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A very good day. Learned a few new techniques and played with molds and textured marvers. Seem to have a handle on gathering, keeping on center and necking the piece. I tried one, modeled after the instructor’s example, where one person gathers, marves and blocks while the other prepares a small amount of intensely colored glass and then, when both are ready, the colored glass is wrapped onto the piece. It worked okay, a bit more coordination and it would have been perfect (well, nowhere near perfect, but at least closer to what I intended). It looked very cool. We finished with a demonstration and some quick practice on cold work. The pieces from yesterday were still too hot to work so I need to go back to finish them when today’s are cooled. Sanding and polishing is kind of meditative. I hope so. I have six paperweights to finish.

I loved this (did I mention what a great gift this was enough times?) and I’m certain to register for additional classes.

This was a great day. The place is huge- much bigger than I imagined- and it has an artsy/blue-collar hip affect that’s friendly and not the least bit intimidating. There were six of us at three stations working in pairs and I had a time to make two paperweights. This introduction is pretty simple- a couple of tools, heat and the glass- and then everything is in the technique. After thirty minutes of instruction we were handling the gathering irons, gathering glass (2000 degrees Fahrenheit!) from the crucible in the furnace, picking up frit, heating it in the glory hole (~2900F), rolling it in the blocks, marving, working it with tweezers, making a neck with the jacks, flashing and knocking the glass off the rod (no missed catches today!) for cooling overnight in an 900F annealing oven. The instructor dodged around advising, giving suggestions and helping when we got stuck. There is so much art to it. By the end of the five hours I was just getting the hang of what we had been shown and it was disappointing to have to stop and clean up the workspace. Really amazing. Tomorrow I’ll make some more and cold work the pieces from today. This is a great gift!

For Christmas-Chanukkah Maria registered me for a weekend course with Urban Glass. The project is making a paperweight but I’m more interested in getting a feel for the process and whether or not I like it. I’ve been fascinated with the idea ever since spending a couple of hours watching two guys making Art Glass in Shelburne Falls, MA several years ago. What a great gift.

It’s a back release (21.4.9) from what I use at the office, but XEmacs compiled on OSX and it just works. On the other hand, the external editor support on XCode is obtuse and buggy. It’s already crashed twice just launching gnuclient which is not encouraging.

For a long time the defacto standard for mid-complexity diagraming has been Visio. Microsoft bought Visio back in late-1999 and the Visio 2000 and 2002 releases were rather nice updates. Except that they dropped most of the keyboard shortcuts and discontinued the stencils for “enterprise” computing- but the old ones worked well enough- so I used it. I recently received an “upgrade” to Visio 2003 and created a number of diagrams. Good, but here is the lock-in: they dropped support for export to Postscript and Encapsulated Postscript (eps). You get the choice of exporting a XML document that nothing can use or a brain-dead SVG that nothing can use. Visio never exported well but now if you want something other than a bitmap or windows metaformat you’re completely hosed. Abandon any cross-platform hopes.

Shame on me. I should have known better than to use it. It’s pretty and powerful and even somewhat convenient but now it’s absolutely poison for any serious work. Hopefully, the demo of OmniGraffle will handle the files and I can export. If not, I’ll use XFig and redraw a half-dozen diagrams and rue all my wasted time.

Follow-up
Hah! My co-worker had a clever suggestion: print to PDF using Adobe Distiller and then export from PDF to Postscript with Acrobat. Good enough but I’ll be damned if I’m going to use Visio again. Might be time to actually get skilled with PSTricks.