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| The Thinker: Kristian Walker The Family Gig: Husband to Christine Daddy to: Jordan, Gabriel, Jacob & Spencer The Pooch: Hero The Full Time Gig: Art Director, TaigMartin Advertising & Public Relations The Prof Gig: Professor-Web Design, Southwest Michigan College The Freelance Gig: Mayor, Eurekaville Design & Communications |
The blog has moved over here.
Click to check it out!
Monday, September 23, 2002
I feel included nowAfter hearing about it online for years, I finally recieved one of my very own! I just got an e-mail from one Hassan Umaru, Manager-Bank of Africa, Abdijan, personally inviting me to make a generous fee for helping him out with a banking problem. I'm so excited! Now I truly feel like an 'net insider.
Thanks Hassan!
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
TodayI drive to work through 45 minutes of cows and corn for my daily commute. Midway between Chicago & Detroit (a bit closer to Chicago), the biggest cities are South Bend, IN and Kalamazoo, MI. 225k population each, max. I can leave the middle of either large city and be in the middle of nowhere in 15 minutes, surrounded by open sky and green fields. My life is usually about as normal as normal can be in many ways.
I remember three distinct things going through my head last year.
One was a feeling of helplessness. I didn’t feel in danger, although the thought crossed my mind that Notre Dame had potential to be a target. This is something I’m sure I shared with a majority of America. Glued to TV, radio or net streams, paralyzed by the immensity of it and the fact that all most of us could do was stand there and watch.
I also remember feeling even more removed from the rest of the world than ever. The small Midwest towns I live and work in are the polar opposites of NYC and D.C. Crime is low, murders few and far between. Major events just don’t happen here. We go on about our lives daily in our own little Pleasantville existence.
But most of all, I remember being shaken from my normal state of blind optimism that convinces me that everything will be fine in the end. Somewhere inside, the voice of that big part of me that is still 10 years old, kept asking “Where are you, Superman?”
Friday, August 30, 2002
New Thinking
Yeah, I know I've been a ghost for a while. I haven't adandoned ship, nor am I pushing up daisies.
Better late than never, right.
I've got too many irons in the fire, bitten off more than I can chew, my eyes got bigger than my stomach, and just busy as a beaver. Get my drift? I'm thinking of cutting way down on the amount of freelancing I do, though. I just don't have the time anymore, plus the 'ol Mac-enstein at home is getting a bit long in the tooth and needs to be put out to pasture soon. It's an old dog and I can't teach it new tricks. Live and learn I guess.
I'll be spending my lunch hour in the next month finishing 2 websites: one for my design class and one for the ad club. Once those are finished I'm going to bite the bullet and get the ball rolling on updating the blog, giving it a fresh coat of paint and some spring cleaning. A whole new ball of wax so I can run with the big dogs and get off the porch.
I hope my absense has made your hearts grow fonder, and that you haven't gotten bent out of shape. I'll be back soon.
See ya' later alligator!
Friday, August 09, 2002
AddendumIn a perfect compliment to my previous post, the last line of James Lileks' most recent bleat reads thus "Never trust someone who can't say sorry to a dog."
Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Feline DomesticusI have always been what you might call a “dog person”. I’ve been raising dogs since I was young. I know how dogs think, I can get them to respond to me very well, and well, my nose is usually cold. I like bigger dogs as well. Dogs I can wrestle with and what-not. We’re planning on breeding our boxer Hero in the next couple of years. He has a great disposition, and personality and has been easy to train. Okay, he eats like a moose, but he’s a growing pup (even at 70-some pounds at 10 months). So, the point is, I love dogs.
I had cats here and there growing up (along with parakeets, finches, a ferret, rabbits to name a few), but I don’t really remember much about them. My parents still have two from when I was in high school. One is nicknamed “Psycho-cat” because she hisses and runs whenever anyone but my Mom comes near. Snooty and anti-social has been my most recent experience.
But I have a 10 year old daughter who has wanted a kitty for years. We broke down and ended up adopting a sibling pair of 4 year-old cats from a woman who’s fiance was deathly allergic. Princess and Buckaroo (they were already named). Their former owner and my wife figured that the match would be good. The two were used to small children (we have 4) and had been around a Golden Retriever (not quite as energetic as a boxer, but close) enough to be well accustomed to being slobbered on.
Day one was nuts. Our 3 yr-old and the 18-month old scared the you-know-what out of the cats and then there was Hero. He is extremely friendly and immediately wanted to play. He got his butt kicked. These cats made it clear they had no patience for his shenanigans.
Now, after a couple of months, Princess spends her day under our bed. She comes out when the kids are gone and Hero is out, mostly at night. Buckaroo spends most of his time upstairs (the baby-gate keeps him safe from being accosted) under Jordan’s bed. Of the two, Buckaroo is the most outgoing. He hangs out with the older kids more often, but is still wary of the tykes.
I’m actually enjoying being turned into a “cat person”. I can understand the current “hide-under-the-bed-all-day” thing. It’s not easy moving into a crazy family like mine. Who knows, maybe I’ll find myself watching a movie late one night in the future with a dog curled up at my feet and a cat in my lap.
Boy, would that be weird.
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
NewA new issue of Thinking Around the Corners is now live (not Memorex). Enjoy.
the Old Fart
31 years ago today, I entered this world with black hair so long, they had to comb it out of my eyes to take my picture for the hospital. Over the years, it has somehow turned blonde and along the way I've lost a good majority of it as well. My knees creak the way my fathers do when I stand up.BUT- I refuse to mature. When I turn 108, I plan on still being able to have the sense of wonder of a child. The reason, BTW, for the exact numkber of 108 is that if I live that long, I will have lived a few years past the Tricentennial of the United States. I think that would be cool, to have lived (and remembered) both the Bicentennial (I was 5 in 1976) and the Tricentennial.
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
…of our peers
Todd Dominey, of What Do I Know blog fame, talks about going in for Jury Duty, the dreaded civic responsibility all Americans must face. I get nervous every time I hear someone grumble about having to go to jury duty.
It’s not that I’m particularly civic-minded or anything. I get this picture in my head, though, of a trial where maybe the defendant really is innocent. In this imaginary trial, the prosecution has gobs of circumstantial evidence (nothing hard like DNA) that makes it a very tough call. This is when I picture 12 people who would rather be almost anywhere else but in that courtroom. Twelve people who moaned and griped about going to jury duty. Twelve people who hold someone’s future in their hands. Then I picture that I’m the wrongly accused sitting in the defendant’s chair.
I don’t ever plan on being in that position. But if for some reason I were, and you get picked to be one of my jury of peers, please take a moment to think and treat my trial as if you were sitting in that defendant’s chair.
Monday, July 01, 2002
IT’S ALIVE!!!!!!!!!
Rumors regarding my death have been greatly exaggerated. I have just finished:
1. Teaching spring semester typography class (regularly 4 months compressed into 6 weeks)
2. Two children in simultaneous softball/baseball leagues
3. One child doing a theater musical at the same time as the aforementioned softball
4. Packing and moving of my office at the agency into a brand new awesome building
5. Launching the first issue of a new e-zine.
6. At least six bouts of some flu-like virus in the family and one wife with a hole in her foot from a nail (all the way through)
7. In introduction of two 4-year-old cats into our family, bringing the total to 4 kids, 2 parents, a dog and 2 cats.I hope July is a quiet month.
I’ll have issue number 2 of Thinking Around the Corners up in a couple of days. This time we will have 2 interviews and one column from Yours Truly as opposed to one interview and a guest article. Once the momentum builds, I’ll move into a bi-weekly publishing schedule.
On June 27th, 8 years ago, my son Gabriel was born. The second of four, he seems to be the most like me. Tall & gangly with light blonde hair, he did inherit enough of his mother’s good looks to offset my genes in that department. We share a lot of the same traits, both of us are ADD (he’s has the added Hyperactivity, though) and he’s the artist of the bunch so far-like his dad.
Tuesday, June 04, 2002
(Oops. I forgot to close the link tag on the end of the last post and now I can't edit it out. The e-mail address is walkers@bwwonline.com. Sorry.)
Double Digits
10 years ago this morning (at 1:48 a.m. to be exact) I had a life changing experience, one of the paradigm shifts the business gurus are always talking about. It was at that moment when I became a father for the first time.Jordan Leigh Walker was born that day. She was just about as perfect as every baby is.
So now she’s in double digits, getting closer to the dreaded teenage years. She’s still my baby girl, though.
Happy Birthday, Squirt.
I’d like to fill our e-mail at home with happy birthday messages , so if y’all wouldn’t mind sending a birthday note to my little girl at posted by Kristian Walker at 8:45 AM
Friday, May 31, 2002
Bumblebee on speedI haven’t been this busy in a great while. True, the past 2 years I’ve kept a pretty fast pace between teaching at the college and freelancing along side the full-time agency gig, but it’s never been this nuts. I think it’s mostly due to the spring semester schedule, where you try to put 4 months work into a month and a half.
We’re cranking the work here at the agency as well. It’s actually a nice change from my previous place of employment. Things hadn’t really been clicking on all cylinders there for quite some time. What’s even better is that I’m not only doing big projects, but I’m doing interesting, intelligent ones. Even though this ends only the second week I’ve been here, I’ve already been doing more creative thinking and problem solving on a deeper level than I did in the last several months previous. Which, for a guy like me who thrives on creative thinking, is great. Today I’ll be out all day doing a presentation on a decent-size direct mail campaign to a out of town client.
Speaking of creative thinking, I PROMISE to have the ‘zine up at the beginning of next week. I have all my software, I’ve finally settled into my office space and everything is written and the page templates are hacked together. All I need to do is find an hour to pop the text into the pages, tweak some code and publish. Simple, right?
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
Week 2Things are going extremely well at my new job. If the "breath of fresh air" wasn't such a tired analogy, I'd use it (I did anyway, didn't I). The creative environment is better then I've been in for a while.
Outside of that, things are running at a more-then-hectic pace. The Typography class I'm teaching is 3 days a week, 4 hours each class. 15 hour days. Luckily my class is small in number, made up of relatively eager beavers.
Add to that freelance work (2 websites, a couple of brochures and a poster) and the launch of a magazine and you can easily realize why I went to bed at 2 am last night (OK, some of that had to do with the Mountain Dew Code Red intake, but…) as well as why my postings have been few and far between. Once everything settles down and starts moving into the right rhythm (syncopated 4/4 swing beat with a soft ride on the cymbal-think Duke Ellington Blues) I'll be blogging more often and maybe even update some things that have fallen by the wayside.
BTW- the new 'zine will resided at this address. The blog will be moved (not yet though) to www.eurekaville.com/thinking/blog
Monday, May 13, 2002
1st daySo far, so awesome at the new gig. The people are very cool. I was just touring the new building we will be moving into in June. Not only is it huge but there is nothing like it in the area at all. I don't think I saw any walls with right-angles. I'll post pics when we move in.
Things here will be a bit slow for a week or two as I get everything worked out here and elsewhere. Moving the pub date of the 'zine to next week, I just have too many things going on. I start another semester this week, filling in for the Typography class.
Friday, May 10, 2002
Outta' Here
I'm down to the last 3 hours at this job. Trying (desparately) to finish the web site for them I started 2 years ago. I really can't wait for Monday to start at the new gig. I've had all kinds of people (photographers, producers, desginers, etc…) call me for congrats and to tell me that I'll love working at this new agency, so I'm ready to rock and roll.I'll post updates after the first day to tell 'yall how it goes.
Getting close to done on the new 'zine, although with everything going on, I may have to push back the launch date a week.
Reading right now:
Nothing. I can't decide what e-book to download next to my handheld.
Listening to:
Ella, Duke, Satch'mo. Lady Day, Cab Calloway, and a little Royal Crown Review.
Quote:
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
-Henry David Thoreau
Old Stuff
Archives
Creative Things
Read my interview in the book Self-Promotion for the Creative Person,
by Lee Silber
Good Reading:
Zeldman.com
A List Apart
Hivelogic
Textism
What do I know
Quarkfolio
Airbag
Dave Barry
Thinking for a living
Interesting Places:
Independentsday
Born Magazine
Digital Web Magazine
Wordlab
Christians in the
Visual Arts
CreativeLee
Fontaholics Anonymous
Old Stuff
Archives
Send me a note sometime
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