Here’s what’s up:

1]  Working to complete ordered masks.

2]  Working to complete some one-of-a-kind’s in time for Halloween.

3]  Found out the hard way one of the lovely sides I’d bought isn’t going to be much good for the masks I’d planned to make from it, so will have to use on other designs, instead.  Because of this, I’ve had a couple of false starts on an ordered mask — got that all fixed with a different piece of leather, so it’s all good, now.

4]  Doing the usual triage on e-mails for the Halloween season.

5]  Still being deluged with Cyrillic and Korean spam [neither of which I can read, so you folks are just wasting your time]. Because these same spammers are hijacking my e-mail for their return address, a few firewalls may be blocking the real messages. Check your e-mail filters, please.

6]  And some of the queries I’ve answered — regarding availability of certain masks and the shipping fees for same — are turning into silent dead-ends.  Either my responses aren’t reaching you, or your responses to my responses aren’t reaching me [see No.5, above], or you’ve changed your mind.

If you have changed your mind, that’s cool.  With the current economy it’s no surprise. Just let me know, okay?

7] Shopping for a new wysiwyg editor [Mac OSX] in the rare spare moment.

Thanks and best,
Ryl

Time Out

Taking a couple days off from the ‘net and biz to deal with some crap and de-stress — will respond to e-mails with devoted attention when I log back in,…

Stay cool and enjoy life –

All best,
Ryl

New One-of-a-Kind Masks –

– are now on the website:

"Hafdef", the Goblin Pirate

The bullet has been bitten –

At long last, I’ve got a new desktop computer and I’m in the process of making a full migration from PC to Mac.  Gotta find new drivers for my scanner, printer, and interfaces for my digital cameras,…

Also gotta get a new FTP going in the next couple of days, but until then, please note that these one-of-a-kind masks from the “Unique Collection” have just been sold:

“Conciliatrix”
“Merlot”
“Ice Cap”
“Mindsweeper”

TTFN,
Ryl

Shiny!

Got a big, new monitor where the squares are squares instead of rectangles, and the circles are circles instead of ovals — yay!

But this new monitor also shows just how yucky a lot [!] of my image files are — bummer.

So now I need to replace all those yucky .jpg’s — it’s going to be a long week.

E-mail is again Wonking out on me –

– my website’s servers are again having problems as they perform upgrades.

If you’re not getting an e-mail response from me, please contact me via a comment through this blog.  I’ve got is set so all comments must be cleared, so they all go through my Super Top Secret Alternate E-mail Address.

Pulling Back for Focus

Yesterday I mothballed both of my Blogspots as it was just two blogs too many — an account each on WordPress for my visual art and for my masks, and then repeating the same on Blogger.  [weary sigh]  It all got to be a bit much.

Yeah, yeah, you get more control over the layout and color schemes with Blogger.  But it’s just so much easier for me to post on WordPress.

Several friends and business associates, and now family members, are telling me I just gotta [?!] get on Facebook.  I’ll confess to some trepidation over that — I’ve been harassed by coattail-riding parasites and stalked by a bewildering variety of whackjobs who’ve refused to accept the fact that not only am I heterosexual, I’m also married.

So if I get a Facebook account, what kind of headaches am I be letting myself in for?

Opinions, please,….

Sharing the Wealth –

I received an introductory e-mail from a fellow mask maker — I’m blogging it until I can make a hole in my schedule to update my site’s link pages:

I introduce myself : I am Sergio Boldrin , the owner of La Bottega dei Mascareri in Venice Italy .

This year I celebrate my twenty-fifth year of activity and I wish to invite you to visite [sic] my website.

Thank you for your attention.

My best regards Sergio

www.mascarer.com

Happy Anniversary, Sergio!!

Go take a look — he’s got some very nice videos about his mask-making processes!

Burning Bridges

Couldn’t have said it better, myself.

Plagued by Spam

Criminy — !

Don’t these Russian spammers know I can’t read Cyrillic??!

GAH!