At Maecenas' Reception Room, Stefan Bakałowicz, 1890

He who puts off the hour to begin living rightly;
Is like the yokel who stands at the stream with a sigh:
'I can't get across. I'll wait here till it runs dry.'
Meanwhile, it flows, forever flows on and rolls by.

Horace's Epistles are collections (two of them, but almost always published together) of letters addressed to various people and composed in hexameter verse. They are full of useful moral maxims, but this is poetry, not carefully argued philosophy with a definite point of view. Nonetheless, the mature Horace of the Epistles is definitely reaching out beyond beauty, to get a hold on truth and goodness as well:

So now I lay aside my verses and all other toys. What is right and seemly is my study and pursuit, and to that am I wholly given.

Portrait drawing of Rainer Maria Rilke, Leonid Pasternak, 1901

Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the 'grown-ups'? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow.

It's been a while. Let's ease back into our reading with a short one, a miniature jewel: the poet Rainer Maria Rilke's ten letters written to Franz Xaver Kappus in the years 1903–1908 (Yes, that's very modern by our standards. We'll let it slide this time). Kappus, an unhappy officer cadet who dreamed of living the life of a poet instead, sent some of his verses to the already published and somewhat famous (although almost as young as himself) poet Rilke asking for criticism and advice. He didn't get criticism (“any critical intention is too remote from me”, says Rilke) but of advice he got plenty. And what advice it is!

In late 2022 I designed this logo for Estonian musical ensemble Sadamasild.

Sadamasild logo, December 2022

The name "Sadamasild" means "Sadam's Bridge", after frontman and songwriter Marek Sadam. The arch formed by the crossbars of the A's in the logo is meant to read as a bridge, at least to an Estonian audience that understands the name.

Here's a logo I designed for Marek Sadam and Mikk Saar's band Saar ja Sadam, with wider and narrower variations for different applications. For non-Estonian speakers: "Saar" means "island" and "Sadam" means "harbor", so the last names of these gentlemen naturally suggest nautical ideas to an Estonian audience.

As with my logo designs for the LEP festivals in 2019 and 2021 (postponed until 2022 for COVID), I've prepared a proposal document with some details and other variations, including text-only versions without the logomark elements, suitable for reproduction at small sizes.

I can't wait to see these on t-shirts!

As part of my ongoing garage renovation I installed new LED light fixtures on the ceiling. This required me to rebuild the existing network of surface-mounted conduits and brought to light some disturbing discoveries about the state of the electrical system in the garage I've lived next to, in blissful ignorance, since 2019. For more on that, watch the video above and learn how NOT to wire a garage with an extra circuit.

In addition to the downright hazardous faults I'm referring to was a class of problems that rise to the level of the merely annoying. One of those: the ceiling box that the lights depend on was rotated by a small but immediately apparent angle from the walls of the building. If, as planned, I installed the linear LED lamps using conduits connected to the box, the pattern of lights would not be perpendicular to anything else, which I obviously could not accept.