the-ruthless

This might prove to be an interesting summer. The website for the design agency is up, so's our t-shirt webshop. Little pieces are falling together.

A storm's coming. Hang on to your hat.

www.barks.no

Try combining poor memory, problems concentrating on anything (due to angst disorders) and OCD tendencies. What do you get? Oh, yes, it is me. So, reading anything, especially technical stuff takes... forever. I really hate it. And that's why it takes forever and you've seen nothing from me since... Meeeh. (Also, the laptop overheats really quickly, so opening and running Photoshop doesn't seem attractive at all.)

So, the book I was reading (written back in early '08) was a bit too visionary regarding the progress and development of PHP6, thus leaving some chapters of the book rather useless still. So I found a new book with the inspiring title of "PHP and MySQL Web Development (Fourth Edition)" written by Luke Welling and Laura Thomson. There's no downloading of code, no errata (at least not as I have found) and plenty of spelling errors and strange code. However, it's kinda freeing when they don't list complete examples... Gotta figure more things out by yourself and pay more attention. And (apart from the lack of humour) I rather like this book, dull as it may be -- because it's fairly well written. Not too lengthy technical explanations of crap, plenty of meaningful examples and code snippets... So far, so good.

Also: Monday 23rd I have a meeting with NAV. As far as I know, it's about giving me about a month of courses in how to establish a business and do paperwork and money stuff and so on. (And if they give me the thumb-up, I'll start the first course in mid-September, as far as I can see.) Looking forward to it.

What have you crazy cats been up to? (Seems I haven't been on deviantArt for about... twelve weeks or so.)

So, yes, my time at Orega is over. It was a good run, fun while it lasted. And I'm also happy it's over and I'm done.

The only really big project I got to work on (for reals) was a website for a client. Based on the CMS Joomla!, it was interesting to see how a (pretty big, marketshare-wise) contant management system actually works from the administrator perspective, and also how to design for/on/around existing templates. Actually, I'm not happy with Joomla! at all. I can see how it is useful for sites much larger and more complex than the one I made. I can see how it seems like a good choice for many people. I also realized how many fails in implementing it any logical manner (after some googling); and herein lies the problem. It is too big, too complex. As a base for your local club/organization/church/whatever, it's not effective in any way, not easy to handle unless you're a seasoned Joomla! developer, and there are also semantic flaws in the code everywhere! Things'll get broken really quick-like, and you'll be wondering what the hells just happened. Also, some of the CSS I made was really rather abstract. Now, I expect code to be somewhat "crazy" for non-techies to understand; it _is_ abstract. However, at some point, things just get silly. When you have to nest five levels and then select next sibling with a class, you just know things should be running smoother. And this is why I want to make my own CMS. I want to have less code, more functionality and ease-of-use. Changing the color of a link should take two minutes, not two hours. Anyways, what I made: norservice.no/norigo/

Also, as we remember, I was not allowed to put anything in my portfolio.

Now, for the next chapter!

Time goes by. I'm working three days a week at www.orega.no now, and enjoying it. So far, I've done typical "Mac-operator" type stuff, some graphic design, a wee bit of copywriting, a little illustration... And probably next week I'll also be doing some web design. So I'm excited about it. However, it seems my time there will be over come April 6th. Oh, and I asked the boss man yesterday about using stuff I made for my deviantART gallery, and he said "no deal, no dice" and told me company policy and whatnot. Not strange or unexpected, but a bit boring...

Either way, it's good to be somewhat back in The Game[tm].

In other news: I'm single, I have a kitten, I'm finally reading up on web stuff (yet again), I'm sober most of the time, and life is quite okay.

Oh, and that little guy I'm sharing kitchen and bathroom with has a girl visitor... Which he made me hang out with today when he was away practicing sword fighting. My dislike for nineteen year old girls from the west side of Oslo is strong and pure.

I've lived for about a week now in the bedsit. Yesterday my roomie came back from his vacation. And today the kitten moved in. So it's all good.

However... Tomorrow I have to basicly just sort papers and letters and crap. Thursday will be "go to various offices"-day, I guess. Friday I have a meeting at Orega, and then a birthday party. And another birthday party on saturday! Time doesn't wait.

And obviously I'm still not being productive.