Remembering

This morning, for the first time in a very long time, I gazed affectionately at my 10 year old white iBook laptop. With a smile on my face I had flash backs of using my first tiny little Macintosh computer at college, with it's black and white screen and floppy-disk drive. Then, at a different college using larger versions of the Macintosh as I learned to be digitally creative.

I remember when the art department at the newspaper got its very first batch of G1 Power Macs and we were all so excited because they were a huge upgrade to what we had been using. I remembered being jealous of my boss at the newspaper because he had an Apple Newton.

I remember buying my very first computer at Harrods, a black all-in-one PowerMac, and reminisced about how excited I was to be able to use it's (I think) 12kph modem to connect to the internet at home using Netscape Communicator. I remember the 100mb Zip Drive I bought not long after.

I remember living in Aruba, hating that I was without a computer and then paying extortionate amounts of money to buy my iBook because there was an Apple dealer on the island. I remember being able to watch DvD's for the first time in my dingy little island home after spending long days underwater. I remember finally being able to get rid of all my really heavy scuba instructor manuals because I could now buy them on CD's.

I remember laying on a balcony studying for a scuba instructors further education class in Florida when some random cute guy started talking to me. I remember IM'ing with that same guy late at night once I was back in London as we made plans as to which Caribbean island we would find work on. "That guy" would later become my husband.

I remember being in the British Virgin Islands and able to research my family history because I had my iBook and a high speed internet connection. I remember the excitement of finding long lost cousins and slowly being able to piece my way back to 1747.

I remember my disappointment, once we were living in the USA, when I realised that I would have to buy a PC as the desktop computer at home.

I remember the Keynote events that launched the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. I remember the excitement of buying my first generation iPad because I was back to using the brand I loved. I remember my husband saying to me "I'm never buying a PC again, only Apple from now on"

Thank you for my memories Steve Jobs. Rest in peace.

Uninspired

Its Wednesday morning and frankly I'm already board with this week. I need to find better things to do during the day than actually working for a living, there's got to be more to life than this daily grind.

So Google released their new "dynamic" views for Blogger yesterday which is why I'm writing this here as I'm testing it out and seeing how I like it. I'm having a good first impression although the layouts really lend themselves to photographs and large bodies of text. I really like the lightbox feature for each of the posts. My only concern is how do people see the profile of who's writing the blog? And where do you find the tags, outside links etc... that bloggers usually have in their sidebar? Maybe this new style with encourage me to write here and cross-post to G+ which is where I seem to be spending most of my time these days. One thing that would be nice is if you could write posts (messages?) over on G+ with the option to be able to simultaneously cross-post them to Blogger.

Spreading My Wings

WOW, I didn't realize it's been so long since I last posted!

Mostly things have been crazy, specifically at work where I'm basically doing two peoples' jobs. Our company is top-heavy with five "bosses" and not enough of us minions to go around. I have people needing things from all directions and all I can do is make a shifting-priority list to line things up to get done. Even that's not good enough, all of them expect everything to be done immediately regardless of how important they are in the grand scheme of things. Its annoying and frustrating to say the least and its actually making me contemplate going back to freelance design, building up a client list then working from home permanently.

I've put some feelers out anyway, see if I can't get some outside work and make a go of it. I'm starting to gather my unimpressive body of work I've done for these guys into a portfolio, although I'm not sure I even like most of it. I wish I had the forethought before leaving England all those years ago to make my portfolio easily accessible, I'd have SO MUCH more to showcase right now.

We live and learn I suppose.

So yeah....

The last two weeks ended up being a nightmare.

Work has been crazy, with the culmination of two HUGE projects. First there was the ongoing saga of the company brochure. We took the first steps for this project in December, asking the printing company to organize a designer. The first one SUCKED! Just because Photoshop and Illustrator have a bunch of plug-ins and filter, doesn't mean that they need to be used at every single opportunity. She quit after I sent back a rather scathing email. The second designer did a solid job and produced a good proof but didn't really "get" what the boss was looking for. So, after some discussion, I convinced him that we'd be better off having me do the design as he would get exactly what he was looking for and it would end up being quicker than trying to get an outsider to understand his ... erm ... "tastes."

So after a number of weeks of back-and-forth we finally have a new company brochure. There are things I would have liked to do differently, but for the most part I really like it and its a huge weight off the shoulders.

The other project was a MASSIVE redesign of the company website. We put this in motion literally just before Christmas and the first few weeks was hands-off as the web company worked with us on the design and then started coding it all. The last three weeks I've finally been able to start filling in and updating ALL the content to get it to the point where we could go live. Its been a couple of weeks of long, lunch-less days and delayed home-time to get it out by my self-imposed April 15th deadline. However, the deadline was made and the website is live even are there are more developments in the works for it, the main thing is that they're not as imperative.

Then of course I'd been goaded into entering my very first A&S competition, which happened to coincide with the website deadline. To say I was stressed last week was an understatement! I spent all week dealing with the website only to come home and have to finishing preparing my three A&S entries for Pent Central. By Friday night I was done, completely drained and ready to just fall over.

Pent Central was pretty cool. Never entered into an A&S competition before, but was goaded into it by JP. I entered the Calligraphy, Illumination and Fine Arts categories. For calligraphy I showcased my 14th century cursive hand in the form of a paragraph from a period document. For illumination, I enter the Silver Crescent award scroll I did for JP and I have to admit that it looked pretty impressive sitting on it easel, framed. For fine arts I submitted my personal research and experiments with gilding. As always, there's room for improvement but I was happy with it and got really positive feedback from the judges. I even won two of the categories, calligraphy and illumination, so I'm now the proud owner of scrolls by Heather Rose =)

And now I can breathe again. I can sit, I can relax, I can play WoW, I can read, I can do what ever the hell I want without feel pressured but stuff I HAVE to do. For a couple of weeks anyway.

So, I'm off to think about the design for an AoA I have to do and chill a little before Game of Thrones makes it's debut on HBO =)