Trying to teach my daughter Spanish. I talk to her only in Spanish. My wife speaks to her in English. Although I’m outnumbered. She gets mostly English so I need to step it up since she’s starting to mouth English words.

I need to improve my Spanish anyway, so I think I’m going to start posting in Spanish as well. Trying to get more in touch with my culture.

She does understand Spanish. I ask her certain things in Spanish and she responds well. Like what sound does a lion make and she roars. What does a duck say and she’ll quack. I ask her where her nose is and she points to it. So she is understanding it. Just not trying to speak it.

Actually she says “pes” and “mas” sometimes (pes is fish and mas is more).

Her English books outnunber her Spanish books. I’m trying to stop the purchase of English books because she’s got more than enough and trying to increase the number of Spanish books so I can read more Spanish to her.

This is definitely a challenge. Soon I will be labeling everything in the house with both English and Spanish words.

I started on this just as an exercise but it slowly developed into an illustration. So I figured I’d just continue. I just wish I would’ve started it on different paper.

This is drawn entirely in ball point pen. This illo is also different. Different in that I haven’t spent an extended amount of time on an illustration in years (but should more often). I put in at least an hour a day on this. Sometimes 2. Not sure where it’s going exactly but I’m loving the process. Since I don’t know when it’ll be finished, I figured I’d post the work in progress.

For those of you whom are passionate about politics, this is not political; nor does it have to do with any of my beliefs. It’s simply me just practicing my craft. I came across a great photo, noticed all the values (i.e. shadows, lights) and I just had to draw them and interpret the image my way. That’s it.

I completely agree with what Chad Grohman and Craig Fraizer say about sketching ideas down, no matter how bad they are. Here’s what Chad said:

I like the idea of the blog as testing ground. It lets me put out ideas without confusing the harmony of my portfolio site, such that it is. All ideas are worth exploring. Even getting bad ideas out will clear the way for the good ones. When Craig Frazier was explaining his sketch process, he talked about putting everything down, no matter what or how bad the idea might seem. Here, these stray ideas could flow into something cohesive. If I don’t put them out there, how will I ever know?

Just in case you update to the new Safari 4, 1password doesn’t have an update yet. But there is a way around it (i.e. a hack).

If you download and install Safari 4, go to the menu bar, click Safari/About Safari and look at the number after the version in parenthesis.

Example: Safari 4 (5530.17) is what mine says.

Quit Safari.

Now go to your Applications folder. Right click on the 1password app and Show Package Contents.

Navigate to Contents/Resources/SupportedBrowsers.plist

Double click on SupportedBrowsers.plist (if you have Property List Editor, it’ll open up in that app. If not, it’ll open up in a text app).

Click the little arrow to open the Root drop down, then click the arrow to open the drop down for Safari. Look for “MaxBundleVersion” and look at the number next to it. Double click the number and type in something bigger than what the About Safari version was.

For example, my number reads “5530.17″ so I changed the number on the SupportedBrowsers.plist to “5530.18″, save it and close it.

Open up Safari and you’ll see the 1P button.

The downside is you’ll have to do this manually until 1password updates their software officially.

Happy hacking.

Disclamer: If you attempt this then it’s your responsibility. I do not claim to be an expert and if something should happen to your application and/or system, I am not at fault. Do this at your own risk.