Salad Sammich

So today all the groups started installing their project setups in the Block (the display room). I spent a lot of time going back and forth between the physical box to help set it up and the labs to do more Flash work. Let me tell you, 4 monitors = nightmare. Because of how they fit in the box, each pair of two is upsidedown compared to the other pair. I can fix that through the display driver, but then for some stupid reason I can’t keep that rotation when I try to knit the 4 into one 2560×2048 desktop, to run a single Flash Player window. So I go to great lengths to reprogram my Flash engine to “pretend” to be on a 2×2 when on a 4×1 setup. Apparently there’s some self-imposed limit of 2880×2880 size on the dimentions in Flash, so I can’t make a 5120×1024 canvas size. I think I may have managed to find a way to hack around this. It still sucks, especially since this stupid limit is on dimensions rather than memory use, which was the whole bloody point of the limit in the first place, invented back when floppy disks were still around.

Long story short: ATI drivers suck, Flash sucks at making anything outside of fiddly webgame crap.

Contrary to what people seem to believe, yes, I’m a web designer. I can professionally design web pages in (X)HTML with CSS, with or without PHP scripts to update it, and all with standards compliance. Of course, since I’m not a corporation, I can’t take ambiguous statements “make a website for me and it has to be how I like it” and produce something. Big business gets paid big dollars to wheedle details out of clients and/or make up the details for an actual website from that. Since I hardly ever ask any money from the stuff I code, you’ll excuse me for asking you to give exact colors, layouts, lengths/widths and other details.

But it seems that no one seems to want to take me seriously as a web designer. Okay, I can understand if you want to learn to code or personally tailor things to your needs, but if you want my help then you’ve got to let me do what I’ve studied to do. I’m not doing a University degree for the atmosphere. I can’t describe all the ins and outs of web design over MSN.

Letting me do coding won’t make it any less your site, and you can still learn how to do coding. All I’m asking is to take me seriously and let me do the coding that web designers have to deal with to get a professional-level web site together.

BTW, this is not aimed at anyone in particular. I’m just sick of having to repeat myself every time web design comes up in a conversation.

I spent approximately an hour or more cleaning up a horrid soda-related spill on my desk. (more…)

There’s a particularly vexing aspect of stress. When you get so stressed about doing something that you spend all your time trying to get unstressed, so much so that you end up doing no work on the thing you got stressed over -__-

This is roughly what I’ve been doing over my assignments >.< That and not being able to do a single scrap of work when I try to focus on it. Anything else and I can work on for ages and ages, but heaven forbid I should do something that might be vaguely assessment related ¬_¬

As a testament to this I’ve managed to put together over half of my idea for a wordpress gallery thing in under half a day… damnit! Why can’t I manage to get this kind of effort into assignments?! >.<

First of all, the good stuff before the bad. I’ve been thinking over the idea of comissioning someone to draw some art for me. Now, the first idea is just plain character sheets or random image requests. I haven’t really had much motivation for drawing lately (probably from the ranty reasons -__- ), and it would be interesting to see how someone else visualizes my characters. More importantly, it’d be nice to get pictures done of characters who I don’t have a definitive idea of what they look like.

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