Tramlines

Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.

Tramlines next to the Charles Bridge/Karlov Most, Prague, Czech Republic.

After reading a recent article about a graduate not being able to get a job (and the resulting furore surrounding it), I thought I should revisit my short post on Education vs Self teaching. Previously I had had stated that I thought education was becoming more relevent (but not there yet), and I still stand by that.

However by revisiting this in light of Brian Nathanson’s article and after looking at his portfolio I thought there were some others things worth mentioning. Brian didn’t seem to have a portfolio – he had a collection of images, some of which were based on his coursework at college. The truth is that a university education isn’t there to build a portfolio for you, it’s there to teach you how to use the software via a series of assignments. You get an understanding of how everything works, but the finished works are not relevant to a portfolio. In much the same way I learned French at school (with a passing grade), but I wouldn’t use my French homework on my CV to get myself a job as a translator.

As Adam Bromell said, you have to throw away everything you have done on your course and create your own portfolio using the TECHNIQUES you have learned. That’s the real reason you went to the class.

I’ve had the EEE PC for a few weeks now, and I’m writing this in the pub (no wifi signal so I can’t browse the net).

It’s an exceptional little machine. It’s tiny, dinky even – which is both it’s greatest strength and weakness. The keyboard is very small, but more on that later. It’s so light that I hardly notice it in my bag, whereas my old Toshiba was like carrying round a couple of bricks.

Although the screen is small (800 x 480), it’s fine for most purposes (I’d bought it purely as a thin client/dumb terminal to connect to the internet. Of course this pub has no wifi). By most purposes, I mean using the internet, and that means Firefox. By running Firefox in full screen it’s perfectly usable.

If I wanted a serious laptop, I’d have bought a serious laptop, however I made the conscious decision to buy the EEE PC because it wasn’t an expensive, powerful computer. Although I’m a computer artist, if I wanted to do any art I’d not want to work on ANY laptop, especially since I have a 24 inch monitor on my powerful iMac. Over the last year I’ve moved most of my computing software to Google – email, RSS reading, document editing, calendar et al., so all a I wanted was Firefox, a screen and a keyboard.

Since there is no wifi here, I’ve switched off the Wifi mode (Function key+F2), which seems to make a huge difference to the battery life – indeed the battery life is my second biggest issue after the keyboard size. I get about 2.5 hours withWiFi enabled, and just over 3 hours with it disabled.

The keyboard is what takes the most getting used to. It’s not ultra tiny, and it’s certainly much more usable than the soft keyboard on my iPod touch. It’s comparable in size to the iGo Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard, and to be perfectly honest, after 2 to 3 minutes of typing each time I use it my hands adjust. It’s similar to the switch I had to make when I switched to playing guitar after playing bass for a few hours. The biggest bugbear is actually the arrow keys, which are placed so close to the right shift that I continually hit the up arrow when I try to use shift. Again, after a few minutes this becomes less of an issue.

I’m writing this is Google Docs – but as I mentioned I have no Wi-Fi here. Thankfully Google have brought their Google Gears technology to Docs, which means I can create new documents and edit existing ones offline. When I get home (or find any network signal), the documents will sync again. Google Reader also works fantastically well with no network thanks to Gears. I’d been away for a few days, so I’d built up 600-700 unread feed items. Google Gears downloaded all these and I was then able to read them offline.

If only Google mail had an offline mode…

Leith B&W Series-4

Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.

Whilst off, I took the camera to Leith docks again, even though I felt that I had totally exhausted that area. I used a neutral density filter to add some darkness into the scene and shot in black and white all afternoon.

I wish that Adobe Lightroom had a good facility to add film grain to images, at the moment I have to export them to Photoshop to add that.

There are a few issues to deal with – the transparent .png files don’t work in IE6, which 17% of my visitors still use. While I’d love to do my part to help kill off that browser, instead I’ll have to fix that. I’ve implemented a quick javascript fix, but i suspect I’l have to convert some of the .png files to .gif.

My biggest issue seems to be getting WordPress commands to run inside Posts – this was working prior to upgrading WordPress a few weeks ago, and means that at the minute my custom links and content pages are pretty much useless. Hopefully I’ll get this sorted fairly quickly.

Edit: All the content seems to now be working, and I’ve uploaded .gif versions of some images to hopefully sort out the IE6 issues.

I had thought that the redesign of RSArt would be a simple affair – it was time for a refresh and I wanted to move away from the clean interface to something with a little more grunge and character.

After collecting dozens of reference images and working through several iterations of the design (I’m on my 4th or 5th deviation and looks nothing like the original designs from a month ago apart from having red in it), it’s close to final.

Moving from Photoshop to an HTML/CSS design however brings many flaws of the design to light. I had concentrated on the big design blocks such as the header, backgrounds etc., but I had neglected the micro details such as formatting the post titles and dates. Separating comments. Just what to have in the sidebar.

All these little niggly aspects need to be ironed out before I upload.

Oh, Forbidden Planet is selling World War Hulk for £17, Amazon has it for £11.

Yesterday I finally moved from Photoshop and procrastination to the HTML and CSS stage of the RSArt redesign.

It’s going fairly well, I have the basic sections all working on my local install of WordPress (using MAMP on the Mac; it set up Apache and the databases for me). Now I just have finish formatting the text.

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