This isn't even my art, it's not even an "object," and frankly I can't tell whether I'm collaborator or victim! But it's fun. To my great joy, the lovely and gifted cartoonist Nina Paley once wrote me, the incorrigible hacker brat, into her Daily Illini "Joyride" comic strip for a couple of weeks. Except I'm "Patty K. Zenko" (not Peter K. Zelchenko) and I'm female. A few Urbana alumni still call me that sometimes. (Click the image to see the rest of the series.) When Nina and I were young, we used to talk about cartooning as she doodled on chalkboards or paper. Her casual doodles were better than my finished work. Once, I walked into my office on the engineering campus and saw a beautiful, giant (but very cute, Nina-style, nonferocious) dragon across the large chalkboard, in rainbow colors of chalk. Nina must have spent several hours on it. Detail. Line. Thicker. Thinner. And so she gravitated to India ink and Rapidographs like a fly to honey.

Here is a Roger Ebert review of Nina's gut-wrenchingly beautiful animated film, Sita Sings the Blues. You absolutely have to see this film! Nina is extraordinary. Nina's dad, Hiram Paley, was mayor of Urbana.

A prototype of an early trackbar design. I think this was the first of its kind. There were trackballs, but putting a smaller ball beneath the keyboard was something new, being seen on some laptops, and this was probably the first discrete design that was meant for desktop machines. Several keyboards came out with a built-in trackball just beneath the space bar. The guts of this working prototype were cobbled from a cheap $5 mouse. The ball was from an old Mac trackball. The late, great Cadillac (AIN) Plastics of Bucktown provided the rest of the materials.

Tired of going to OfficeMax and not finding exactly the pocket calendar I am looking for, or else being expected to pay $25 for it, or else settling for a cheap one with a vinyl cover that will be ruined in a couple of months. So, I got out the sewing machine, found an old, beat-up briefcase with wonderfully thick black leather, and chopped it up and sewed myself a proper pocket calendar that should last a couple of generations. Well, this is just version 1. I'll improve the design as soon as I fix my sewing machine, which seems not to like thick leather.

Naturally, a pocket calendar needs a calendar. So I got into my page-layout program and made one, then printed it on decent paper, and bound it on a GBC comb binder. It's now better than what I can get in the store. At least, it's what I wanted, and it works. Made a closure out of velcro. Stole the credit card sleeves from somewhere else.

Food Underground Network. Typical spread. Sticker collector booklet. Actually a fun prototype for a saddle-stitched product to encourage children to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables. Pitched to the Coalition to Lower Obesity of Chicago Children and Seven Generations Ahead. Click on the image to download the PDF.