Logical Next Step: Bullfighting

Just want to direct your attention to the bottom right corner of that picture up there. [Here's a nice big version for you.] See that? League champion. In my very first go of fantasy football. It's not so surprising; pretty much everything I've done this year for the first time ever I've ruled at.

The MBD Endorsement: Paying for Quality

Sweetpea has turned me on to this thing, a philosophy I suspect she got from her grandfather or someone equally wise, where she believes in paying a premium for high-quality goods, rather than filling your life with cheap, disposable junk you'll likely end up replacing several times anyway.

I'm not talking about throwing money away on flashy shit like $400 Japanese denim, nor am I equating higher cost with higher quality necessarily. But there exist certain things—the steak frites at Tallulah, European sports cars—that are totally worth the extra cheddar and some things whose discounted price tag doesn't offset the general crumminess of the product.

A product, for example, such as Office Depot brand ink. I thought I was so smart buying a generic OD ink cartridge when my printer needed a refill but yesterday, after two months of streaky, faint, useless prints, el cheapo cartridge crapped out. Half full, of course. The blinking error lights on my printer are like three tiny little Nelson Muntzes haw-hawing my "saving" five bucks by going cheap on my ink. Lesson learned, Office Depot. Lesson learned.

Collaboration Nation

Very few times in my professional life have I ever partnered up to work on a particular design project. I've either worked at tiny companies with small staffs where the luxury of assigning multiple people to a project did not exist or larger outfits where they could afford to divide the labor into tiny, standalone tasks for each employee.

But as of two weeks ago, I've had a project cooking where I'm part of a three-person team working on a single project. We each have our areas of expertise—not quite chopper pilot, safecracker, tank mechanic, etc., but still cool—and I'm really excited to see how it all shakes up.

The MBD Endorsement: Backing Up Your Files

So this morning I was futzing with the design and publishing settings of Ye Old Peas and Carrots (please to enjoy) and in one errant keystroke, the index file of MBD.com was written over and replaced with a portion of this here blog.

Could have been traumatic and tragic to lose such a large chunk of just-completed work, but because I'm a cool customer and back up everything religiously (we use and love Carbon Copy Cloner here at MBDHQ but that's another endorsement for another time) getting everything back in place and running smoothly was a snap.

I realize that for some of you, backing up your files--whether to an external drive or media, online storage dump, or some combo thereof--is just common sense, but too many people still don't do it (or do it often enough) and wind up helpless and hopeless when catastrophe strikes. Which it will, guaranteed.

You've been warned.

Dress British, Think Yiddish

Sweetpea and I spent a big chunk of this last weekend giving the house a thorough going-over. Lots of scrubbing and organizing and purging and finding homes for stuff and the place looks great. We even found, tucked away in a closet in an unpacked box leftover from the move last spring, this fetching frame just begging for some art. I think we decided on a winner.

Jungle Fever

My cat doesn't get out much, and when confronted with the occasional visitor to our windowsill, I think he struggles between wanting to hunt down and kill the little furry thing and wanting to make out with it. Either way, good thing there are two panes of glass between them.