John Beck

With the temperatures soaring into the 90’s this week I decided to cool off in my neighbor’s pool. As I stepped into the pool I noticed something floating on the far end. I got out to take a closer look and found this guy:

As I fished him out of the pool I was surprised by how heavy he was and how little he actually smelled. He still had the skunk smell but nothing like what I would have imagined. After double bagging him I washed up and went back in the pool. No skunk is going to ruin my day!

A buddy of mine gave me this picture from 1944 of his wife as a child. The picture was missing pieces and what was there was in extremely poor condition. I cleaned the picture up and rebuilt what was missing. I also saw that the original location in the picture had paint chipped off all over the steps so I repainted the steps. I hope (s)he likes it.

Testing the blog and RSS feed. I noticed that images weren’t displayed properly when importing my blog into other sites nor when viewing in the RSS feed. Then I noticed that links in the RSS feed weren’t working properly, not viewing images and getting an error when clicking on the article link. Hopefully this will fix it. I’ve embedded an image in this article to ensure that it is posting properly.

A good buddy of mine makes some of the most delicious homemade pies. I wanted to create a logo for his pies that would really stand out. I’ve been inspired by industrial labels that are usually found on machines or machine parts. I think they are beautiful and often overlooked but when they are used in a different context then I think people are immediately drawn to them. In the case of my buddies pies, the taste alone isn’t enough to bring notice too, mainly because it is such a huge market and there is so much competition, hopefully this logo will draw more attention to how great his pies are. What do you think of the logos?

Last week I had switched hosts for my website. If you link to my site or subscribe to the RSS feed update everything to point to www.beckinabox.com. Today I finally got around to fixing the “Photo Albums” section and added a bunch of photo albums, in case you didn’t see them on Facebook. The blog is much easier to update now as well, something that really prevented me from making frequent posts. Some more minor changes and tweaks will coming in the next few weeks.

This is just a test. MobileMe may be shutting down their personal web servers so today I got some hosting from GoDaddy. I know, I should have done it sooner. The Apple way was just so damn easy. But now that I’m on a ‘grown up’ host I have plenty of more options. So this test post is to test php. Hope it worked.

It took me a while to figure out compression (still didn’t) but I finally uploaded my latest video. You can find it in the Artwork > Video section or you can click HERE. For the most part I’m happy with it. It’s a bit different from what I usually do. It was a spontaneous shoot so the camera work could have been better, I tried covering up the bad camera work with all the different layers that I have going on. I like how dark it is although I wish at certain times the light on my grandmother was a little better. Some shots look beautiful though. It was my first time using my Canon P&S camera, a PowerShot SD780. It shoots HD video on an SD card. I’m going to try to use this camera more so hopefully I will be uploading more videos, mostly music videos for Joseph Martin’s music. Doing music videos will give me more freedom to experiment with this camera. Let me know what you think of the video and how I can improve on the future videos.

My buddy Joseph Martin wanted me to tell you about his new website The Umbrella Engine. You might know Joe as the composer for many of my videos. He has also assisted me in writing a few of my videos. I have a new video which should be on the site tomorrow some time. The new video is a music video to a track by Joseph Martin titled “A Moment of Frost”. It’s my first video in almost 3 years. It will be up tomorrow and I’ll update the blog accordingly. Meanwhile, check out the Umbrella Engine and tell Joe I said hi!

Went to Wegman’s Wine & Spirits yesterday, this is what I got:

Yards – Brawler Pugilist Style Ale – 6 pack bottles
Brooklyn – Lager – 6 pack bottles
Dogfish Head – Palo Santo Marron – 4 pack bottles
Chimay Red – 1 350ml bottle

Laird’s Applejack – 1 bottle
Francis Ford Coppola’s Claret – 2 bottles
Francis Ford Coppola’s Rosso – 1 bottle