When 7am came, I got up, but only to reset it to 10am instead and decided to go in for the afternoon session. I ended up sleeping through 10am as well, and woke up at 11am. I then reluctantly got up and had 15 minutes to get ready, which I did, but after managing to get out of the house while I was still half asleep, I then missed the train that I was trying to catch. Great.
I caught the next one, and made my way to college, expecting to meet Rod, but he wasn't there so I went to sit outside. Soon after, Jamie found me and we chatted for a while, before going back up to his classroom, getting Mike and Fisher and two of their friends and then we/they went to get something to eat and I came with them.
I feel as if me and Jamie are quite close friends these days, since we often call each other and that's not something I'm used to, calling people for no other reason to just find out how they are and stuff.
For all I know, Jamie could read this diary (Hi Jamie!), as I've been thinking lately. I mean, he knows about http://www.openme.co.uk/diary/pics/ because I've often shown him pictures from it and he's memorised that address to look at the other pictures in there which I have no problem with. But Jamie isn't completely stupid and I'm sure he knows that by not adding the /pics/ but, he can access an entirely new directory, which contains things like this, which is of course the template for this diary, which has all of the links in place, so all he'd have to do is press "New" and he'd load up my diary.
So, if you're reading Jamie, hello. I'm not really arsed if you read this, because well frankly, I'm not arsed about anyone reading it no more, except perhaps my mum/Laura.
I don't exactly go around boasting and advertising it though, of course, because I like to this of this diary as a kind of inverse private diary. That is to say that it's supposed to be read by everyone but people that I know personally (who didn't read this diary before meeting me, of course) and to those people, it's supposed to be off limits. Usually, people want a select group of people to read their diary and no one else, whereas I want everyone to read it but a select group of people.
I'm sure there are other people who I know personally reading this diary right now and I could ask you to kindly stop reading, but I doubt you'd respect my wishes and go away because that's how you are. I'm sure you knew the moment you found my diary that it was wrong to be reading it, but do it anyway because it's human nature to be curious about it. Having said that, as I've said in the past, if ever I found Laura's online diary, for example, as soon as I knew it was hers, I'd close that window down immediatly. I'd know that it wasn't for my eyes and gladly close it down. But how many people would afford me the same courtesy?
Back to today though, and Tony's lesson was frustrating more than anything else. We have to create a poster for the Biennial, which finished a week or two ago. The preferred method of this is Illustrator, since Illustrator is a vector-based program and can therefore scale your artwork to whatever size you wish and it won't lose its quality. However, even though Photoshop and Illustrator are made by the same company, Adobe, Illustrator seems to be so much more difficult to use. I don't mean that I can't use it, but the program itself is very UNuser friendly. A very simple example would be the way you choose colour.
For example...
In Photoshop, you click once on the big square of colour in the toolbar and it'll open up the colour picker.
In Illustrator however, if you click on the big square of colour once in its toolbar, it'll open up a small box which a rainbow of colours to choose from, but that rainbow of colours is about 100px wide by 20px high so it's not like you can actually accurately select a colour at all. Above that, you have four sliders. One for cyan mixing, magenta, yellow and black.
You must double click to open up the same colour box that Photoshop does with one click and I might add that CMYK options I've just described are IN this colour box anyway, which kind of makes the one-click colour box a bit useless in my opinion. But that's just a really simple example, which has probably gone over everyone's heads because I doubt most people who read my diary have ventured as far as Illustrator. If I could, I'd stick with Photoshop.
Anyway, I digress.
My point is that even though I do have lots of ideas, Illustrator is very crap at allowing me to get them down on 'paper' and because of this, I spent the entire lesson designing, deleting, designing, deleting. It was very frustrating. At the end of the lesson, I had nothing to show for it.
Of course, everyone else is using Photoshop because that's what they're used to. Tony is allowing them to use it because he knows that most people know how to use it and he only covers Photoshop, not Illustrator. However, as I said, we should all be using Illustrator to create this poster and as such, I have tried so very hard to refrain from using Photoshop, even though I know I could create my ideas in there in no time.
At 4pm, Bronek gave us a tutorial, which is basically him talking and talking and talking for 50 minutes about two sheets of information - stuff that he will say the same thing about in weeks to come I might add.
On a positive note, I did manage to put all the fountain pictures I took with one of the college's digital cameras onto CD.
On a negative note, I've just found out that it didn't record properly and I can't open any of them.
Bah.
I ended up leaving college at about 5:30pm. Bronek was meeting everyones parents, which is why people like Abigail, Alex and Rob stayed behind after the tutorial. I guess I could of told my mum about it, but since I'm over 18, my mum doesn't have to come and really, it's not like there would be any need for her to anyway although it would of been quite nice to hear from her what Bronek has to say about me because she'd tell me and I know Bronek won't. I mean, I know that I am/can be very arrogant sometimes and I bet Bronek thinks I am, but it's not like he'd ever tell me that. As a teacher, I don't think he'd be even allowed to tell me that. I'd quite like him to tell me my bad points though so I could improve on them. If he thinks my work is shit, I'd rather him tell me so instead of saying it looks good.
I spent the journey back home texting various people - oh yeah, I got my phone unlocked and now it's back to its normal self again, woo!
In addition to that, las tnight, I text Katie for the first time in ages to see how she was. I've been worried about her, since I haven't heard from her for ages, but she finally text back and I'm really glad about that. She says that she is living with her boyfriend and I'm also glad about that because it's nice to know she has someone to care for her and that she isn't on her own.
I think I'm actually supposed to be meeting Rod tomorrow, but I'm not sure. I'll call him tomorrow and see. I hate all this stuff with Rod really. It just seems like so much hassle, finding a place to call my own, but I really really don't want to be living here, in this crappy bedroom by the time I've finished this course and yet, really, I very very unsure whether I could survive financially on my own. I also get scared that if it doesn't work, there is no safety net to catch me. That's not true really though, I suppose. I mean, I know I could always come back here, but once out, I don't really want to come back. It'd be kind of like admitting defeat to myself and it'd just be disappointing.
On a side note, I managed to make Chris feel sick before by sitting almost right next to him with food covered in tomato sauce - something which tonight, I found out that he can't stand. That was kind of funny. I sat there eating and Laura started laughing seemingly at nothing. I asked her what she was laughing at and she said Chris's face and that he couldn't stand sauce. He didn't like it that much that he decided to go upstairs away from me and the smell of it because it was making him feel sick. Ha, amusing.
