1 uni update, 7 linkies and a birthday

Uni

I apologise for being a bit absent from my blog. The main reason is uni.

I think this year is going to be a killer! My first major assignment was due on Wednesday. It doesn’t go towards my mark, but acts as a guide for improvement and forced me to read extensively on my subject area. It was a literature review, which I should have drafted last week and given to my supervisor for feedback, fixed up and then handed in. Instead I did the same thing I’ve done for the last four years of assignments — had good intentions of doing it early but ended up breaking my neck the night before to get it done. Of course, this was much bigger than a night-before assignment. I actually spent about 9 hours each on Thursday and Friday, 12 hours on Monday and 15 hours on Tuesday doing it.

I met with my supervisor and it turns out I need to be doing longer days and working harder in general to get anything out of my project. That’s not unexpected, but I’m not sure how I’m going to cope (in addition to my other commitments). For the last month I’ve been living with fear/dread in the pit of my stomach; it fades sometimes, but is especially noticeable before I go to sleep.

Some links that took my fancy

I haven’t been writing much (on my blog) recently, but I’ve been reading (I love RSS!). <tangent> I’ve gone back to Vienna for feed reading, in case you’re interested. </tangent> I’ve also been bookmarking a heap of things in Del.icio.us (and my linkblog in the sidebar), but incase you missed those…

• Dave Child from I Love Jack DanielsAdded Bytes has put together a whole lot of cheat sheets for PHP, HTML, CSS… even World of Warcraft. A really good collection.
• I was starting to get rather dissatisfied with a new WordPress theme that I was making, until I employed the help of the 960 grid system. Very good for helping visualise web page widths and positioning.
• I don’t know how I missed the definitive guide to semantic markup by Chris Pearson when I was investigating hierarchy. I’m not sure I agree 100% with what he’s said, which I’ll address in another post and is partly addressed in one of the comments. However, I don’t think you’ll go wrong with his advice.
• hamstu made a nice train timetable for viewing on his iPhone. I can totally relate to its usefulness, since I’ve been known to run late at work. The buses and trains become significantly less frequent as it gets later, it can take twice as long to get home.
• Brian Gardner is redesigning his blog live… sort of. I’m not sure how real-time it’s going to be, whether he’ll let himself break something or actually be ugly at some point. Should be interesting though. I hope he takes screenshots and posts when he makes updates, otherwise it won’t be very interesting via RSS!
• LaurenMarie has been doing a series on mastering masks in Photoshop. It has been a really great series, which should work for GIMP as well — all the principles are the same. The most recent post is particularly insightful. I would not have thought to use channels to mask out some particularly fiddly details! Of course I only figured out how to use channels a few weeks ago, so it’s no surprise I didn’t think of it. 😛
• My brother asked me about Photoshop text tutorials. I didn’t know of any in particular, but I had a quick look around and quite fancied this simple halftone one. I figured out how to do it in GIMP, but I’ll leave that for another post. 🙂

The birthday

It was my birthday on Thursday. It was quite nice: did a hard day at work, went out for dinner and drinks with friends, went out with my family for lunch today.

My husband bought me a Nikon 50mm f/1.8D Nikkor lens. I’m pretty excited about it. Can’t wait for some really good shooting opportunities!

After an abysmal first shot, which I deleted, I took the shot below. I also used my old speed-light bounced off the wall. The speed-light was obviously way too bright, but I think it gave an intriguing effect. I really like this photo — I think the over-exposure on the right balances with his dark hair and allows his face to fill the frame without being over-powering.

This version is with some quick adjustments in Uraw, but I think I’ll play more with this photo and see what happens.