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The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

Sun, 30 May 2010 23:05:44 -0400

Recent events in the news and in our personal lives have revealed to me again how ignorant so many people are of technology—especially computer technology. Condescending

Sixty Turns around the Sun

Fri, 1 Jan 2010 10:19:42 -0500

Sixty turns around the sun I’ve seen, each from the same “I”
This “I” is no “thing” (nothing), and so has no “where,”
And so has no “when,” except those I create.
I love this game, this life I've created.
With each new turn it grows richer and more fun
From where have I come? Nowhere
To where am I headed? The same nowhere
Is that a desperate, hopeless nowhere? No way!
It is the eternal nowhere of the “I”,
aware of its awareness, and ever enjoying the ride.

Civic Responsibility

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 07:31:00 -0400

I attended my first Clearwater City Council meeting after living in this beautiful city for fifteen years. As a responsible citizen, I should have done so long before and far more often. It was very educational.
I don’t pretend to be up on any of the issues—far from it. I don’t even read a newspaper, as I don’t like all the bad news. But I also don’t like to depend upon others’ opinions, much less the opinions of those who are employed to write for a newspaper, those opinions being clearly colored by vested interests.
At issue during the first part of last night’s meeting was a property tax increase. The public in attendance were clearly of a majority opposed to such. Numerous citizens were given a chance to voice their opinions before the five council members voiced theirs. Three voted for the increase, while two voted against it.
Each council member gave what I thought were carefully considered points of view, none of which were unreasonable. I’m sure all of them realized that the issue was far from cut and dry, as there are numerous factors, both known and unknown to consider.
Having attended this meeting, and having heard the various points brought up, both in support of and against the tax increase, I felt I was better able to form my own opinion on the matter.
Accordingly, I support the tax increase, as I want the various services and quality of life we enjoy in this city to not only be maintained but to improve. Living in and getting around the city on a daily basis, I see numerous situations both good and bad. I like the various improvements we’ve enjoyed in recent years: the new public library, the new Memorial Causeway bridge, the new Beachwalk improvements, new condominium construction, the new downtown marina, the Cleveland St. streetscaping, and various improvements to city parks.
I know this all costs money.
Many protest that there is no money in these “hard times.” True enough on one level of thought, but on another, I believe hard times demand harder dedication on the part of each one of us to work even harder to realize our respective dreams. If a dream can be blunted or lost by “hard times” it wasn’t much of a dream, was it?
My wife and I have dreams—a lot of them. We just keep working and harder than ever to realize them. We enjoy work, as we see progress in getting ever closer to realizing those dreams.
One of our dreams is to live in one of the new condos, built just before the crash. We hope those who’ve already bought into it can maintain it well until the economy recovers and until it is filled with new owners, we being amongst them.
We think the cost of living in this town is worth it—for ourselves and for the citizens of Clearwater. We all have to look to the future and be willing to invest—not only in property taxes—but invest in and of ourselves, our dreams, our efforts, into building a city we can be proud of, one which many others will want to move to and invest in as well.

First blog posting

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 17:32:24 -0400

My name is Daniel Swanson. I started Van-garde Imagery, Inc. in St. Charles, Il. in 1987 as my second career in life. I was 37 and was enamored with the concept of being a professional artist with my medium of choice: the Apple Macintosh computer.
My first professional software tool was Adobe Illustrator, version 1.1. I remember clearly that it cost $500—a rather large sum for me at the time who was basically “starting over from scratch.” I wanted to produce technical illustrations with it, and I was confident that it would be a good tool, as I had just previously studied Adobe’s Postscript page description language which they had invented and published a few years earlier. I was impressed with its elegance, and I realized that Illustrator was basically a GUI (Graphical User Interface) to the language.
It was pretty easy to learn, and I soon found freelance work for various manufacturing companies in the Chicago area. Though I’ve met only a few of my counterparts over the years, the general market for our services back then was wide open, and few companies and fewer schools had gotten on board with the so-called “desktop publishing” technology.
The ensuing three-odd years were quite good for me, work-wise and professionally. The former Dryden Press, based in Hinsdale, Il was a good client and I did a large quantity of art programs for their business and finance college-level textbooks. I learned quite a bit and honed my skills, all the while re-investing in the latest hardware and software from Apple and Adobe, always yearning for more functionality and speed, in order to make myself more productive.
In 1992, I reached the point of wanting a partner—a life partner—to both share in the work and the veritable romance of my life as a freelance computer artist. Yes, that’s what I consider it to be: a romance (from the Latin: “in the Roman way.”) and an adventure.
I found my wife and partner, ironically or accordingly, as the case may be, during what were then the early days of America Online, before websites, when there was just e-mail, and AOL had a “Personals” section where I uploaded my particular entry. In less than 30 words I laid it on the line what I wanted, and what I didn’t want.
Darlene read it, it caught her attention, and she responded via e-mail shortly thereafter. We corresponded back and forth quite a bit, then called each other back and forth (she was in Joplin, Mo.) until our respective long distance bills got quite large.
I sent her a plane ticket for her to come up and visit for a week. It went very well. She returned home, and shortly, we decided to get married. She brought two sons with her, 9 and 11.
Last August 21st, we celebrated our sixteenth wedding anniversary, and we’re happier than ever.
The boys are grown and moved away, one with a family and two sweet children.
But for ourselves, we work very well together. Darlene didn’t need much help from me to become a professional artist in her own right. She’s an expert with Adobe inDesign, to which we phased over from PageMaker and Quark XPress as soon as inDesign came out.
In spite of the disappearance of the “desktop publishing” market as it used to exist for freelancers in the late ‘80s, we somehow kept busy, job to job, over the years. And now, due mainly to the ubiquitousness of the internet and broadband cable, we can access the new relative renaissance market of “self-publishers”, and we’ve been quite busy producing books for individual self-publishers.
We’re also gearing up to become publishers ourselves of our own products in the form of iPhone/iPod Touch educational software, and published 3D model artwork, to name two product categories.
I intend to make new contributions to this blog from time to time, as I realized it will provide me with my own private sounding board on which to express my ideas, my opinions, and to relate my wisdom to anyone who might be interested. I welcome your feedback via e-mail: adobephile@me.com
Daniel Swanson