the thoughts and experiences of Heather Meadows
In a section about Hurricane Dennis, Drudge has the following two headlines:
Hurricane Dennis enters gulf…
Swipes Florida Keys…
Now really, Dennis should think twice before trespassing and then going for a spin in Florida’s car…I mean, he could go to jail.
Wil Wheaton’s in Vegas, and last night he wrote this:
On my way out of the casino, I saw a man and a woman in a lounge. A half-empty bottle of wine sat on the table between them. A common scene in any hotel, except . . . he was an Elvis impersonator, dressed in the jumpsuit. She was a bleached-blonde in a spaghetti string top that was having a hard time containing her rather large breasts. Her hair was teased up almost a full twelve inches above her head. They smoked cigarettes while they drank their wine. They were both in their late fifties, and she was in a motorized wheelchair. I am not making this up.
I love how the details about the couple slowly emerge, like single beads being slipped down a string, until finally we have the full picture, and it’s nothing like what we expected at the beginning.
Wil is a master.
I was starting to drift off, so I had to stop reading. I got through half the first book. That’s not too bad a start!
Now, a little futzing around online, and then sleeeeeep.
Well, I’m very near the end of the third book
…I think I’ll take a break from Lord Foul’s manifold machinations against the Land and see how far I can get into the Harry Potter books before The Half-Blood Prince
I realize the chances of actually getting through all five books in one week are nil. However, my schedule is pretty open right now…and I didn’t feel like just rereading book five, diving into all those ellipses without the safety net of the first three books.
So there you have it. Madness.
Think I’ll start now.
London’s streets creaked and rattled with nervous new cyclists Friday after bicycle sales rocketed in the wake of bomb blasts on three underground trains and a double-decker bus.
Seasoned cyclists told of weary walkers offering them up to 300 pounds ($500) for their bikes as they headed home on Thursday, and of giving impromptu lessons to shaky beginners.
Biking to work = good.
I miss it :/
I’ve been waiting through Torg’s denial to see how he’s really coping with what happened in the Dimension of Pain. It looks like resolution is on the way. (Or at least, some conflict.)
I had the best time at my internship today.
Actually, if you’d asked me at around 2:30, I would not have been as cheerful. Because the reason I am ecstatic right now is because I got some major work done, stuff that is actually being used for something. (You won’t see it anywhere, but people in a meeting will…) And the road there wasn’t easy by a long shot.
Yesterday, I was asked to do a project that would take two days, and asked if I could come in today to finish it up. I accepted; if I get a job soon I might have to stop going to the internship, so I want to get as much out of it as I can. Plus, I was feeling challenged by the project–and my first impulse was to duck out. My stubborn streak said No, Heather, you are not going to be a wuss about this. You are going to do this thing.
And so it was rather reluctantly that I got up this morning. I left early to run an errand in Evans and wound up arriving downtown at 7:30. I spent the half hour before the office opened wandering around Riverwalk, starting this time at the Marina. The morning light with its long shadows made for some beautiful scenes, and the weather was cool and not too muggy. I’m glad I was early.
I finally headed to the office, arriving exactly on time, and got to work scouring various resources for stock photography (again). This was what made yesterday so tiring, and I wasn’t looking forward to any more of it. Amazingly, I found a resource I hadn’t known existed yesterday, and was able to fill out my requirement of images easily. I finished with that just before lunch.
It was with a feeling of accomplishment and relief that I headed out to eat. I didn’t pack a lunch today, thinking that I would treat myself to a restaurant since I was doing extra work. When I started out, I went to the Cotton Patch, but when I went in it looked too intimate and too much like a bar for me to brave alone. I turned around and left.
Wandering down Reynolds, I pondered cutting over to Broad and going to The Bee’s Knees. It was then that I spotted Beamie’s. I’ve wanted to try that place ever since I first saw it, so I went in and took a seat in their outdoor section, adjacent to the parking lot.
Lunch took pretty much exactly my alotted hour, what with waiting for my food and then waiting for my check. The sandwich was, as I mentioned, delicious.
When I got back to the office, the president took a look at the pictures I’d found and picked the ones he liked, then had me print contact sheets so we could narrow them down further. Once the pictures were decided on, it was finally time for the fun stuff: putting all the content together.
I actually had a template for this, so it wasn’t difficult to put everything together. There were 23 pages in all, and things were going well until I got near the end–and suddenly there was way too much copy per page. I messed with the design to make it work, but it really wasn’t looking good…
…so I rewrote most of the copy.
That actually didn’t take very long. I didn’t put my new copy in the document, of course, but I did keep it in a separate Word doc.
I was fairly happy with how I’d laid out the project when the head art director mentioned to me that the font size absolutely had to be the size she’d set it in her template.
This freaked me out, because I had drastically reduced the font size due to the sheer amount of copy. I edited my guides in Master A so I could expand the text area (I was using InDesign), but even this didn’t make enough room for the text without seriously altering the layout on some pages. I did it begrudgingly, thinking that if my copy was used, such drastic measures wouldn’t have to be taken.
I printed out my Word document with the original copy and my revisions, and then printed a proof of the project with the original copy and the mangled images. The head art director took a look at the proofs and pointed out that I was forgetting that kerning is my friend (d’oh), and I could crop some images to make them look better. Then the president looked at the proofs and my copy edits.
He approved in general of the way the page layouts were coming, with my qualification that some font and image manipulation would occur. Then, “These are good,” he said of the edits. “I like what you’ve done here. A writer and a designer. That’s great!”
X)
So after that, it was just a rush to get my copy in place, fix the kerning, and crop some images. And I got it done.
Because I rule.
I am seriously happy with the final product. I think it looked great. I’m glad I persevered through the changes. And I’m uberglad I did those copyedits, because they were sorely needed. I feel that I put out a final product I can be proud of.
And my abilities were recognized! That makes me happiest of all.
This was, really, the first “live” project that I worked on feeling like an equal. It was a collaboration rather than a “here, you do this, and then I’ll redo it later”. (I know they didn’t plan to redo this later because they had me print out the final color copies. ;>) I feel like I’ve finally learned enough to be useful, which is great.
Still plenty more to learn, of course. But this was a red letter day for me. I haven’t accomplished a big project in awhile. It made me remember how it used to be at 2go-Box. Despite my problems with that place, I truly did love the work.
I had been starting to wonder if I was on the wrong path, if I would never find something I liked to do. But today made me remember just how much fun it can be to put documents together.
I’m glad :)
That catfish sandwich was good.
…everyone sits on a nice plush (usually white) couch and messes around with a laptop.
Look at the cool box art for the Japanese DVD release of Kyou Kara Maou volume 1!
And then, look at how much the poor bastards have to pay for three freaking episodes.
…
If you’re still here, then maybe this will convince you:
Being conditioned to look for a bold statement, that’s exactly what I did. Look.
“Land of the Dead. Well hell, that’s a statement right there, right? Isn’t it? It has to be. Like ‘this land is your land’, except it’s not anymore, because it’s overrun. Yeah. By evil. Yeah. Utterly inhospitable to life. Yeah. Because of the zombies, but also because of repression. YEAH. And denial of rights. GOD YES,” really cheering myself on now, “brought about by the Patriot Act. And globalization. The failing dollar. And McCarthyism. Good God: taxation without representation! America really is the Land of the Dead!”
Before the opening credits, this was already the most broad and convincing social satire I’d ever seen. Unbelievable. A master stroke.
Except it wasn’t.
Go. Now. There’s a twist ending!
The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. has put together what looks to be a totally awesome exhibit.
The beauty and humor that he pictured on the road between two great cities brought fame to Utagawa Hiroshige, one of the greatest Japanese artists of the 1800s, and influenced French and American painters from Paul Cezanne to James McNeill Whistler.
The Phillips Collection has put together a rare exhibit of all “53 Stages on the Tokaido” Road, first published in 1863-4 as an accordion-like album, but now widely scattered. There are in fact 55 woodblock prints in the set: an additional one from Edo (Tokyo), the start of the trip, and another at the terminus, Kyoto, nearly 300 miles to the southwest.
Curator Susan Behrends Frank has matched the Hiroshiges with 41 European and American pictures to show how he changed Western ways of looking at things. “East Meets West” will be on view through September 4.
Road trip!
The glottis strikes again:
“We conclude that a major difference between a novice and an experienced player is a learned, but usually subconscious ability to reduce the glottal opening,” said Joe Wolfe, who headed the research team, in the science journal Nature. A didgeridoo is about 1.5 meters (yards) long and was traditionally used to accompany chants and songs. Its unusual sounds are produced by interactions among the sound waves of the instrument and in the player’s vocal tract and the motion and air flow between their lips.
The movement of the lip sends a sound wave into the instrument but it also travels back into the vocal tract which can act like a resonator – boosting some sounds and repressing others.
Already my mind is whirling with thoughts of how that “small tube” and microphone could be used to study language :>
Asbestos-related deaths are making the news in Japan right now.
I went to this article purely because of the title: Wee shops turn out flat TVs. I wonder if you can meet a leprechaun there!
The RIAJ attacks!
In a first for Japan’s beleaguered music industry, five individuals have agreed to pay compensation to five record companies for unauthorized distribution of music on the Internet through file-swapping programs.
According to the Recording Industry Association of Japan based in Tokyo’s Minato Ward, the five agreed to a total of about 2.4 million yen (about $21,600) to five record companies.
The five individuals expressed remorse and apologized for their illegal activities, the association said Wednesday. They also submitted written promises not to conduct similar acts that violate copyright laws.
Meanwhile…have I mentioned that Koizumi loves Elvis? Well, he does.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi joined in a 59th birthday tribute for U.S. President George Bush Wednesday night, joining other G-8 leaders to sing “Happy Birthday,” and then did a brief solo of a song by Elvis Presley.
And here’s a story that might turn even the pieman‘s stomach…
In a bustling market in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, dogs, cats, chickens, frogs, snakes, turtles and palm civets are stacked on top of each other in crates, wire cages and water buckets ready for sale.
Customers peer at the caged animals before choosing their meal of the day. They watch as the butcher cuts up the animal with knives and machetes, spreading blood, guts, faeces and urine all over the market floor.
People from South China believe that eating wild animals is good for their health and vitality, and gulping down such exotic fare as cobra and Asiatic brush tailed porcupine is seen as a symbol of social status.
Indeed, there is a saying in South China that “anything with four legs, except a chair, and anything that flies, except an aeroplane, can be eaten.”
But hey, at least Leonardo DiCaprio has purchased himself an island.
Hmm. $1.75 million isn’t really all that much. I bet I could save that if I went couch-diving every few weeks…!
;P
And lastly, here’s something nice. Learn the Tanabata song!
Do you ever find that you’ve been walking, or running, or driving, or working, for some time, and you can’t actually remember what you’ve been doing?
3 plunge into elevator shaft after elevator fails to arrive
Police said that when the doors of an elevator on the first floor of the six-story “Sunshine Chugo” building in Nagoya’s Nakagawa-ku opened, two men and a woman stepped inside, thinking that the elevator had arrived.
However, the elevator was still on the fourth floor of the building at the time, and the three, aged between 21 and 22, fell into a 1.5-meter deep hole. They suffered light back and arm injuries in the incident.
Auto-pilot can be dangerous…
