt many of his never-built sketches. There was a sketch of a study of an octagon rotated around a central radius. I didn't get a picture, and I wanted to remember it, and I couldn't find it in a couple of quick google image searches so I tried to re-study it from memory. Here goes nothing.


I'm not particularly proud of the end result, but here's to publishing instead of sitting waiting on perfection

read more...


Don't Work for Assholes

This is not a comment on any particular individual, or employer; more like my best advice for figuring out how to identify a better place to be

Don't work for Assholes, Villains, Rubes, Charlatans, Quacks, Bullies, Blow Hards, or Clowns*. Don't work for people who throw their teammates or direct reports under the bus to make themselves look better. Don't work for people who don't honor their word, especially if it was in a contract. Don't work for people who habitually hurt you or others by ignorance or malice. As far as you're concerned ...

read more...


Risk

When setting out on a venture to create something you need to understand lots of things.

There's sort of tried-and-true wisdom about "Budget, Timeline, Features, pick two".

There's a much more nebulous one, that I'll just call "risk". It happens both for writing software and dealing with physical creations in much the same way.

Surely, don't let that stop you, because the best way to understand this stuff is to just go do it, and know that you'll probably screw up a lot. Keep going. Try harder.

Your risk rank-order depends a lot on your ...

read more...


Workspace rules

I am not a tidy person. Much like choosing components I cope with this by having rules. If you don't have rules you don't know when you're breaking them. Rules aren't mandates, they're a thing to measure against.

We have a one car garage that is an office, workshop (recently: cabinetry, concrete, casting, electronics), storage area (mostly camping and sporting equipment, couple of bikes) and gym (dumbbells, pull up bar, and a heavy bag). It's about 250 sqft for all that. It was also a makeshift co-working space for a half dozen people once a week for a ...

read more...



Issac Kelly