In case you were wondering, nooooo, that is not what I named my iPad. I was considering Paddington, and it fit, but I am just not sure. Most people know that I like to name my belongings but I’ve yet to choose something that fits.
This isn’t the original iPad that I purchased a month ago. This is the one I ordered on the weekend. It’s an iPad 2. With the release of the new iPad, demand for the older models has decreased. I seriously don’t think every user wants to have a high resolution on such a physically small device. I’m sure most people on the new iPad would zoom in to a comfortable range. Who cares how huge the resolution of something is. If it’s not physically big, it doesn’t do much good. The iPad isn’t very large, but it has the same resolution as my monitor, which is physically about four times as large.
Everyone knows the joke with Steve Jobs holding up four iPhones stuck together in a two-by-two formation as the iPad, right? Well, it’s made its way pretty far. I know it was just seen as a pointless device, but I think that when it was first released, tablets weren’t all the rage and e-readers seemed sufficient enough to read on. I have to admit that the iPad, though not really a necessity for me, has been rather helpful so far. I finished reading half a book today on the train instead of just staring into space. I have wanted to read the e-books sitting in my computer for quite some time and I’m glad I got to do that on my morning commute. Of course, playing games is terrific, but I’ve owned the iPad for two days and I’ve only played it at home.
The first app I got was Instagram. Oh, how I missed it. Ever since I lost my iPhone last year I’ve been trying to nick my brother’s phone to upload there. Now I no longer have to since I have a camera on my iPad and I can upload and share my photos. Since I got addicted to Jewels Maze on my phone (Android), I got Bejeweled on my iPad. I found a lot of other similar apps but so far Bejeweled is the best. Some of the others had horrid colouring or really janky animations. Some of the animations were over the top. The idea for Bejeweled has been around for a hundred years, but it was popularised by PopCap Games. I remember playing it on my old computer when I was a lot younger.
I might get people recommending apps to me again. That’s totally fine, but I don’t like games like The Sims, Farmville… I can’t name any from the top of my head, but if it begins with “build and take care of…” then no, it’s not for me. I don’t like games where you create and build something and take care of it and have to monitor it. I find those games boring and tedious. James doesn’t like those games either. He says that if he wanted to do something he’d go and do it instead of playing a game involving it.
“I wouldn’t play an archery game.”
I agreed that I wouldn’t really play a ballet game, or a piano or guitar game.
“It mocks people… your efforts in honing a real skill you possess.”
I suddenly remembered how much I hate Guitar Hero. I never mentioned it because I know someone’s going to shoot my rear end – but here: if you’re going to, I don’t care. The reason I hate Guitar Hero is because it is completely unrealistic. There is absolutely no way in hell that playing Guitar Hero is like playing a real guitar. You’re pressing buttons. You’re pulling a small crap bar down every time. I don’t care that the new guitar model has a button for every fret and is closer to a real guitar. It just bloody isn’t. How the hell are you going to learn how to do slides and bends on something that just bears buttons?
I once heard someone say they were going to practice learning chords on a Guitar Hero guitar before they had a chance to learn guitar. I’m sorry, but that’s sad. If you want to play guitar, go and buy one. A typical classical guitar would be a hundred dollars. It might be a cheap brand and not last long but at least you’re getting a feel of the strings and the way you strum. Not with a fucking lever or whatever you want to call that stupid thing that you press down. Frigging wow. I don’t care if they make new models and shit, not happening.
One might argue that someone who really knows how to shoot a gun would be offended by shooting games with gun props. Like the ones in the arcade, I suppose. That is a valid point, for something as simple as using a gun in a game. I don’t know how to shoot one, and maybe shooting a toy gun is not actually how you shoot a real one. I don’t see people practicing how to shoot using a toy gun, though.
I could go on to argue that I hate DDR because it’s not dancing and you’re just stepping really fast and improving your arm and leg coordination, but I’ll stop. I kinda just hate Guitar Hero. And I know it’s just a game. But when you get people bragging about it or thinking it’s cool to walk around with the guitar controller (I’ve seen people do it. Seriously.)… just no.
Anyway before I log out, I just wanted to share a new forum that Erin initiated. It’s called StarsFalling MB. Since Tiffany and I owned SkeletonsMB.net and sadly decided to let it go after a couple of years… hopefully StarsFalling will come up with a lot of the members we had. I really liked the community we had on Skeletons but Tiffany and I really got far too busy to maintain the forum. There were active members but a lot of the staff were not active, and I guess we weren’t dedicated enough to it. We have our priorities though… school and work, as always.
I think it’s quite amusing how technology really eats at your soul these days. I was just working on an assignment and I was using Photoshop to create buttons with gradients. Sometimes I make my own and I use the Stroke tool to outline buttons; sometimes I’m far too lazy and I browse the web or just Google for “PSD button templates”. Photoshop is a gift, really. I adore digital media so much that I find it hard not to immerse myself in large quantities of it every day. Call me weird, but I enjoyed reviewing other students’ learning proposals. It reminds me of the days far back when I reviewed websites and critiqued them… I’m not going there again. It was truly time consuming because you weren’t just reviewing a page… you were reviewing a whole website and its content.
I came across a post on 1stwebdesigner.com called 45+ Free Design Template and PSD files. I don’t know about you, but seeing the word free makes me go like this:
I am not really liking the ‘web 2.0′ style; to be honest I think it’s stupid and makes every site look the same. When I looked at some classmates’ proposals it seems that they want to look into the styles of a lot of websites. I don’t dig the “typical” look of most portfolios and professional blogs in this day and age – they often have glossy buttons and light diagonal stripes on the background, or mildly pixelated or textured backgrounds. I like to see web design as a work of art, and that means going by WordPress’s little “code is poetry” motto. Code has to be beautiful, semantic, clean – designs even more so. That means standing out from the crowd, in my opinion.
Something common that I don’t object to, though, is social media buttons. They’re cute, come in all different shapes, sizes and colours – and many websites offer them for free. I don’t deny that social media is a phenomenon, and sometimes I think it’s one of the best ways to interact with others who are in the same field. I have kept in touch with a lot of my blogging buddies over the years via Twitter, and it’s a quick, easy and mobile way of contacting each other. There is absolutely no obligation to read everyone’s tweets, and no one will half-heartedly shoot you if you don’t. Often, I’ve come across people who say, “I tweeted it, didn’t you see?” A funny matter, but you shouldn’t expect everyone to read every single one of your 140-character rants.
I often like to see new followers of mine, and I choose to turn notifications for these off (when you have 1000+ followers it gets annoying). I look at my profile and find a lot of web design blogs following me possibly because of stuff that I tweet, but there has only been one that I felt so inclined to follow back and that is @designdeck, who also have a regularly updated blog and tweet regularly. A lot of web design blogs have Twitter accounts that are worth subscribing to; if you’re not really one for blog feeds or just want to flick through some tweets until you spot something that tickles your fancy… Twitter is fantastic for that.
Anyway, there are also some great tutorials for creating your own web 2.0-like buttons if you so choose.
Next, iPads. Word on the iPad I won over a month ago? Still hasn’t arrived at my work office yet. This afternoon I got bored and started browsing eBay and bidding on a whole bunch of iPad 2s. They’re generally under $400 and you save quite a lot on used ones now that the ridiculous new iPad has been released. Of course, I bid on a few of those, my expectations of being outbid by a hundred dollars being met – and set myself a budget for any iPad I was to bid on. Of course, I get a thrill out of bidding on items. I feel like it’s a wonderful tactic to bang-snap-outbid someone by a hundred dollars, or shoot in your maximum budget price as soon as a listing opens. Of course, not a tactic to win, but to troll people. I don’t know how many times I’ve bid on an item in small increments only to keep getting outbid. I’m now doing the same to other people, and I know, as James says, it’s like I have no intention to buy the iPad at all… but the fact that someone out there is getting trolled makes me rub my hands together with glee.
Of course, why do I want an iPad? To read on, primarily. I have decided to get rid of nearly all my books and novels. My collection will soon be so much smaller. And I’m not doing it because I will be getting an iPad, no… I am doing it because I need more space in my room, and those books deserve better homes. But I’m getting an iPad because I want to be able to read on the go without carrying a large book around. It would be more impressive if I was dedicated to making an iPhone/iPad app… but maybe that’s for another day.
Full time work and full time study make for a very tired, somewhat grumpy, mildly relieved, but mega awesome Georgie.
Today I finally finished my 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, therefore completing another item on my 101 in 1001 list. I’m very proud of the achievement. I’ve taken a photo of the completed puzzle. People have been asking whether I’ll be gluing it together and framing it, or just dismantling it to do again another day. To be honest, after nearly three gruelling weeks of looking at all that green, I don’t think I’ll want to do another puzzle for a while. I’d frame the puzzle, but I have nowhere to put it. Our house is a bit unstable in terms of wall mounting, so drilling holes in the wall to hang something isn’t the best idea.
It’s the first 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle I’ve done – in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever done more than a kiddish jigsaw puzzle. Ever. I’m thrilled. I suppose I’ll keep it and one day when I have my own place, there’ll definitely be a spot on the wall for the puzzle. I can dismantle it, but at least I can do it in bits so it’ll be easy to piece back together again. I’ll take some better photos later.
I’ve been having work and university day in, day out, and perhaps I was a little too arrogant to think I could do it – but I don’t care, that’s obviously my problem. I just think that maybe I was being a little bit too determined thinking I could work and study at a postgraduate level. Well, so far it’s not bad. I just have less time for other things, I’m a little low on sleep – but I’m not stressed. That is the number one thing. Last year and the year before, I’d often get stressed, my time was awfully managed, and I was just all over the place. Right now I’m finding a good balance between work and play, even though most of it is really work. A lot of the time I come home, too tired to do anything. I’ll manage, though. I sure like a challenge.
Today I nearly fell asleep in class; very uncool. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. I was positive I wouldn’t fall asleep; it was just that I was extremely tired. I can recall quite a few times when I’ve nearly dropped dead, but it’s only been at work, never at school or in class. It was 8:30pm though – I was just tired.
I was so tired I shut one eye and tried to sleep with my eyes open. It’s possible, but apparently you have to be really tired; so tired that your mind shuts off into sleeping mode before you get a chance to close your eyes. It’d be silly to try. I think if it happens, it happens. Nonetheless, I was listening to the lecture with one eye shut, and it reminded me of something I learned in high school. If you walk around with one hand over your eye for long enough, you’ll start seeing things two-dimensionally. Yes, I would assume it’s very bad for your eyes. Whatever cool effects you think it may render, it’s something I wouldn’t recommend. Similar to “let’s see how long I can go without sleeping”.
Some people try some very odd things. It seems like something fun to experience, but probably because seeing things normally, three-dimensionally, is just the norm, and anything out of the ordinary tickles the mind. Do you know how many times I put my iTunes on shuffle and come up with a song I never expected would come up? That tickles my mind. Sometimes too much that I have to keep pressing “next” until a good song comes up.
If life had shuffle, I wonder where it’d take me next. Hopefully bed. I’m tired.
My daily commutes to and from work and university and home have been rather dull. I forgot my headphones today, and my only option was to listen to the distracting beat of someone playing Kesha’s Tik Tok on a speakerphone as I sat on the train and thanked the cows for the great seats on intercity trains. I hate Kesha.
Normally I’d write a poem, normally I’d study, and often when I forget my headphones (not often. And I love music to pieces, ugh), I end up playing Jewels Maze on my phone. Which is similar to Bejeweled. But since I’m a girl, I can multi-task perfectly well. So while I was trying to fly past a level of Jewels Maze, I was thinking about a particular 13th March 2012 and about something I had to write for that day.
XHTML is not new to me; I will have no struggle writing a learning proposal in XHTML… I even plan to make things look lovely with CSS. I’m not quite sure what everyone else has in mind for their learning proposals in the class, but wherever I can help, I would love to. It’s just my nature to help people especially in the field of web design – a field which I believe I have extensive experience in. I’m sure other people will have basic ideas but I have a few of my own, which I can hopefully explain from a layman’s definition right to its complexity.
Let’s start with my first idea. Of course, the important thing is to challenge myself so I have to think of something that I can do that is not easy, given my skills. I could easily say “create a mobile website” but I’ve partially pulled one up for my blog already (it needs tweaking, sorry it’s ugly), and I have had that experience several times at work. So my idea has something to do with images. As I like simple graphic design and photo editing in Photoshop, I’ve come to enjoy creating icons/avatars based on characters from television shows, movies, or just using stock photography. LiveJournal has a large community when it comes to “icons”. For those unaware, in such a community, icons are generally 100 by 100 pixel images that have been cropped and/or edited in some way. My idea was to build something similar to Hannah’s Iconish, because I very much like the idea of being able to organise images, and to create something similar on my own would be something I would be very proud of.
Having used Iconish before, I have found no problems with it, and I like that Hannah has the feature of categories. Icon Sort is a similar PHP script, but makes the process of adding images much easier by allowing you to simply make a folder and add folders within that folder – where the folders’ names are the category names. Simple and easy to use, but obviously not as complex as Hannah’s. I have used it on icons.georgie.nu.
I won’t completely review the two scripts as that is not where I plan to head with my ideas, but given my interest in images, organisation and management, I have decided to look at something a bit more complex and perhaps common.
As WordPress is an extremely popular CMS, its media uploading feature must be used quite a lot. However, I personally find that WordPress’ media uploader is a pain in the backside. I can think of several dislikes:
Resizes your image and makes multiple copies of different sized thumbnails.
As per the above, wastes space.
Gives less tech-savvy people the impression that they are inserting smaller images into their posts which reduces loading time, but high resolution images are still uploaded to the server.
Changing captions and image metadata is a hassle as you need to hit ‘Save’ every time.
If your theme does not have the default image classes specified in the stylesheet, your images don’t align properly.
I can just think of so many improvements to this media uploader. Since many people in the class are using WordPress for their blogging platform, I suggest you actually take a look at the media uploader and see how it works for you as an image uploader. I’ve previously worked with Textpattern, and I’ve discovered that the bot_image_upload plugin is a lifesaver. You can insert images, easily edit them and change their order with a simple drag-and-drop function. A little goes a long way.
As a photographer I also prefer simplicity. While the pros of the media uploader include the fact that you can quickly make minor edits to your images and create a gallery, I believe that some people out there would appreciate a simpler uploader (myself included). What I’d like to include is basically a form with all fields already set out, including a “Browse” field to browse for a file, then you need only hit ‘Save’ once.
It would also be desirable for a stylesheet to be automatically included into the user’s theme so that images are guaranteed to be aligned the way the user wants. Also – no thumbnails unless requested by the user. This could be a separate option. I would like to incorporate all my ideas into a WordPress plugin that will override the crappy image uploader WordPress has now.
That’s just my ideas in a nutshell, not really concise… I do apologise. It’s getting late.
You know, I did try writing a really, really simple plugin once, that didn’t go too well.
Last week I was drying my hair with the hairdryer our family has owned for many years. Supposedly due to the heat, the unit decided to explode. It only exploded on the inside, so there was a bit of fire, a lot of sparks, and some remnants of the unit made their way down the sink. I wasn’t injured but my mum decided to look for a new hairdryer. Since it’s been a decade or so since we got this hairdryer, it was surprising to find that these days we’re apparently going to have to fork out some $100 for a good hairdryer. I don’t dry my hair a lot – most of the time I let it dry naturally, but because I hated the poofiness that resulted from this old hairdryer, I sometimes used the hair curler instead. Now I like killing two birds with one stone. Curly hair and dry hair… fantastic.
My mum isn’t a fan of buying online, even though it’s cheap, shipping is free, and it’s generally quite safe. I keep telling her that the shock stories she hears about using credit cards online and getting money stolen is often reported on television as a result of people’s lack of common sense, or just the media trying to make you crap your pants. The media is ridiculous in the way it tantalises minor issues in society in order to gain more viewers and hence higher ratings. What’s this I hear about sashimi making people lose their legs? … come on. I got salmonella in a country where hygiene is terrible and health conditions are below average (not joking – and it was horrible). That’s not hard to believe, but in a relatively rich country where raw fish is stored at very cold temperatures giving them a certain appearance and flavour – I highly doubt that you would get some life-threatening disease like gangrene from eating sushi that isn’t cold enough. Ugh, moving on.
After contacting the eBay seller to retract my bids, I received no reply until two days later, upon which the seller threatened to open a case against me. After that they said that they had already sold the item to someone else… but still demanded payment. Now I got myself into this mess and I used James’s account and felt like a complete fool, but he was nonetheless willing to help. He contacted eBay and they dealt with the situation, though we were not given any information about what they did to the seller. The seller still opened a case saying I was a non paying bidder. It’s funny that the warning is that I “may not receive the item” if I don’t pay… yeah well, even if I do, I won’t get it because the idiot seller sold it to someone else. Ooooh, that hurts so bad.
The reply James received from eBay was promising though, and assured us that appropriate action would be taken and the issue would be resolved. The representative reassured us that it would be okay and even apologised for the late reply. Meanwhile, since I was outbid on a number of iPads, I chose one (just one, hahaha) and went for it. This time I made sure I read through the listing and was okay with it. Right, so I’m not desperate for an iPad but one would be useful for my eBooks, more of my music, and for web testing.
I’m getting bored of this layout; I feel like the colours and fonts are dull and it’s time for something new. Working on a number of websites at work has made me keener to dabble in HTML5 and CSS3. I should be thinking simpler; that’s just what I had in mind when I designed my free themes and they turned out wonderful. I feel like I put too much effort into things sometimes, that if I stop poking around and look at the bigger picture, it would make things a lot easier.
Today James took me to a Japanese restaurant for lunch to celebrate Valentine’s day. There were some heart-shaped decorations hanging from the ceiling but I was most amazed by the avocado, tuna and roe sushi that were shaped like flowers. I’ll be posting some photos to my photoblog. Valentine’s Day is a special day for some, and a day of whining about being single for others. Please, stop. It’s a holiday that was originally meant to celebrate romantic love but for crying out loud, it doesn’t mean that if you don’t have a partner you have to feel like you’re drowning in rose petals. It’s rather pathetic; I think that people should be able to treat it like just another day if they’re in that predicament. Some people don’t celebrate Christmas but they don’t complain about not being Christian. I don’t complain that I get nothing on Mother’s Day… because I’m not a mother, duh.
I’ve got to be up early tomorrow to go to work again, so it’s time to sleep as early as possible. Catch you in Dreamland! I’ll be playing my guitar under the tree with pink leaves.
I just think that maybe I was being a little bit too determined thinking I could work and study at a postgraduate level. Well, so far it’s not bad. I just have less time for other things, I’m a little low on sleep – but I’m not stressed. That is the number one thing. Last year and the year before, I’d often get stressed, my time was awfully managed, and I was just all over the place. Right now I’m finding a good balance between work and play, even though most of it is really work. A lot of the time I come home, too tired to do anything. I’ll manage, though. I sure like a challenge. 
I’ll be posting some photos to my