Warning: Contents are Extremely Random

This weekend has been good to me so far.

Thanksgiving went well. Everbody liked my part of the food preparation (the rolls and an apple pie), my grandmothers didn't do any meddling or nitpicking for once, and I enjoyed listening to my relatives complaining about the Lions game.

I managed to make myself scarce when my parents started showing pictures from their trip to Hawaii and used the time to draw.

After relatives started going home, my sister and I watched the Farscape episode "Won't Get Fooled Again." I never noticed it before, but I prefer doing things with other people when I can.

My trip to the gym on Friday went really well, even if I did arrive a few minutes later than I wanted because I had to stop and enjoy the snow.

I finally got Inkscape 0.43 to install. Now all I have to do is convince Metroplex to recognize the tablet I "borrowed" from my mother and I can start using the program to revise my icons a bit and do other interesting things that you just can't do well with a mouse.

Here's the latest drawing I've been working on. It definitely isn't finished and has a few problems, but at least I can say that I drew it and inserted the stars.

Finally, I'm completely back to normal, my scanner is working, and so is my sound card.

I hope I didn't scare off all one of the people who read this thing. (The huge delay between replies probably doesn't help, but I feel like I have to be invited to use other means of communication.) I'm not normally angry like that, and wish I hadn't posted half of what I did. Those items remain only because deleting them would be like pretending that they didn't happen.

The sad part is that I fell into the whole obnoxious livejournal rant thing, and I was trying to avoid that.

My weekend was very relaxing, and the rest of this week looks good too. I'm basically housesitting for my parents while they're in Hawaii for a friend's wedding, so I have lots of peace and quiet. I also get days off on November 8th and November 14th due to client holidays.

I did some research on customizing Livejournal's appearance and found that a lot of things can be customized. There's only one problem- free accounts can't really use any of them. At least I learned more about the technical side of webpage design. If I had an eye for layouts, I could do some really cool stuff with this new knowledge.

Other than needing to increase the cardio portion of my workout, things have been going very well at the gym.

Art was impeded somewhat by Looney Tunes Golden Collection volume 3, and I feel like I rushed the newest thing I tried to draw.

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Helped my sister move into her new condo yesterday. She was expecting it to take four hours, but it was more like eight because nobody realized how much crap she has, and half of it wasn't packed.

It's a very nice place, except for one thing. Because some of the units are still being constructed, the final layer of asphalt for the street and driveways hasn't been applied yet. That made it kind of difficult for her friend's husband to back the u-haul up to the garage, and I tripped on the gap between her driveway and the floor of her garage after I closed up the u-haul.

My workout today went fairly well, despite a sore foot and shoulder from the aforementioned fall. Something about my cardio workout actually made my foot feel better, but I don't quite understand why since I had to move my feet a lot. I think I'm starting to see results- I feel stronger, there seems to be a bit of substance to my frame now (I'll consider taking some pictures when I actually have something to show off), and I feel like I'm walking a bit differently because of it. I still don't like that almost all of the fat I have is on my abdomen, but I'm starting to fix that.

My attempts at art haven't gone as well as I would have liked.
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I think I've actually managed to make something that could be considered art, and may eventually turn out decent.

After grappling with drawing by hand and getting results that I wasn't entirely happy with (need practice, can't give up, it's not like good artists spring forth from the earth fully formed), I realized that I should try approaching art with the skills I do have. Those skills being programming, math, logic, and unrivaled stubbornness.

Work gave me the idea to use scalable vector graphics (SVG) since one of my teammates will be testing an application that uses the format. After that it was a simple matter of downloading a graphical tool to use and seeing what I could do. The GNU/Linux version of the program I found has a tendency to crash when I mess with the fill and stroke settings (editing the XML by hand gets around the problem), but it does have some nifty features.

I also "borrowed" my mother's Wacom tablet to see if that would help me use the application's calligraphy tool; unfortunately, the tablet and the version of X.org I'm running don't get along.

The first thing I tried to make was a LiveJournal icon for myself. The original image is actually a 500x500 pixel, 14.4 kB SVG file that I had to scale down a bit and convert to PNG so it could be used as an icon. I started with a basic concept of the current KDE logo's border and use of gradients and combined that one of my favorite animals- the cheetah. The icon still needs to be cropped properly on the right, better tear marks, adjustments to the ears, a decent mouth, and a few other improvements, but it should do for now. If I do things right, I may even be able to add some code to animate the image or have it changed based on my mood.

Here's an unscaled PNG version of the image. I'd provide the actual SVG file, but most people would need a special plugin to view it, and I'm not certain how LiveJournal would respond to me embedding it anyway. Comments and criticism are quite welcome, especially since that's the only way I will ever learn.
http://pics.livejournal.com/exatron/pic/00005yqs/g1