Skip to main content

Perfect Imperfection

Just ordered a book titled "To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure" by Henry Petroski.  It's about engineering projects that where designed to standards of the day but still failed.  It's a part of history that intrigues me.  From the Great Eastern ship to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, there are projects that where designed and planned based on the best standards of the day, but they failed to understand when the standards or times have changes.

Skip ahead to the current Post-PC period.

The form factor, operating system, language, uses and manufactures have all changed.  Try to stuff a PC into a netbook or tablet does not work.  You can do it and get some sales but the market has moved forward without the a lot of the features that we thought we needed. The enterprise apps, the expansion slots, the same old apps, all being depracated in the post-PC period.

Looking forward to reading the book and gaining insight from history.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Still Life

 Life is never still, at least I don't think you would want it to be.  That's why so many of us (i.e., retired care free people) travel.  Keep seeing new things and places.   Well the Hurricane so far inland was a new thing and one I would have rather forgone but life is what happens.  Life keeps moving. Except a still life is forever and captures a slice of time frozen in a painting.  This is from a wooden bowl of pears onboard our ship during dinner one nice.  Again, just thought it looked nice. Enjoy.

A Trip Abroad

 Just back from our trip abroad as Asheville continues to recover from the hurricane.  This trip has been planned for a long time and we almost didn't make it because our dog sitting business will be closed for a while. But make it we did and now we are back. We love Amsterdam.  What a fun place to visit.  So many things to too and do there.  The weather was not the best but it did not have an impact on our visit.  Just bundle up. Got some quick painting in while on the boat (i.e., Viking) as we moved from port to port.  This painting is of a garden at a heritage site of windmills.  I thought it looked nice. Nice time on the trip to de-stress from what was happing back home.  We were fine back home but not everything is well with many others.

A Process

Once in a while I take photos of a work in progress.  This is for me as well as others as the work moves from stage to stage.  And it is done in stages with defined processes for each step.  On this walkway overpass up in Spruce Pine, I've done both an ink / marker and an Ink / Wash on the same piece. This is the finished watercolor of the work.  To start the process I did an ink drawing of it and then took a tracing from that.  It's the tracing where I did another ink drawing but this time on watercolor paper. Tracings of a work is done with standard tracing paper.  I get mine from CheapJoes.com and use the 8x10 size as that covers most of my needs.  The tracing is done with a 0.3 ink pen (Winsor & Newton Fineliner).  Once I have the tracing I can then use it for other paper or to do another work of the same subject. The tracing is just a start as I still need to get it transferred onto other paper.  For that you need a very bright light...