Category: Uncategorized

Finally, the opportunity to go to bed a little early. Most of today felt like it was leading into the weekend, simply because I knew I didn’t have to come home from class and do hours and hours of homework for the next day. I came home, checked my email, watched a bit of TV, and in a couple of minutes, I’m headed off to bed. To sleep. Hooray!

I think I’ve almost worked out when I’ll have time to work out on the Bowflex, and it isn’t pretty, since its mostly weekends. I’m going to see what I can do about getting ahead on assignments, even just a little, so that I won’t be completely out of time every M-Th, but I’m not sure the teachers want to reveal what we’re going to be doing before we do it. Still, I must do well in these classes. I’m in school because I choose to be, and I just have to remember that when it seems hard; this is what I want to be doing (or a pre-requisite to get to what I want). Like working out being a pre-requisite for the body I want to have.

I’m going to sleep now. I’ll try to post more tomorrow. Shouldn’t be hard. It’s only Friday. Just work! Easy!

Yes, I am aware that there is a problem with the site loading. No, I don’t know if/when it will be fixed. Last time this was happenning, my service provider said they couldn’t find anythign wrong. Of course, they did wait a week after I reported it, when the problem had resolved itself. Please be patient.

Here’s an interesting thing: How Compatible/Similar are You with/to me?

I’m interested to see what kind of scores people manage to earn. Link courtesy LiquidMercurial. If you ARE LiquidMercurial, I was going to post my results for you on your site, but can’t post comments since I don’t have a LiveJournal account. You can see my results if you click here.

SimilarMinds.com Compatibility Test

Your match with LiquidMercurial you are 89% similar you are 89% complementary

What else… I’m really tired. That’s something. Classes are kicking my ass. Homework, really. Each class session is 3 hours, and because of problems obtaining materiels required for homework due tonight, I couldn’t even start until last night after class. So from 8 to 12 last night I managed to do 10 of the 12 drawings we’re supposed to have by class today at 4:40. If I get out of here on time (yesterday I had a call go 15 minutes late) I can get home by 3:20 or 3:30 and have about 1/2 an hour to try to pound out the two remaining drawings and eat supper. I stopped last night from sheer exhaustion. I should maybe have stopped sooner, since I was 1/2hr late for work this morning (I will be takign 1/2 my lunch hour to make it up, so I can leave on time).

I am so tired right now. Studio art classes are not like any other classes I have taken before. Instead of 50 minutes of lecture and/or discussion or even an hour of lecture and an hour of lab work, there is 3 hours of surprizingly exhausting and intense work. Homework isn’t rote memorization or working out equations or reading or developing intelligent essays or anything else that is primarily a mental exercize. Homework is 3+ hours of the same intense physical application of technique, exhausting me and swallowing up my time.

Not that I don’t appreciate what I’m working towards. If I understand this correctly, I am teaching myself a skill and building pathways in my brain and so on and so forth that will eventually allow me to express myself through drawing and painting with more skill and accuracy in the future. It’s just kicking my ass right now.

So, a little over a week ago I purchased the new Mac OS X v10.2, which is known as Jaguar. I first installed it on my iMac, which already had OS X on it, so there wasn’t much difference in operation there. This weekend I installed Jaguar on my laptop, on which I knew I needed to be able to continue to also run OS 9 natively. For a week leading up to this, I pondered how I would set it up as a dual-boot system and what difficulaties I might have doing so, and so on and so on, since I come from a heavy PC background, where setting up a multi-boot system is a pain in the neck and sometimes requires reconfiguring hardware.

So, I don’t know if you’ve ever installed an OS on any computer before, but on Mac it goes like this: Insert OS CD, double-click on the ‘Install’ icon, Agree to the license, select a HD to install on, and hit ‘Continue’. It didn’t ask me to type in any 54 character alpha-numeric keycode, and it didn’t ask me whether I needed to be able to boot OS 9. It automatically set the system up as dual-boot. I can go into the system preferences and with two clicks set the computer to boot OS9 (or OSX) and reboot into my preferred OS. during any bootup I can hold down the Option key on my keyboard and before it boots it will ask me what OS to boot. OS X can access everything for both OS’s, and OS9 can see almost everything. It’s pretty convenient.

I brought my laptop with me to work today (hoping to get some work done on a project for my 2D Design class before class tonight) and plugged it into the network here. With Jaguar, it automatically started talking to the network, got itself an IP from the DHCP Server, and once I entered the proxy server’s address into System Preferences, my browsers automatically work with no additional configuration. A couple more clicks and it’s easy to switch between this setup and the one for home. If they let me plug in at school, I’ll set up a third profile there just as easily. For reference, in OS 9 special software was required (not cheaply) either on the server or on each mac that needed to be able to access a Windows network. Oh, and for Proxy, I needed to run a re-configured proxy software on my PC workstation because of the way they configure the main proxy server here; that is, my Mac talked to my workstation talked to the proxy server talked to the internet. I blame PC software makers, of course. Only thinking of themselves.

Oh, and iChat is cool, even if I don’t have anyone to chat with. I did get connected to my little brother, but no one else yet. I like how the windows look. I like how easy it is to use and configure. Not particularly happy that it only works with AIM. (I already got everyone I know to use MSNIM, so that would be more convenient for me, or some combo AIM/MSNIM client, but with the ease-of-use and gloss of iChat.)

There was something else… I don’t recall what it was…

Okay. One Hour Photo just started playing at the Camelview in Scottsdale. I know some of you wanted to go see an evil Robin Williams, but I can’t remember who. If you’d like to go see One Hour Photo with Edison and I, please call me or email me ASAP so we can make plans. I know many people are going out of town this weekend, but I’m busy weekdays now, so it has to be on the weekend. Perferably this weekend.

Let me know.

So in arbitrarily picking Drawing for my MW class and 2D Design for my TTh class, I managed to not only get both classes in the Art Building (Apparently the bulk of the core classes (ie: freshman-level) are not taught in the Art Building but instead in the Tower Center. Go Figure.), but also to end up in the only 2D Design course offered with an emphasis on computers. The required text is a website. All the assignments are online, and the first one is my choice of physical or entirely digital. It happens to be something that my digital art experience (and computer hardware at home) is particularly well-suited for, so I plan on doing it all digitally. Sort of. I have actually begun working out some ideas on paper to get a feel for what I want to accomplish. Still, the bulk of the work will be directly digital using the graphics tablet I paid so much for for so little use to date.

The teacher is pretty forward-thinking when it comes to computers, though he doesn’t expect the class to have advance knowledge of how to use them. My impression is that a lot of the class will take place in the computer lab instead of the regular classroom, which suits me just fine. The lab is, of course, a Mac lab, being for Art students. Which suits me just fine. Everything is on OS 9. Which is okay, I guess.

Also, I don’t seem to have to lug a lot of stuff to the 2D design class, which I appreciate, since I have to lug so much to the Drawing class. I even managed to buy an expensive drawing board in the wrong size (likely because I trusted the sales clerk instead of triple checking everything, and was pretty frazzled and late at the time) to fit in the large portfolio (20″+ by 26″+) I bought, so I get to carry those two things and a tackle-box-like device for art supplies back and forth to class Mondays and Wednesdays. I think everything I need for 2D Design will fit in my backpack at the largest, except for that tacklebox full of pencils and stuff, but that’s a lot more reasonable to carry than two items larger than 20″x26″.

So, that’s all well and good and so far, I seem to be doing fine, although I haven’t got any feedback from either teacher on the work we’ve been doing in class. In Drawing class yesterday, I followed along and did what I could to create some Mass Gesture and Line Gesture images, and the teacher was walking around the whole time giving feedback to various students, but never got to me. Now, in a 1hr class, I could understand easily that there simply isn’t enough time to work individually with everyone, or in a 30-seat class, sure. This class is 3hrs long and there are 14 students.

I’ll probably get feedback when I turn it in next week. We’ll see.