Today's Drink: Paradise Splash 6oz Sour Apple Puckers 1.5oz Orange Bacardi .5oz Malibu Coconut Rum Serve in Highball over ice. If too strong, thin with clear soda to taste
I am only reminded of how artistic I am not when I have a desire to do something artistic. Tablets for me are about as effective as trying to write cursive with a barbell, and Photoshop scares the living bejeezus out of me. For that reason, I use Adobe Illustrator for cell style shading and coloring. I "get" vectors and the idea of how curves can make shapes and how to manipulate the points to create something. This however, is not enough to cover for my lack of graphical ability, as I prefer to think of shading as something you do to avoid the sun and can't even make a stick figure look decent. As a result, doing graphical things is always a massive time consuming project I have to do. I've sunk almost 60 70 hours into the image now, and am as done with it as I think I can be, short of pushing my mouse squarely through the monitor. It's not that there isn't room for improvement, it's that any more improvement outweighs the investment in time I will have to make. After all, these need to be good to go in a week's time. When all that is up and running I will no doubt be plugging it here.
Some other projects have began to wrap up though, one of them being the web site for the Bay Area Animation Society which is running on the ever-so-awesome Xoops engine. The more I use this CMS, the more I like it, especially from a modular point of view. You can do some really neat stuff with it, and if the development team keeps on the pace they are now, they are likely to become as powerful as nuke in terms of a development user base. Making a module is relatively painless, and if all goes well, the next set of module revisions will match most of the desired features wanted for their non-module counterparts.
In other news, the tutoring center hired two new technology tutors within the past few days. While I am not opposed to additional co-workers, the school, like all things education, is on a finite budget, and so the hours for the new tutors have to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, losing even an hour or two a week adds up to having very little money to work with. I don't want to drop working with the campus group whose company I enjoy, but depending how things go, that might just be the way the cookie crumbles. I'll probably email my boss tomorrow morning and explain that somehow I was not hired as a TA (as was the supposed plan) so I will need the 18-20 hours at ASAP. I'm sure he'll be positively thrilled to hear the news. I think I'll brace for the worst. But not before going to the Northridge Mall in Salinas. Tessa's present is up there and waiting. If I am lucky, I can give it to her after her rehearsal, but if not I will probably have to figure something else out since I seem already committed to a game of airsoft and a Toga party somewhere within this weekend that I am supposed to be preparing for school. Current idea was something like Olive Garden and seeing Big Fish, but we'll just have to see how things go.
I mixed the above drink, only a bit stronger than I listed above, so the desire to sleep has kicked in. This is probably a good thing since I need to be moving in the morning. As a closing note, Audio Hijack is the perfect fit for the sadly missing Sound Recorder that is absent in OS X. It is good to see third part development for the Mac emerging. It means there will be bigger and better things over time, and a solid software foundation encourages a solid user base.
In response to "I am so very not Artistic":
Jakobokobokins, beee my baaartenderrrrrr~~!
Or secondarily, TEACH ME YOUR DRINK MAKING WAYZ.