We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties

About a month ago, I stumbled from my bed to my computer, hit the on button, and went back to the bedroom. When I came back out, the screen was still black and lifeless. I hit the on button again and wandered away to pour myself a cup of coffee. With coffee in hand, I was once again greeted with a completely black screen. I hit the button again and heard nothing. Saw nothing.

It’s almost laughable now how panic begun to settle over me at this point: I jiggled the cords and hit the button – nothing. I plugged it into a different outlet – nothing. I ripped it off the desk and carried to yet another outlet – nothing.

My computer was dead! I felt sick. (Yes, I am serious.)

I had finished the SMCS website the day before (thank goodness), but it had been months since my last backup. Pictures of my kids, all my passwords, my financial history,  hundreds of drawings and musings and . . .  and . . . everything gone.

Thankfully my wonderful husband was able to create “Frankenputer” – a hybrid of computer parts that allowed me to back-up my undamaged hard-drive.

But now my computer was reduced to nothing more than a pile of pieces.

There are three other computers in my house – my husband’s laptop and two desktops that are primarily used by my kids – but I felt lost and unhomed without a desk to call my own. I didn’t feel right putting an email client for my email on any of these machines. None of these other computers run PhotoShop or Illustrator. No programmers’s notebook or XAMPP. And what is my Twitter password? My cPanel password? My WordPress password? I had no idea.

Why had I never written this stuff down or printed out my password files? Why did I wait so long between backups? I’m supposed to be smart about this kind of stuff, but I wasn’t. I was relying on a machine to be smart for me. I had put too much faith in a fallible piece of plastic and metal.

. . .

Yet here I sit at my brand-new computer making all the same mistakes. So let’s do this together. I’m off to back-up my computer and make a hard-copy of my passwords: why don’t you join me?

Or How I Finally Learned to Use Illustrator

I’ve always had a hate/hate relationship with vector based drawing, mostly due to the fact that we spent a grand total of two days learning Freehand in college. (Our first assignment was to trace a crude drawing of an old fashioned school house, similar in detail and dimension to a drawing created by a talented five-year-old; our second and final Freehand assignment was to create a CD liner. I believe I got the lowest mark of my whole ‘design school’ experience on that project and never touched the program again.)

When I decided to finally upgrade from PhotoShop 7, I opted to get the CS3 design standard edition that included Illustrator. I was so excited to try this program; so many great things are created in Illustrator and I believed that I’d be able to just open it up and start drawing. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Using Illustrator did not come easily to me; even after years of using PhotoShop I didn’t find it intuitive at all, and was constantly frustrated.

And so Illustrator sat unused on my computer for years, taunting me with it’s pen tool and complicated interface. Every once in a while I would open it up and try a beginner’s tutorial, and while my results were usually satisfactory I never felt that I was gaining an understanding of the program, but merely following the steps.

This year I decided that I would learn Illustrator or die trying (okay, maybe that’s a tad overstated), so I bought a copy of the CS3 Illustrator Bible and started working through the book at a painstakingly slow pace. The pen tool took me days to learn, but I finally did it; I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to draw a simple shape before (hearts and clovers and leaves, oh my).

So now I present a few of my Illustrator (and one PhotoShop) creations for your amusement.

‘Sad Elephant’ was created in Illustrator with a mouse. (An exercise in learning and using the pen tool.)

‘Little Girl’ was created in Illustrator with a Wacom Intuos4. (An exercise in learning and using the gradient mesh tool and using a tablet.)

‘Little Black Dress’ was created in PhotoShop with a mouse. (Straight up PhotoShop love. Hopefully one day I can use Illustrator as well as PhotoShop.)

“The desire to redesign is aesthetic-driven, while the desire to realign is purpose-driven. One approach seeks merely to refresh, the other aims to fully reposition and may or may not include a full refresh.” – Cameron Moll

If you’ve been here before you’re probably wondering what the heck has changed. ‘It looks the same’ you think to yourself, mutter to your dog, shout out the window in disbelief. And you’re right. While there are a few subtle changes to the overall look of my website (what do you think of my letterpress text?) the real changes are under the hood, so to speak.

The adoption of WordPress is probably the biggest change. It seems that nobody wants a plain old static website anymore, and the more I’ve worked with WordPress, the more I’ve realized why: just because you can write a mean line of code doesn’t mean you have to.

And with WordPress comes the possibility of a blog. (Which I see you have found; welcome.) ‘What do I plan on doing with the blog,’ you ask. Honestly, I’m not sure right now. What you won’t see are web round-ups, tutorials and other such things that are so wonderfully done at other places.

Have a look around, and let me know what you think either via the contact page or in the comments below. And for goodness sake, if you see a mistake or something just doesn’t look right please let me know.

*I stole this term from A List Apart and Cameron Moll. You can read the whole article here.