To all my friends, family, co-workers, assorted acquaintances and good people of earth – I hope you are having a lovely and fulfilling Christmas! (You know, if you’re into that kinda thing.)
Some Christmas Day advice: if you’re hungry, Sonic is open. However, they will forget your $4 popcorn chicken. And your fries. And you’ll be too distracted by holiday cheer to check the bag before driving home. And it’s a bit too nasty out to go back for it. And you’ll be left with mediocre burgers (but tasty tater tots…). …

Last week, under a serious short-term deadline, I produced another digital catalog for St. Louis retail store Hustler Hollywood, in conjunction with a promotion on 105.7 the Point. You can view the Flash catalog here (pretty SFW, unless your workplace is really prudish).
This was definitely a “so many irons” project – I contacted models, arranged the shoot, did all the photography, performed all post-production on the photos, designed the catalog and set up the Flash interface.
Because of the aggressive schedule from client sign-off to launch deadline, I wasn’t able to …

It’s been a rainy Fall here in the midwest, and when the St. Louis metro gets saturated, basements start flooding. Ours is no exception. Friday night, we returned from work to find the unfinished portion of our basement with standing water, and our bedroom (which is the finished portion of the downstairs) a humid, carpety-bog.
The last time this happened, some 18 months back during a particularly nasty Spring, the rising tide destroyed our carpet and stained some baseboards. But, through fortunate timing and an hours long struggle to contain the …

This afternoon, my wife (@wendybuske) and I were dining with my sister, Cathy, and her husband, Jack, at the Red Robin restaurant in Edwardsville, IL. We don’t often get a chance to see Jack and Cathy outside of holiday gatherings, and they don’t get a chance to escape from our hometown very often.
We were celebrating Jack’s 25th year of living with a kidney transplant (he is the longest living kidney transplant survivor in America). They don’t dine out often, so we thought a burger place with a fun twist would …

Back in July, Emmis Communications launched a new Environmentally-mined lifestyle website – EcoLifeSTL.com. The mission statement:
EcoLifeSTL.com is a Green-lifestyle portal focused on promoting sustainability and environmental awareness in the St. Louis community. Our aim is to bring the green-lifestyle message to both the average consumer – new to eco commitment and wanting to learn, and to aid and connect those actively pursuing a sustainable lifestyle. As a gathering place for green-minded individuals, companies and organizations, we facilitate connection, education and cooperation in St. Louis’ eco-lifestyle.
EcoLife is Emmis St. Louis’ first …

This article was originally published a few years ago as a guest column in the Edwardsville Intelligencer’s “Edge” weekend insert.
There is a creature unique to the bounds of civilization, growing overpopulated and more prevalent. It inconveniences us, endangers our vehicles and, perhaps worst of all, takes up all the good parking spaces. It affects all but the most dedicated e-commerce consumer, and it’s an epidemic of our own making: shopping cart abandonment.
Every department or grocery store parking lot is an urban wilderness populated by cast-off carts, left to litter …

This article was originally published a few years ago as a guest column in the Edwardsville Intelligencer’s “Edge” weekend insert.
While out shopping with a female friend, we stop to examine a kiosk selling trendy purses and belts made entirely of big, dangly sequins in bold, fluorescent colors. I fear someone has accosted a figure skater and stolen their outfit for raw materials.
“I should get one of those,” my friend says, her face a canvas for disco-ball refractions cast by sparkling handbags. I raise an eyebrow. This young woman, characterized by …

This article was originally published a few years ago as a guest column in the Edwardsville Intelligencer’s “Edge” weekend insert.
What’s the big deal with spam?
I’m referring to the unwanted email, mind you, not the highly dubious canned meat product (it deserves an entire column to itself).
Sure, spam clogs up our inboxes. Yes, we waste many minutes of precious surfing time deleting undesired messages and appending mail filters. And, technically speaking, this electronic junk mail absorbs precious bandwidth and slows the entire internet down. But what about the positive side of …

The new website has been up for about a week now (though I haven’t promoted that fact yet). I haven’t had a lot of time to work with it, but have been filling in some content areas here and there. There’s still a lot of empty spaces to drop stuff in – the filler feature headlines are a tad vexing – but I’m getting there.

I managed to get a little comic reading time in this week. Polished the trades for Marvel’s Annihilation #2 and #3. I don’t usually go for any of the deep-space-crazy books from either Marvel or DC, but I’d heard so many good things about this serious (and the Abnet and Lanning books that spin out of it) I figured I’d give it a try. Plus, I got a good chunk of the series and related books on the serious cheap at Chicago Comic-Con ’09.

This is the first real post for the new website. Excited about getting this up and live finally. Just migrated a few years worth of (sporadic) posts from Blogger and MySpace, now to get this thing up to speed with some current content!
I’m going to keep things brief for now (has Twitter affected me that much?), so here’s some general stuff:
I’m addicted to Glee. Seriously, love this show, love the music. The show is a little rough around the edges, but it all really makes me happy. I listen to …