Challenging Week

The week is challenging not in the oft-used sense of the word. Our research organization - spread around the world - is challenging itself to come up with a big idea. This means a grass-roots process to propose ideas, and watching that happen is quite interesting in itself. I'm skeptical that a suitably lofty proposal will come about, but I'm enjoying the process by which a group of people - all highly trained world leaders in their field - propose ideas for research.

Collaborative tools like wiki's, blogs, and fora work in some respects, but email - and I suppose IM would work well, maybe better. It turns out that a wiki and email work well together. But I think a wiki with embedded IM might be the ultimate collaborative combo. Anyway, the challenge wraps up this week, and no doubt my morning email is full of discussion.

My evening was full of tablet exploration. I bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet. I tried it first on my PC at work, then brought it home to my macbook and big monitor. Well, what a great experience. If you've googled your way to this page due to the product names above - I've found it to work great (Mac OSX 4.x) And I was using it with GIMP . It felt great and I was able to do some sketching and calligraphic scrawling. Flipping the pen over and having GIMP understand to swap foreground and background didn't work (thought it does on the PC). But I found the integrated ink stuff in OSX to be fun too - with handwriting recognition... which I turned off shortly, but played with for composing an email etc.

A friend recommends trying Inkscape - but I haven't tracked it down yet. Sounds interesting too. It's interesting to discover new drawing techniques while on GIMP. There is the obvious pen size and shape stuff. But playing with opacity made it seem like a nice precise ink brush - doing precisely thinned washes. That is very nice.

I'm sure I'll develop some interesting new sketching styles with a few more hours on it.

Well, let's see how that email looks... Oh yeah - lots going on. :(