Sporadically Updated

I have a huge pile of drafting to hand in by Friday noon, and it'd be nice to have company during some of it.  I also might be looking for essay topic ideas. So somebody please come visit...I should get home around 4pm or so.

Or at least I can be.  I have some refugee research to do to, and a huge pile of reading.  So if you want to come by, call and let me know so I can arrange homework appropriately.

I'm trying to revive an old Victorian custom: the At Home. Basically, when I have an evening full of drafting or other less thinking-full homework where I would like to have company to chat with, I'll try to let people know, and hopefully some of you will swing by and see me. If you can, please call first, just in case we have to run out for an errand or get lazy and go for pho instead of cooking dinner.

Tonight is the first At Home.  I have a site plan and stuff to do, and would like not to be bored silly the entire time. I also might end up installing a printer if I get done fast enough. I am home as of now, and would love to see people while I'm metaphorically chained to the drafting board.

Since I have been finishing the client booklet for the loft, I've been making digital sample boards. Since my page background is dark, it looks much better if I remove the plain background from behind the product images -- except for the usually-white halo left behind, and the commands under Layer > Matting don't always work so well.

I have figured out a trick to lessen the manual labour in removing the background.

1. Just in case, duplicate the layer your product is on.
2. Make a new layer and fill it with a colour approximating your page background, using the Paint Bucket.
3. Switch back to your duplicated layer.
4. Select the background, probably via the Magic Wand, such that your selection is mostly correct.
5. Now hit Q to go into Quick Mask mode, and use the Brush and Eraser tools to touch up the selection. This is way easier than repeated magic-wanding.
6. Now that the selection is touched up, fuzz its edge with Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur at approximately 1px. This will reduce the opacity of, and thereby soften the edge of the resulting product shot-on-transparent-background, which looks way better than the hard edge, because you can never get the edge perfect.
7. Delete the background. You might have to inverse the selection first.
8. Touch up as necessary with soft Eraser or commands from Layer > Matting.
9. Delete unnecessary layers, e.g. your original layer and your dark test background.
10. Save as something with transparency support, probably PNG format.

There are also some useful tutorials at http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/l/blremovebackg.htm

Our assessment letters finally came in, and our past two years of tax refunds are nice and fat, thanks to layoff followed by education credits. Soon, soon I will have a shiny new screaming fast laptop with extra toys in my hot little hands, and then it will be goodbye to my 2001-vintage desktop that died mid-final-project three hours before deadline!

*cackling with glee*

On a more sane note, I'm not going to run out and buy my laptop right away. I want and can afford a Mac, and Apple has *something* up its sleeve right now that's going to hit before the end of September. Nobody outside Apple knows what it is, but odds are high that it's some kind of laptop refresh. So I shall wait impatiently for another few weeks in case they announce the new iWant while the back-to-school promotion is running.

Hurry up and announce, Apple! I want my shiny thing!

So, I survived first year in Interior Design. My grades are intimidating -- twelve A+s out of twenty-one courses, and almost straight As overall.  (I cannot bond with my classmates over bitch sessions about art history being too hard after acing all three courses of it.)  That probably explains why I haven't written here for ages. ;-)  I need to go through the stuff I made and do a lot of scanning and photographing for my portfolio...when I eventually get that done I need to make all of it into a website for myself at which point I can show it all off.

One interesting thing in life is that I got to go visit Brian out in BC for a week just after school finished.  After approximately eight months straight of daily deadlines and late penalties, it was really, really nice to not have a schedule for a week, except for catching the planes.  Mostly I just relaxed or wandered around with my camera, or followed Brian to places he wanted to show me. Accordingly I have a ton of pictures that I haven't actually done anything with yet except for delete the really fuzzy ones.  I have realized that I am not a normal vacation photographer.  Other people take pictures of people.  I tend to take pictures of scenery -- plants, animals, buildings, things like that.  Now that it is too late, I wish I had taken some of people.  Oh well.  I did not tell the parents that I went, since I didn't feel like going through the inquisition over why and how I could afford it and so on...

Aside from that, Jason's computer died but was resurrected.  As far as I can tell, it wanted to be dusted.  Mine, however, has died, been resurrected, and died again.  I'm not sure what I'll do about it yet, since I can manage with Jason's for now, and if I can find a VGA cable, I do have a spare.  Speaking of which, anyone got a spare VGA cable, the kind that connects the screen to the computer, and usually has blue ends?  Near summer's end, however, I get to buy a laptop. Finally. I really do need one, partly because it's mandatory year after next, but also because I am forever having trouble getting the time and resources I need in the school computer labs, and it is not efficient to risk 15% off an assignment because you cannot get a computer to print it from that has the software and fonts. On top of that, my poor machine is approximately six years old, and it shows.  It shows very badly indeed when I need to run AutoCAD and Photoshop at the same time, which is fairly often. So I think I have more than enough reason to buy a shiny new thing, and I would very much like a Macbook Pro -- I am sick of Microsoft and don't want to deal with Windows more than necessary for AutoCAD. There is a happy education discount, and I would really like, after nearly missing the deadline on my final project in my most important class because of my computer died 3 hours before it was due and the school computers don't have InDesign CS2 and I had to have my prof pull strings to do disaster recovery, to have a computer that just works.  This is a very important thing for me now.  For the same sorts of reasons, I will also be buying a scanner.  I can no longer afford not to own one. 

Oh -- and I need to do my taxes and apply for next year's student loans and find a summer job.  If anyone can help with the finding a summer job, I'd be very grateful.  Gratitude could include homemade cookies, computer help, website help, etc.  Not only do I need the money, I need to be somewhere air-conditioned during the day when the weather is 40C sort of horrible.

And finally, I joined two varieties of Borg -- LinkedIn and Facebook.  I am a little confused by how to connect to people on LinkedIn. Facebook is considerably better at making sure you find at least some people you already know.  I'm not sure how much attention I'm going to pay to them, but I do at least have a (rather empty) profile now.

Whee! It was my birthday yesterday, so we had a party this last weekend. I got given shiny loot, including a necklace, CDs, perfume, and books. Shiniest of all, Jason gave me an iPod nano! :D

This has led to some discoveries.

1. I have got to replace my headphones. All three pairs I own make my ears hurt after half an hour or so. This means that I need a pair of more traditional headphones that have overall good sound and good bass, ideally are sealed to reduce background noise, and that pack down small. I had been planning to get a pair of these but they're coming out with a new model, so I'll just have to wait and find out if they're just as good or if I need to find another candidate.

2. Now I know why iPods are so popular. Mine just plain feels slick, expensive, and perfectly thought out. It's small and light, but not too light, because it's cased in solid metal, except for the screen. Build quality feels lovely and solid, and every material has its own caressable texture. The controls are responsive but rarely go off when you put it in your pocket without locking it, and it has multiple levels of sleep, from "backlight off" to "hit a button to wake it". It has dozens of ways to slice and dice your music collection, only one of which requires you to make playlists. It has intelligent shuffle: it remembers what came before (and after), doesn't play the same thing again very soon, and not only can it shuffle songs, it can shuffle albums, like a cd changer. You can whirl down a thousand-song list in seconds, but slow down anytime you want a closer look. It comes in a gorgeous little acrylic box instead of a nasty plastic clamshell, even though it's only their second cheapest model. It makes good use of the initial charge time right after you unpack it, to update firmware, select music, and synchronize. It tells you when it's doing something in language that is both clear and polite, not inscrutable or patronizing, like most gadgetry! In sum, it was made for people who love beautiful things, and "working properly" is included as a type of beauty, because thus far every nook and cranny of the thing, both software and hardware, has been lavished with care.

For those who do holiday/birthday presents, and need inspiration, here is this year's list. I will probably update once the new semester starts and I have the material lists.
( Read more... )

Nifty article about a man, a Hummer, and a jet engine. Go read it.

Motorhead Messiah

My potential new employer asked me to suggest my own salary, so I have been doing a little research this morning. It'd be administrative assistant work -- nothing terribly hard, but you do need half a brain and some judgement.

• The median salary for an administrative assistant in Ottawa is $39,884 a year = $19/h. (Low but not lowest pay is $35,533 = $17/h.)


• A badly-paid file clerk earns $25,118 a year = $12/h.


• The median salary in Ottawa for jobs requiring less than 1 year of experience is $40,000.

I am therefore going to suggest $15/h and hope that he thinks I am worth it. The research certainly was, because I had guessed at $10/h...

I conclude from the list above that virtually everyone I know is being hideously underpaid, or is burning through money a lot faster than I imagined, or both.

I know that you are all smarter and more capable than your average admin assistant. All of you can and should be doing much more interesting, valuable, and lucrative work. So how can we get us some of that?