Hi 👋

One of my regular running routes takes me along the access road for a local canal. It's a public right-of-way as well as a road regularly used by the Central Oregon Irrigation District.¹

The canal itself passes under a highway, and the access road passes under through its own little tunnel, barely wide enough for a truck to pass through, but perfect for pedestrian traffic. It's maybe a hundred feet long. Concrete and blacktop. Adequate drainage. Utilitarian.

An overview of the COID canal tunnel under the Bend Parkway, facing east.

But what it unexpectadly offers is a huge, secluded concrete canvas for local taggers and graffiti artists. And they are locked in a constant struggle with COID, who apparently prefer the walls to be grayish tan at all times. Any graffito here is ephemeral, destined to be painted over by the district within a week or two of appearing. ²

Spray painting these walls is illegal, make no mistake. But places like this are destined to be gallaries for punks and weirdos, and maybe we should allow a little room in our society for outsider art. Just please don't tag my garage door.

I'm not an art critic and especially not a graffiti critic. Many of the marks I've seen are amateur, rudimentary, perhaps created in haste and with little to say. But I've documented many of them.

Here are my favorites.³ I'll post more when I get 'em.

Captured March 19, 2021

Captured March 19, 2021

Captured October 27, 2021

Captured July 20, 2022

Captured August 14, 2023

Captured May 22, 2025

Captured August 7, 2022

Captured November 8, 2021

Captured August 14, 2023

Captured July 20, 2022

Captured August 7, 2022

Captured July 20, 2022

Captured May 7, 2023

Captured June 3, 2025

Captured July 4, 2022

Captured August 7, 2022

Graffiti can be a wonderful ongoing conversation between both artist and cleanup crew.

Captured July 20, 2022

Captured May 19, 2024

In a past life, I worked at a newspaper as a graphics reporter. Among other things, I made infographics and key art for all sections of the paper. I relied heavily on digital tools (Photoshop, Illustrator) but when it came to sketching or original art I was and remain stubbornly old school.

I stumbled upon this cache of raw scans for infographics and illustrations and decided to share them, with some minimial context.

Aneurysm

Something to do with an aneurysm? I think I eventually traced this in Illustrator.

I recently decided to upgrade an old utility instance on AWS from Amazon Linux 2 to Amazon Linux 2023. This was mostly easy, as the linux flavors are very similar, however…

Cron is not installed by default on Amazon Linux 2023, and AWS recommends using systemd to run scheduled tasks instead of using cron. So I decided to learn how to do that.