Valhalla Island

In an effort to improve my room, be creative and have some fun, Courtney and I have been doing lots of painting. Mum found some really cheap canvas a little while ago so she bought heaps of them and I’ve always had lots of paint.

A couple of days ago we wanted to make one of those splatter paintings, so we did and it’s now in my room and looks great but I’ll show you pictures of that later. While we were working on it we had bowls with diluted paint and we both had the urge to just throw the bowls at the canvas. We used all the self control we could muster and finished the first one before getting another canvas to throw paint at.

Courtney threw the bowl of red and this is what happened:

Since we weren’t planning on doing it, we didn’t really have any space for it so now it’s on EBAY! With a starting bid of only $5 and no reserve you’d be crazy not to place a bid on this magnificent piece of artwork!

Windows and Windows Defender are a joke.

The Windows computer was really stuggling today so I downloaded Windows Defender, Microsoft’s own virus and spyware ‘remover’. Oh yeah, I assumed the computer was struggling due to spware because of the huge amount of random processes running.

So I install Defender, an extremely long task in itself, then I click full system scan.

Five hours and fifty minutes later the scan is finished and it has found three ‘medium to low’ threat files. So I click the remove button, a loading bar appears, half an hour later it tells me it can’t delete the files. What a fucking joke, five hours to find three files it couldn’t delete anyway.

Being a Mac user that doesn’t have to deal with viruses, adware or spyware, I feel good.

While Flickr is cool, Zooomr is almost identical and while pro accounts with Flickr are about $30 a year, Zooomr gives pro accounts to bloggers for free. All I have to do is put this photo…

… in a post. Link it here and I have a free pro account. I like this question from the Q and A in the post:

What? You�re giving out free Pro accounts to bloggers? Why in the heck would you do that? Do you hate money or something?

It’s a pretty smart move from the creator. Get millions of people everywhere to start using Zooomr instead of Flickr, get them to write nice things about it, link to it, put a Zooomr feed in their sidebar, that’s a lot of free publicity.

Zooomr has obviously copied much of the Flickr interface though and I wonder how Flickr feels about that.

The difference a good client makes is amazing. The position I’ve been in before has meant I haven’t had to deal with the client or I’ve worked for an employer who was much more like a bad client. Recently I’ve been dealing with more clients myself and have found an amazing one and it’s taken me by surprise.

What makes this guy so good is that he’s just a great guy and would be good in any situation but aside from that, he knows his stuff, he knows exactly what he wants, he knows what is bad and what is good, he want the right things (that’s important), he’s quick to reply to any questions and he doesn’t hesitate to sink money into areas where money should be put. All these make for one great client.

Other people should be able to learn from this because despite making my life easier, it results in him getting much higher quality service from me. Not because I do shitty jobs for clients that piss me off but because I’m just dying to impress this guy. I might have the job done in half the time, I might go out of my way to teach him the software or add extra features where he hasn’t asked for them at no extra charge, I might buy him a Mint account, small things like that because his good attitude towards me makes me want to do an amazing job.

I really don’t want anyone to think that I don’t work to 100% on projects where the client is bad because I do, just sometimes you’ll hate the fact that you have to work to 100% on those jobs. I will always do what they ask for the the absolute best of my ability but that’s all I’ll do.

Being a good person will work for you in life. No one wants to go out of their way for an asshole.

In response to an article in the International Herald Tribune on my favourite typeface, Georgia. Not really in response, it’s just a great article that I learnt a lot from.

“A few designers have mentioned that there seems to be a ‘Georgia revival’ going on,” says Matthew Carter, the British-born, Boston-based designer who developed Georgia for Microsoft in 1996. “It seems a bit young to have died and been revived already.”

That’s was something I was definately a little surprised by, that it was developed for Microsoft. Not that Microsoft don’t make nice fonts, the latest are really nice, it just doesn’t seem like a Mircsoft font. Even more surprising is that it was developed at the same time as Verdana, possibly the web’s most popular font.

That article also discusses the origins of type where letters used to be carved out in metal, there’s so many fonts today because it’s so much easier to create new fonts on a computer.

While Georgia definatley looks good on a screen with anti-aliasing on, it looks horrible without it. I don’t think it works on a site with too much text (but then again no site looks good with too much text), it doesn’t look good bold either, so I don’t think the NY Times site pulls it off. Day Dream does.

Printed, it looks amazing. I use it on all of my printed university assignments.

Another difficulty was that the numbers looked confusing, so he differentiated them with slight variations in height. “The variations were so slight that it looked like a mistake,” recalls Carter. “Late in the day we decided to exaggerate the differences by making them ‘old style figures’ in which the 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9 drop below the line, and the 6 and 8 stand proud.”

Why some numbers in Georgia fell below the line is something I’ve always wonderded. Sometimes I like it, sometimes it is frustrating.

I use Georgia because of it’s sophistication, detail and readability.

He’s 18, he’s smart, he’s a cool dude and guess what ladies, he’s single!

Today was my first day back to university after my 5 week, mid-year holiday. Today was also the first day I’ve travelled to university in anything but my car. I like public transport for the social factor but I knew things were going to go wrong today and they have. Not horribly wrong, I don’t know if missing a bus or train is that horrible.

Right now I’m sitting at the bus stop after missing a bus by five minutes. I definately like trains much more than buses. Another bus doesn’t come for another hour and I’ve wasted 15 minutes so far. Once I actually get on the bus it’s going to take another 45 minutes before I get there and even then I won’t be home. From there I have to get another bus and not even that takes me home, I have to pick up my car there and drive home from there. I like public transport.

Well anyway, after missing the train I planned to catch this morning it was suprisingly easy to find the room in the building on the campus that I’d never been to before. This semester I’m doing one course at the Queensland College of Art in Southbank. After only three hours there this morning I can tell that I’m going to love it, I loved it this morning it was amazing. Everything about it is so great, the building, the atmosphere, my teacher, the computers (oh! The computers, I’ll talk about them in a sec) and the subject matter. I’ve forgotten what the course is called but it’s something to do with digital image creation or something similar.

Now, the computers in this room are all identical, 20″ Apple cinema displays and Dual 2.7ghz G5 PowerPCs, with four (yes, four) gb of RAM. These are very nice and very fast computers. The software is great too, completely up to date, we were working with Adobe CS 2 today.

Our teacher really knows her stuff, I learnt more in a three hour workshop than I could have taught myself in a year and I just can’t wait to get stuck into Illustrator when I get home. I’ve always heard people talking about how great Illustrator is but I always struggled with it when I tried myself. Now I’m quite confident I could come up with something really nice in it and that’s after one workshop. Expect a redesign here soon.

As well as just learning how to make something we’re learning how to do it quickly, really really quickly. After that one lesson I’d be twice as fast in any graphics program and that’s really exciting. No one really shares my enthusiasm though. She showed us some work by previous students in the same course and wow! It’s brilliant, I’ll have to post some up here.

Also, today I had my first Maths lecture with a hilarious Lecturer and my first Programming 2, with the most dull man on earth. It’s people like him that give programmers bad names.

So 16 minutes have passed since I began writing and that’s not nearly enough. One thing I have noticed while sitting here is the amazing amount of Asians. I am in the vast minority being an Australian commuter. There’s probably 50 people here waiting and maybe 5 are Australian. Another thing I’ve noticed is how loud they talk, their normal talking voice seems to be much much louder than ours.

Ok, I’m going to organise some files and then hope time passes quickly. Hey that’s something else I need to talk about. Ever since installing Windows, OS X seems much slower, even when Windows isn’t running. I’ll talk about Parallels in another post, or maybe I’ll talk about it on the bus, if I’m able to type.

Part of the fun when reading blogs, news or online comics is seeing the design, analysing it, finding parts I like, parts I don’t, looking for special little touches. You don’t get that with feed readers, all you get is text and that reminds me of when that’s all the internet was capable of.

So my daily reading list is set up in it’s own bookmark folder. Safari, Firefox, Camino, anything that supports tabs has an ‘open in tabs’ option at the bottom of a bookmarks folder. I just open these each day, closing through sites without an update and reading the ones that do. This list gets constantly moderated. It’s quite a long time before a site gets on the list, I’ve rushed to add some before and it’s always resulted in a quick removal after realising the mistake I’ve made. But when I take my time and let it prove itself before being added it’s a very difficult decision to cut it.

That’s what happened to Signal vs Noise this morning. After almost 6 months of being one of my favourite reads, it’s completely lost the plot in the last couple. I would find myself not being interested in anything written there anymore. I gave it a chance though, a really good chance. I let it sit there for two months, it didn’t once redeem itself and in those two months I didn’t read one post written for Signal vs Noise.

Kyle Neath at Warpspire feels the same way and points out where they went wrong. Ironically, Warpspire is on the path to list addition and this is how that works.

A site is added to the list after I regularly find myself reading and enjoying their articles by chance. I don’t really know how I continue to come accross their posts but if I do and they are good and this keeps happening, they are eventually added as a daily read.

It’s quite a tough process. So Meredith at Banana Theory should be very proud of herself for making the list this morning. Her writing is humorous and plentiful, her style is great. She also breaks a few milestones, she is the first blogger account on the list and also the first Random Shapes member. If she’d like to get off blogger and onto a far superior, self-hosted, Wordpress blog then the offer of help is always open. I’d love to be part of making writing easier for such an entertaining writer.

As I said I was going to do, the old computer has become a Ubuntu computer once the Macbook arrived. I haven’t really touched Ubuntu since I installed it so there’s not much to say except it picked up the wireless card and internet with no trouble at all.

Aww, doesn’t the Macbook look like such a baby. I’ve adjusted suprisingly well to the much smaller screen.

Almost the first thing I played with on the new Macbook was Photobooth. It’s so much fun.

We both caught elephantitis in our eyes while we were taking the photos.

In the last week or so my dock has been moved around over and over again trying to create the perfect order. I think I’m pretty close at the moment but further improvement can still be made. The longer it’s left in one formation the less likely I am to change it in the future so I’m trying hard to get a configuration I like as soon as I can. Here’s how it stands:

Click on it for the full version. It tends to trend from applications always on to occasional use before running back to things that are nearly always on. It feels like a logical way to organise things at the moment.

It annoys me when music video TV shows cover the actual video up by telling you which song it is and who it’s by:

If they just showed the words it would be better but they need to give the text a background that covers the entire screen. I guess you’d get bored at a TV station that only plays videos other people have made though. This is closer to how it should be done:

There’s still that big distracting mess in the corner but it’s much closer to how it should be.

While I love Wordpress to bits, I’ve never tried anything else. But why fix what’s not broken? It’s much the same as me never having tried anything else at Subway because I just love the meatball so much, I don’t want to risk getting something I won’t like when I know I like the meatball and can have it.

So I’ve decided to try them all at once, there were a few conditions, it had to be free and self-hosted. Here’s what I’m testing:

• Wordpress 2.0.3
• Drupal 4.6.8
• Seredipity 1.0
• Expression Engine 1.4.2
• Text Pattern 4.0.3
• Movable Type 3.3

To make it a little more interesting for you all, I’ve uploaded and installed all of them on fightingfriends, not only so you can see the default front end but I’ve created open user accounts so you can all have fun with the back ends, the important part! So here’s the details for all that:

• Wordpress
  fightingfriends.com/testing/blogging/wordpress
  Admin
  Username - admin
  Password - password
• Drupal
  fightingfriends.com/testing/blogging/drupal
  Admin Username - admin
  Password - password
• Serendipity
  fightingfriends.com/testing/blogging/serendipity
  Admin
  Username - John Doe
  Password - password
• Expression Engine
  fightingfriends.com/testing/blogging/expressionengine
  Admin
  Username - admin
  Password - password
• Text Pattern
  fightingfriends.com/testing/blogging/textpattern
  Admin
  Username - username
  Password - password
• Movable Type
  fightingfriends.com/testing/blogging/movabletype
  Admin
  Username -
  Password -
  My server doesn’t allow cgi-bin uploads, time for a new host.

Well, seeing as though that took almost all day to upload and install all those I’m going to have to wait until later to write about them all. I sure have a lot to write about, some installation procedures were much (much) easier than others. Some came with a million languages pre-installed in a massive mess of language packages. I’ll write about it all later. I’ve barely even tested any of them myself.

For now, have a play with those.