Ghost Town

Dec. 14th, 2009 09:49 am
morsla: (Default)
I'm getting the distinct impression that I'm the only person working on this floor of the building today... everyone else seems to have taken off for their holidays. When I came in at 8am the place looked like it had been deserted for weeks.

Unfortunately, my year isn't exactly winding down at the moment.

I've finished the conference season of madness, with only a small amount of residual madness hanging about the place. It's been a productive few weeks in terms of meeting new people (industry folks at Social Media '09, and lots of other students at the CRC conference). I even managed to win an award, which was nice. Now that I'm back in Melbourne again, I'm getting stuck into all the writing that I didn't do while I was away.

The end of the year is also publishing season for the Indigo books. I've updated two subject guides (VCE National and International Politics), and sent them off to the printers. This week I'll get the files for the last of them - a full re-write of the Economics book, which I'll be typesetting from scratch. It won't be printed before Christmas (deadline for that is today), but it should be ready to go in the new year.

Our home internet problems were sorted out, though not in the way we'd have liked. Apparently the building is on a pair-gain line - i.e. Telstra saved costs by splitting the copper line, instead of running copper to each house. That means they meet their Terms of Service (providing a voice phoneline), but we can't get ADSL at all. We're stuck with wireless broadband for the time being, as it's marginally cheaper than cable. Not impressed at all.

On a more positive note, I bought an airbrush and compressor last week. I have a vast pile of figures that need painting over the next six weeks, so airbrushing the base colours should speed things up dramatically. I still need to experiment with the various acrylics that I paint with, to find out how best to thin them down.

I'm looking forward to trying it out. Last time I used an airbrush, I was putting together a graphics folio (and walking to school through the snow, dinosaurs snapping at my heels...).
morsla: (Dawn1)
I've been slowly building up a list of links at http://del.icio.us/morsla so I can keep track of travel info while on the road. It's as good an excuse as any to start transferring my bookmarks to del.icio.us, as they won't be much use to me on my home computer.

I think I need Firefox to release a real "plug in" - one that plugs into my brain, so I can filter through the mass of sites without adding more strain to my poor retinas. Every time I start looking for travel-related sites, I seem to average having 40-50 tabs open while I flick back and forth to compare plans and locations. It's nice being able to track all that information at once, but I burn out after a few hours.

I have a good visual memory, extending to text as well as pictures. Google Earth has been handy - I've looked at the layout of most cities I'll be visiting, and I can draw basic maps from memory now. I'll miss it, once I head off - the ability to see detailed images of my next destination is a recent addition to my daily life, but it's quickly become indispensible. Time to re-remember how to navigate the old fashioned way (i.e. get lost, get unlost, walk for many miles and end up knowing all the streets with my eyes closed).

Not long to go, now.

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