Losing momentum

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Wow, had been keeping up with the blog pretty actively last week but then Sunday hit and I just didn't really feel like writing anything for it. Yesterday was completely nuts at work so I didn't get a chance to write anything from work (which I normally do). I was so tired when I got home that I just didn't have the energy to type up anything.

I really wanted to keep the momentum going so that's why I'm pushing to post something today. The switch to days always wears me out though so it'll probably be a few days before I get back to my normal level of writing.

The future of this site

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This started off as a tangent on my resume blog entry but it got so long that I figured it was better to just cut it out of that blog entry and make it it's own.

A big problem I'm having with working on the site is that I think I've lost track of my vision for what this site was supposed to be. I think it includes far too many different elements. I've put up a couple technical articles that I think are pretty good (although I do need to update them to include some diagrams). I have a half-written (at best) section on my travels in Russia. I have a few pages in the personal section. The biggest single area that I've continued to do any amount of work on is the photo section and that work has mostly just consisted of tossing up more photos as I scan them. There's a lot of half-finished work on the site but not much that's actually been completed. The new addition of the blog has been really good because it makes it easy to express thoughts like this that don't really fit into the main structure of the site. But more and more I'm really feeling discouraged by the lack of structure in the rest of the site. It's made it very difficult to complete the re-design because navigation designs that work in one part don't necessarily translate to other parts of the site. Landon suggested that maybe I should treat each individual section as it's own site. I think this will help quite a bit because what I'll end up doing is just having the navigation in each section just relate to that particular section and back to the main page. Yes, it adds 1 extra step for navigating between sections but it helps eliminate 3 and 4 layer navigation structures that would just be way too clunky. Still need to sit down and work through the full design if I go this way.

I think that's another problem I'm having with the site. I did do a little bit of initial planning (far more than any earlier site) but it's still not as well planned as it could have been. So now I'm going back and trying to re-work the existing material into a better plan. Hopefully, if I do it right it will be much easier to work on in the future.

PDF Resume is now online

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As promised, I have put up the PDF version of my resume. I really like the new look of it. Oddly enough, it kind of matches the "new" (over 1 year old and still a work in progress) look for my website as well. I took a look at my old work page and see that it's horribly out of date (like much of this site). At the time of this writing (just noting this so that if I update it later this all makes sense), it's at least 3 years out of date, probably more. I left MT&T back in October 1999 and spent a year and a half trying to be a freelance consultant. I started working at Eastlink in March 2001. My work page was last updated at some point during that freelance period of time.

On the one hand, I see the page as a really interesting snapshot of my mindset at that period of time. On the other hand, it's embarrassingly out of date and naive. I think in the end I'll update it.

Proofreading

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It's funny, I generally think that I can write fairly well, and for the most part that's true. But then I look back at what I've written later and I can't believe the number of stupid mistakes I've made. Not to mention spelling errors. At least I'm fairly consistent in those, there are just certain words that I always misspell. Maybe I should use this new fangled "spell check" I've been hearing about!

Seriously though, Blogger does actually have a spell check, a fact that I just noticed. This is way cool. Now if only I could tell it that I'm writing in Canadian English (or UK English) instead of American English, I'd be set. It's annoying to have words like colour, humour, and honour, come up as incorrect even when they are valid spellings. Actually, I should really say that they're the correct spellings of those words and the American spellings (color, humor, and honor) are the incorrect ones.

What freaks me out even more is the number of things I've written over the years without any proofreading. Makes me wonder what kind of marks I could have gotten in school if I had have taken the time to proofread some of my stuff before I handed it in. Oh well, can't really change that now. Something to consider for the future though.

Book thoughts

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I hadn't mentioned it before in my blog, but I'm in the process of writing a novel. Been working on it for over a year now but there was a real dead period there in the middle where I didn't work on it at all. Basically, I got a bunch of stuff written early on, then just hit a block and didn't work at all on it for over a year. Fortunately, I had written down an outline of some plot ideas so I could pick it up again. I did a bit more work on it more recently which was really cool. Basically, I just skipped the blocked section and worked on another part of the story. I probably have around 30 pages (single spaced but final fomatting is done so new chapters eat up some of that) so I'd say it's easily the longest single thing I've ever written. Considering all the other long stuff I've written has been research papers for school and this is fiction, that's a pretty big accomplishment.

Lately I've also been considering the idea of doing a webcomic. The big problem is that I'd like to do a more serious/dramatic comic rather than humour and my drawing ability really isn't up to that kind of project right now. Actually, I'm not sure if my drawing ability is up for much more than a pretty simple drawing style right now. I'd like to get drawing more and then maybe I'd be able to do something like this. I've tried doing some digital drawings as well but they haven't worked out very well for the most part. I think it's mostly because I just don't have a clear enough idea of what I want to draw and haven't been taking the time to refine things. I think if I spent some more time improving my skills in illustrator that I might be able to get some good results with it. I really like the idea of doing this kind of work in Illustrator because then I have resolution independent files so I could easily do up a poster version of something or if I wanted to do a book I'd have it all pretty much ready to go. After reading what some webcomic artists have gone through to get material ready for print it definitely seems like a good idea to get it right to begin with. Course that's really jumping the gun, right now I can't even draw well enough to do the project so I'm nowhere near having enough material for a book project. Still, something to shoot for.

The other thought that occurred to me the other day was to turn my novel project into a webcomic. In some situations, I can see this as a really cool project because I've really been working on the story for this book and I find that a lot of comics don't focus on the story as much. I can really visualize how I'd want to draw some parts of the story (this is another area that I find some people fall short on, visual story telling). The big downsides I see is that a webcomic is inherently serial so you usually want to make each strip somewhat self-contained or have a hook to make you want to read more. The other issue is that as the story is written right now a lot of it deals with how the characters are thinking and feeling and it might not translate into a visual format as well. Some work on really conveying emotions in the drawing would be necessary for sure. I'm not sure if I'd end up with a stronger story or weaker story if I went this route. At the moment, I think I'll just focus on writing more and see if I can't improve my drawing abilities. Otherwise it's basically a moot point.

End of the week

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Finally got through this week, just need to get through this shift and then I'm off for the weekend. Course it's not as good because I have to transition from 3:30pm-12am to 7am-3:30pm. At least I've got a decent stretch of days coming up so I will actually be able to adjust to day shifts.

The stress is calming down a bit. Work has still been crazy but I did manage to get my job and community college applications in today so that's really good. I'm pretty happy with my new resume and it's cool to see that I can actually put together a pretty good 20 image portfolio. I probably could have done even better if I had've taken the time to go through more slides and scan new stuff but I just didn't have the time. As is though, it's a good reflection of my current skill level and covers work from 1998 right up to 2003.

Still getting pretty bad heartburn. I'm not even 27 years old, I shouldn't have to keep 2 different types of antacid in my desk at work. For "mild" cases I have my extra strength Tums, usually take 2-3 of them. But more recently, I've switched to using Zantac 75, need to take 1 a day of them to keep it under control and sometimes that's not enough. I switched to it when I was having to take 6+ extra strength no-name brand antacids a day and still wasn't noticing much improvement. I swear work is giving me an ulcer.

stupid work interface

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Okay, I really didn't want to turn this blog into a work rant too much but this really pissed me off. I just got a call where the customer was having telephone problems. I just got my phone training a couple weeks ago (a whole other rant topic in and of itself) so I go to put in a service call for them in the telephone ticketing system. Even though I was trained in all this a few weeks ago this was the first time I'd ever gone into this system. First of all, as bad as I thought that the internet tool was, the telephone tool is way worse in terms of interface. For instance, to search by phone number, you have to put it in as area code and then phone number with no spaces or hyphens or it will complain that the phone number is invalid.

So I get in to the woman's account and put the trouble ticket it, all pretty straight forward. I hit save, internet explorer crashes on me. Now I'm running IE 6sp1 at work with all the updates for win2k so this kind of shit really shouldn't happen. We run into a lot of problems with our web based tools and different browsers (like Firefox, which a lot of agents in here like) so I stick to IE. It's also the main browser we support so it helps make me a better tech on the phone.

I did get off lucky, at least the woman's trouble ticket did get submited. But this really strikes me as something that shouldn't be acceptable for one of the main tools we use here at work, especially because I think it was a custom developed piece of software for us.

The other big annoyance was I was in the middle of typing up a really big blog and had just about finished it off so of course I've lost all of that.

Slightly less stress

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Okay, I managed to get a reasonable amount of stuff done today so I've got a bit less stress going on. I had to work on my resume and covering letter some more. Still needs a bit of work but I think my resume is kicking ass now. I really re-worked the layout and design so it looks a lot better. What also freaks me out is I noticed a bunch of stupid mistakes and inconsistencies in it that have been there for ages because I've been using the same format for a few years now. Mostly just silly stuff like some lines had periods at the end and others didn't (for incomplete sentences like Halifax, NS). Also, I never noticed that half the items listed Nova Scotia and half said NS. None of this was that big a deal to fix but it definitely looked unprofessional before and it really freaks me out that I didn't notice it before.

Once it get the finalised version done I'll put up a pdf version. I used to maintain an HTML version of my resume but google can index pdfs anyways, it will print better, and MacOS X makes it super easy to turn anything into a pdf (it's just an option in the print menu).

Stress

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Okay this week is really not going well in terms of stress. Work is completely driving me nuts. I have been totally worn out and it's been super busy this week so it's not a good combination.

On top of things, I'm trying to get a job application together for a job that I really want but am probably not qualified for. I'm also trying to get together an application for the Community College's photo program. Both of those are due Friday. To make matters worse, I just checked the Community College's website last night and saw that in some places it says the application deadline is March 5th and in other places it says March 1st so for all I know it's late and where photo is an oversubscribe program I won't get in.

Oh, plus I have to start working on my illustrator final project that's due in like 3 weeks and I only have a vague idea of what I want to do for it. Plus I've got my application to Nova Group to get finished up and ready for March 24 and if I want to apply to AEON as well then I need that in by the 20th. Going nuts here.

Old blogs not worth it

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Okay, I went back and looked at the 3 entries from 1998. The earliest talks about a site design I was working on that I never finished that was way flashier than the more text-based site I ended up with. The 2nd was just mentioning that I switched to the more text-based design. The 3rd says I updated a couple pages. Honestly, it's just not worth the effort to update that crap with 3 seperate archive pages (different months) just to get those entries in. They really don't add anything more to the blog. So they are going to just get tossed.

In terms of the blogging, I'm really enjoying being able to post quick updates like this without having to go through all the trouble of writing a new page. It's especially good for stuff like this which is just random ramblings about my site design or my current mode that wouldn't fit in with the rest of the site.

Going live with Blogger

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Okay, so I had been using the blog in a sub-directory on my site but the intention was that once I had ironed out any problems that I would switch it to be my main index page. Since I ended up not having many problems with getting the template worked out (once I found out the syntax to use), I've decided to migrate it over.

The other good news is that I think I've figured out a hack to get my older posts (prior to 1999) into the blog. Basically, I'll just copy the code for the other archives and make my own static page for those older blog items and tack it on to the bottom of the archives listing. It's a bit of a hack but it should work no problem. Before I do that though, I'm going to take a look at what I have from back in 1998 and see if it's even worth doing.

The other thing I'm really looking at doing is migrating my "development" system back into my normal main site. This is all being done on my "dev" site which is just www.tildefrugal.cjb.net. My actual doman www.tildefrugal.net hasn't been updated in ages. On the one hand, porting over the dev work will be easy. On the other hand, I've got a ton of half updated stuff and broken links on the dev site that needs updating and I really need to get off my ass and start finishing off the work. I'm also contemplating moving my domain over to my linux box to save on hosting but that would be even more involved.

Now powered by Blogger!

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Okay, I've been putting off doing updates to my site for WAY too long. When I did the re-design almost a year ago I had gone for much more of a blog style for the main page. I had been meaning to write up a database-backed tool for managing the posts.

Since then, I found out that Blogger can ftp to your own site, I had thought you could only run a blog off their site. I changed the template around to match the look of my page and now I can do it all through Blogger's website.

The other cool thing is that it allowed me to back date posts so I was able to put in all my old version history information. Unfortunately, it only let's me go back to 1999 and I have a few updates from 1998. I suppose depending on how you want to look at it I've actually been blogging as far back as 1998, way ahead of my time here!

Hopefully. with the Blogger interface making it easier to post updates I'll start doing some blogging more often to add new content to the site. There have been times when I've really wanted to post little updates about what's going on in my life without having to do up a completely new page.
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Finally added some photos of Canada after much nagging from some friends. I've also done some changes to the other photos as well. In particular, I've taken steps to remove some of the duplication of images. In addition, I've also removed all my black and white photos. I wasn't happy with the results I've gotten so far, so I plan to re-scan all of them and try to get some better images.
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Corrected the gamma correction in my images. It turns out that I used the Gamma() function for Image Magick incorrectly. Aparently, Gamma(gamma=>2.2) doesn't adjust the image so that it's gamma is 2.2 but in fact, adjust the gamma by a factor of 2.2! This made my photos look really washed out. I didn't notice at first because I was doing the conversion in Linux (I dual boot my mac system MacOS/YellowDog). The photos didn't look too washed out (because the gamma in Linux is usually around 2.5), so I made the mistake of thinking that maybe the default gamma for YellowDog was set the same as the Mac's. It wasn't until I viewed the photos in MacOS that I noticed how terrible they looked. They seemed far more washed out then they normally would if I did the correction in MacOS. So, I went back and instead used Gamma(gamma=>1.2) because going from 1.8 to 2.2 is an adjustment by a factor of about 1.2. This seems to be correct now but I haven't double-checked it yet on a PC system. However, the photos are now slightly lighter on the Mac and seemed slightly darker in Linux, so I think I've got it right this time.
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I finally cracked and changed the gamma on my photos. I had been using 1.8 (the Mac default) and hadn't realized how terrible that looks on PC systems. Apparently, the PC system I tested it on wasn't using the PC's usual gamma of 2.5, so the photos looked fine. Anyways, I've now gone to using a gamma of 2.2 for all my photos, this will make the photos a bit washed out on the Mac and a bit too dark on the PC, but it won't be as drastic as before (where the photos were way too dark on the PC. There are also some new photos of Estonia and Russia, more to follow!