I thought it'd be nice to reflect winter in my diary. Plus I had had V.23 for over eight months now. That's the longest I've ever had a diary layout for. I've not used white as a background in a while. Not properly. I like to stay fresh with my designs and design elements.
You might notice that there's a new link above called Events. "What is this!", I hear you cry. It's something I've been meaning to do for a long time now. It's going to be a list of all the important events that have happened each month since the beginning of this diary. This way, both you and I will be able to simply go to a specific month and find all the interesting things in one place. Handy, eh? It's a work in progress so only February 2002 is working currently, but I'll have the rest up soon.
Since I haven't written anything since last Sunday, I shall start from when I went back to college on Tuesday.
It was quite a good day actually concerning what we did. We had to make a Powerpoint presentation of the work we'd done for Bronek over the past few weeks. I've never used Powerpoint before, though so this was a new experience for me. I quickly found, however, that it was extremely simple to use and I found it easy to get to grips with it and found it frustratingly too simple. I'd much rather make a website and present my work that way.
By lunch I had completed my first ever Powerpoint presentation and I showed Bronek who asked me if I'd used Powerpoint before. I said never. He said that what I'd done was excellent and while it wasn't really, I knew that it was better than most of the presentations everyone else was doing. Everyone seemed to be obsessed with piling as many animations and colours and effects into their presentation as possible, making it look incredibly tacky. They all looked like your standard Geocities page. Horrible stuff. Mine wasn't exactly anything special either, but that was down to the fact that I was using Powerpoint, which I quickly found out was designed to be used by people who aren't artistically minded, what with the lack of freedom in designing in it.
After lunch, I then made one for Tony. We have to do one for each tutor. Because I'd spent the morning learning a few things about the program, Tony's one looked a little better. It filled the afternoon well and for the first time since I've been on this course, I wasn't bored in Tony's lesson. Shocking.
Thursday was more of the same, creating a Powerpoint presentation for Brian. This was most definitely my favourite one, because I had now decided that even if it's not a website, it could still look and act like one. So, I added links and whatnot instead of just using slide after slide. It looked a hell of a lot better than the previous two. I spent all of my lunch sitting there too, after asking Brian if I could stay in the room. I had burnt a CD of music and brought some headphones in so I was quite content to sit there all morning and lunch doing my work and listening to music. It also meant that I didn't have to listen to Alex, Abigail and Will being annoying as fuck.
It soon approached 1pm and Daniel arrived. He didn't want us to do a presentation, but carry on with our logos that we'd been doing before half term. I had already done mine though, and set about modifying them and experimenting with different colour variations. By the end of the lesson, I had three or four different sets of logos which looked quite nice.
Moving on to Friday, and since I'd finished my logos, I asked Daniel what to do next and he said I should do my presentation. I didn't finish it in the morning so I went the library at lunch to carry on with it, listening to music on my headphones as I did so. Listening to music seems to make things so much better as I do my work. Everything seems more fluid. I feel like I'm able to work better because I forget I'm in college.
There was a woman sitting next to me typing away. I glanced over at what she was doing and she was typing a LiveJournal entry out. I didn't read any of it, but I did make a point of remembering her username out of curiosity, because I don't really have that many Liverpudlian diaries to read.
I hadn't finished my presentation for Daniel by the end of lunch so I continued working on it throughout his lesson and also talked to him about websites we both like. I showed him a few examples of things I like and he did the same for me. He showed me an old portfolio of work he had done and I must say, I was kind of disappointed. A lot of his stuff was almost copy and paste simplicity. I was expecting slick graphics and animation. He is, afterall, supposed to be primarily teaching us Flash. I was very surprised. He did have a few good things though, such as pictures of this 10 foot sheet of metal, which he had painted onto. That was very cool. Also, he had done a halftone painting, which was excellent. A very interesting and difficult piece.
By the end of the lesson, I still hadn't finished the presentation for Daniel. It didn't matter too much though, as it doesn't have to be completed till at least the week after next. I have plenty of time.
After college, I watched the fireworks for a bit from my window. I heard that there was a display on at the Albert Dock, but by the time I actually remembered it was on, I would of missed it by the time I got there. As I was watching them from my window, I had the idea of taking a few pictures of them with my SLR camera, but I don't really have that much of an idea when it comes to taking decents shots manually. I'm sure the 16 shots or so that I took will all turn out completely black.
I called Jamie for something to do, just to see what he was up to. He said that he was going to watch a firework display at his old school. He also said that he, Stan and Mike were going to watch The Grudge on the cinema today (Saturday) and he invited me to come along. I said I wasn't that sure and to call me tomorrow to ask again.
So, around 12pm today he called me. I was in bed at the time, but had just woken up, so his call wasn't as unwanted, since I was getting out of bed anyway. I said that I'd go with them and so three hours later, met him, Stan and Mike in town and walked to the cinema to watch The Grudge.
Wow, I didn't expect that.
Sarah Michelle Gellar in a horror film does not sound the most scariest of things, but my God, there were parts in that film that did indeed scare me and that's a very hard task to do. I don't scare easily when it comes to films. At all, even, but this was scary. And the rest of the audience thought so too, as you heard them all gasp for a second at the scary parts.
Halfway through the film, someone fell over in the dark. Ha, that was funny. Everyone in the cinema laughed. I bet whoever fell over felt pretty damn embarassed.
Because the film was set in Japan, rather than America and because there was a cast of Japanese people in it as well as American, the film seemed a lot better. It wasn't as cliche. While it wasn't the best storyline, the scare factor was most definitely huge and if you want a good scare, then you must go see this film. There was a part in it where Jamie was so scared he closed his eyes. Haha! Stan couldn't stop laughing at him.
After the film we all said our goodbyes and I went back to the station, but everyone had been evacuated from it and there was a fire engine outside. You could hear an alarm bell going off from inside the station. Some assumed it was a bomb alert. Why does everyone jump to such a big conclusion?
I'd only just said goodbye to Jamie and Mike and they said that they were going to see Danielle in the shop where she works, before walking around town for a bit so I decided to try and find them. I went to the shop where Danielle works but they weren't in there. I tried HMV too, but they weren't in there either. My next stop was McDonalds, but I passed the train station on my way there and it had opened up again so I decided to go home instead. I got a drink first though and asked the guy at the till what had happened. He said that a sprinkle system had gone off and that was the cause of the alarm and evacuation.
This week has been quite an all round good week in terms of keeping busy. I'd be quite ok with it staying at this pace for a while. Three days of productive work and an enjoyable event at the end of the week. Just a shame that for most enjoyable events, you usually have to pay out for them, i.e. the cinema. Not to mention travel, just getting there and back.
That's it for now.
