life according to kathryn

saturday baking, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

saturday i baked the strawberry mascarpone tart from the moosewood celebrations cookbook. i had been saving the recipe for an appropriate occasion, and my friend’s graduation from an intensive graphic design certification program fit the bill.

i substituted whole wheat pastry flour for white, and omitted the amaretto/grand marnier. i also used the vanilla that matt brought me from mexico years ago, which always makes a recipe special. the whole tart was delicious but i especially enjoyed the crust, and wonder what other fillings would work with it. ideas?

congratulations katha on your fresh minting from massart! may lots of exciting graphic design opportunities have need of your talents.

this week we were without internet for four days. four long days!

monday one of my students asked me how to make a garden in flash, such that each time you clicked, a flower (of random variety and size) appeared. it only took me about ten minutes to code that up over my lunch break, and another few moments to make a variation with falling flowers.

that evening, matt and i were looking for entertainment and we riffed together on several variations of the falling flower movie. this one uses mouse proximity to determine scale and saturation. i hadn’t manually coded a ColorMatrixFilter before, that was fun. it was also really fun to program with matt. we should do that more!

this is the first post where i’m using the WP-SWFObject plugin to display a SWF in a post. seems to work, but let me know if you discover any difficulties.

i also have a bit of news to share. i leveled-up to software developer at schematic. i really enjoy my work so it’s nice to get recognition and a chance for new challenges.

matt at cafe du monde, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

i’m just back from a really great trip to new orleans, for a wedding. congratulations carolyn and thom!

friday morning we sat at cafe du monde and ate beignets, then walked around the french quarter, and browsed quirky old books in a used bookshop. my favorite was a guide to BASIC programming with great illustrations and captions like “i’m going to integerize this decimal number with my trusty truncating saw!”. afterward we had a yummy lunch at bon ton cafe (thanks julie).

it was a rainy day and matt and i took a good nap in the afternoon, then woke up and went out for ice cream, which we ate while watching big ships on the mississippi. we saw lots of tow boats pushing barges. we had a rehearsal dinner to attend in the evening… then we sprawled out on the big hotel bed and watched some of the tales of hoffman on public tv. very funny to see an opera with a robot!

mississippi river, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

saturday we ate breakfast at mother’s (thanks stephanie), went walking along the river and even got a little sunburned! then matt and i split off and went to the aquarium. my favorite part was feeding stingrays. i am a squirmish one so i am proud that i was able to hold the fish in my hand and deal with the sting ray touching me. we also saw otters, penguins, seahorses, eels, piranhas, sharks, and frogs… as well as an imax movie about the wetlands and hurricane katrina. it was really nice to have dot dot dot time with matt.

wedding cake, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

in the evening was the wedding, and that was fun. it was at a big mansion with a great garden, lots of music and dancing. there is this tradition called ’second line’ at the end of the evening where everyone dances in a line out into the street while waving a handkerchief in the air. then we blew bubbles while the bride and groom walked out to a horse-drawn carriage that took them away. super fun!

night mermaid, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

pearlescent aqua is one of my favorite colors of gocco ink. i have used it a few times to print mermaid cards. it just seems to fit her so well.

yesterday i pulled out the old screen and printed with the same ink on navy paper. it reads as silver on the dark paper, as you can see from the silver envelope in the background.

i love this kind of discovery! i wonder how the other pearlescent colors (yellow, pink, purple) will look on dark backdrops. some more experimenting is in order.

cherry blossom wedding invitation, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

a high school friend is getting married in may, and we designed and gocco-printed her wedding invitations together.

she was an excellent client, with specific ideas about what she wanted, but also flexible around constraints. the stencil-like cherry blossom imagery she found worked beautifully for gocco.

the reception will be a barbecue at a campsite in massachusetts, and i am looking forward to summer weather! now, to find a pretty dress to wear…

Happy April Fools Day!

I wrote this application as a prank on my beloved. It is a maximized, transparent, always-on-top application that creates a new “stuck pixel” every ten minutes. After a few hours he definitely wondered what was up with his monitor.

Until I work out how to mesh the AIR install badge with Wordpress, you can download PixelStickr.air directly. You’ll need to have the AIR runtime (Windows/Mac) installed as well.

matt’s birthday, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

my handsome one is another year older and wiser. we made a spice cake to celebrate. happy birthday mattie!

hard drive, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

last week my hard drive started complaining that it was almost full. long story short, we swapped out that drive for a bigger one, and reinstalled everything.

matt had been backing up my computer, so i didn’t lose one ounce of important data. three cheers for matt, without whose help i might be telling you a tearful cautionary tale.

reinstalling your operating system and all of the programs that run on it is somewhat time-consuming and tedious. but after five years of gathering clutter, it feels as though my computer is a nice fresh clean slate.

coconut cookie batter, originally uploaded by kathryn_rotondo.

here’s a random assortment of updates, accompanied by a picture of some cookie batter made at this time last year (which i think is the last time i baked cookies).

first, matt passed his research comps! this is cool because it is the last requirement for getting a masters degree on the way to his phd. he had to present his research (about gesture recognition from a mobile platform in varying lighting conditions) to a panel of faculty. i am so proud of matt!

also, this semester i am teaching an actionscript class at the rhode island school of design’s continuing education department. i took this class a few years ago, which you might think would make it a snap to teach. however, actionscript has changed a lot in that time (from AS2 to AS3), and i’ve had to rework pretty much everything.  the final project for each student will be a game, so perhaps in a couple months i’ll link to some of those.

i already posted that vogue went live, so i’m looking forward to my next project at schematic. in the meantime, i’m exploring the flex 3 component kits for photoshop and flash to see if i can come up with some improvements for designer/developer workflow.

coming out of an intensely busy period, i have been trying out evenings and weekends away from the computer. i really think this is the way to go, and am going to continue trying to keep this up even when things inevitably get busy again.