My first painting was a terrifying but rewarding experience. It’s the first time I’ve seriously set out to make art with paint since I was a kid in school. I had some guidance, but for the most part we were both learning as we went along.

To say that I “painted” in the traditional sense of the word is a lie. I used paint to cartoon on canvas. I tried to get ambitious things got away from me pretty fast. So I returned to my safe-zone, deciding it was better to go with my strengths my first time around. Once I looked at the canvas like I was working in Photoshop things got easier. Fill an area with color and then stroke with a nice thick expressive line. Maybe that’s cheating, but you need to understand how easy it is to get discouraged and abandon art. I was worried I would walk away from this and give up. I wanted to finish it and feel some sense that I had accomplished something worthwhile.

Painting is this corner of art I’ve not screwed up in yet. All my mistakes are ahead of me. It’s got a different pace. I can see myself doing it simply because it’s relaxing and thrilling to be trying something different. I’m excited to learn more about REAL painting and see what I can do. Maybe I’ll take classes. It’s also nice to finish something and have an original piece of art at the end of the day.

This first painting I’ll keep. Mike says you always keep your first painting. I’ll hang it up at the office when I get it home. But this will not be my last painting and hopefully I can do it on a regular basis. Maybe I’ll start a side business selling originals.

Pictures of the process can be found on my flickr page.

UPDATE: Based on reader recommendations I have performed a system restore on my iPhone and not restored it from previous backups, instead opting to set it up as a new phone. I’m going to use it this way for a couple days and see how things go. I’ll let you know.

I’m an Apple fanboy, there is no doubt. Ever since I switched over from Wintel machines to my Mac Pro and Mac Laptop, I never want to go back. It’s hard not to champion them to other people, even though I know how annoying that can be on the receiving end. This week, during my visit here at the Penny-Arcade offices, Mike bought a Mac Pro and I was giddy. I felt elation FOR him. I just love Macs.

That being said, I hate my iPhone. I hate it so much.

My iPhone was something I waited in line for when they first came out. I waited a couple hours actually, in the Texas heat. I paid 600 bucks for it too. And for that first year, it was the best phone experience of my life. Great interface, great way to check mail and surf the web on the go. Visual voicemail is lovely. It was a glorious time.

Those days are over, my friends. Since the 2.0 update, this thing barely does anything after the “i” part of it’s name. It certainly doesn’t “phone” anymore. I miss calls constantly. Sometimes, around 8 or 9 pm, I just get pelted with a series of buzzes in my pocket. My missed calls have finally caught up with my iPhone and it wants to let me know I missed some important shit.

It needs to be rebooted 3-4 times a day. Once a week I do a full restore on it. I don’t keep any apps on it at all because all they do is slow down the device. Several times a day it tells me voice mail is either not accessible or not set up yet.

The bad thing is that I got used to checking my IMAP email on the fly. I check it a lot. I twitter and text a lot as well. But not even that works. The iPhone’s internal mail app can not look at any attachment. I am constantly backing out of the mail app and opening safari to look at my gmail on the web where a 56k jpg can actually be viewed.

My friends here are telling me to dump this iPhone and get a blackberry. I’m seriously considering it. The only bad thing is that I would totally miss using this thing as a video iPod. I’m being told that once I deactivate the “phone” part of my “iPhone” I can no longer use it to watch episodes of Dr. Who in bed.

I hate my iPhone. The question is, what do I do now?