Ah, Technical Difficulties, We Meet Again

So I've got this laptop. It's a Dell. Say whatever you want- I really like Dell laptops. My very first personal laptop was a Dell. I got it when I was in sixth grade, I believe, and it was a hand-me-down-- already a few years old. It didn't even have a functional battery. I had to keep it plugged into the wall. But that laptop was pure gold in my eyes. I wrote my first novel on that hunk o' junk-- the first draft was sixty pages! I haven't written anything that long since. I have a feeling that that laptop didn't connect to the Internet... not sure, but if it didn't, then that probably had something to do with the success of my lengthy writing project.

...where the heck am I going with this? Ah, yes. I like Dells. I've been using Dell laptops for almost half my life and you're not going to convince me that they're bad, so save your breath/typing muscles. (People often disagree with my choice in laptop brand. I'm a little sensitive.)

Anyway. I've got this laptop. It's a Dell. I actually got this laptop free from my university as a part of a hefty scholarship package. So I guess it wasn't free as much as I paid for it with my blood, sweat, tears, and the surrender of my social life in high school. It isn't the fanciest thing in the world, but it's pretty close. A very adequate piece of machinery. Been using it for two years and it hasn't let me down.

Until now.

I've taken that laptop and its charger cord (which I have recently learned is actually called a power adapter-- thanks, Dad) all over creation. Back and forth to the library, across campus, on car trips, through airport security and on airplanes, and to Europe. It has survived amazingly well.

However, on Monday morning I packed up my laptop and brought it to class with me, planning to sit in the library to recharge it while I worked on something. That didn't end up happening, so I just went home. That evening, as the battery dropped down to the yellow-blinky-light level, I pulled out the power adapter and plugged it in.

The laptop did not start charging.

I checked everything. I made sure the power outlet was turned on, the power converter and plug were securely plugged in, the parts of the adapter were firmly put together, the battery wasn't loose... I even pulled out the battery and blew into its socket-thingy to get rid of any dust. I mean, if it works for video games, why not? But nothing worked.

Luckily, one of the guys in my group has the same scholarship and therefore the same laptop as I do. I plugged in my laptop using his power adapter, and the laptop began to charge. From this I deduced that the problem was the power adapter and not the battery. At first I thought this was excellent, since I could simply buy another power adapter and use the other guy's adapter until I got one. But today I realized that, if it were the battery that weren't working, I would probably be able to use my laptop as long as I kept it plugged into the wall (like my very first laptop), with no need to constantly borrow the other guy's charger. Pros and cons to each situation, I guess.

So that's why there haven't been a lot of blog posts lately. I'm trying to use my laptop as little as possible so that I can make the battery last as long as possible between visits to the guys' apartment to borrow an adapter. As a matter of fact, I am writing this blog post from a computer in the university's library. And just to add insult to injury, this keyboard is weird. It's a QWERTY keyboard, not like the AZERTY keyboards in France that were just impossible to type on, but there are just enough differences that it's making it difficult to type. I don't know if this is a typical Ireland/England keyboard or what, but the @ symbol and # symbol are in different places, the shift key is tiny and I keep accidentally hitting Caps Lock instead, and the enter key... You know how on Guitar Hero the orange key is really hard to hit because you have to stretch your pinky out super far? Yeah, that's about what I'm dealing with here.

I've got a couple of great blog posts lined up. I just need to be able to write them. The school computers aren't letting me upload pictures, so I'm going to have to go back and forth between the computer and my iPhone app a bit. Hopefully this will all work out!

Always With The Technical Difficulties

Too bad it's not called "Red Justice." Guess I'll be going out to buy some more printer ink.

Technical Difficulties: The Conclusion

Over the last couple of days I've been blogging about the difficulties I've been having trying to make an advertisement for my French class. Here is the conclusion.

My problem was that I was trying to use my Wacom tablet and ArtRage Studio to do this project. ArtRage is a wonderful little bit of software and I love it, but it's really meant for drawing, I think. Perhaps some people have had better luck than I editing photos with it, but from now on I will use it only for drawing things from scratch.

(Unless I stumble upon an excellent tutorial that will show me how to use ArtRage Studio for editing photos. Anybody? There's a comments box...)

I love my Wacom tablet dearly, and I was very excited that I could use it for a school project. However, my insistence on using it led me to create a product that was much less professional than the one I had envisioned.

Also, I was trying to do it at 1 A.M. and I don't think I need to tell you how successful projects are at 1 A.M.

So today I happened to be in the library and have some free time because all my classes were cancelled (inclement weather, but that's another story) and I found an unoccupied computer in the Digital Production Area. It was a Mac and it had a really cool keyboard.

(Random note: I really prefer Windows over Mac, but I absolutely love the way Apple keyboards feel and look)

The cool keyboard was nice, but the important part of this computer was that it had Adobe InDesign installed on it. While I am not that great of an artist and am relatively new to ArtRage Studio, I have a lot more experience working with InDesign. We used InDesign to put together our literary magazine in high school (click here if you'd like to see it) and as I sat down and began to play with it, a lot of stuff came back to me. I even began to have FUN, which is the polar opposite of how this project was going on Monday night.

Why was it going so much better? Well, working on it during daylight hours helped, I'm sure. But InDesign is exactly the kind of software one should use when one is trying to make a one page advertisement. Yes, there are less expensive ways to do this, like PowerPoint and such, but I feel like stuff just looks shinier when you do it on InDesign. I dabbled around on Adobe Photoshop a little as well, trying to free my bottle of barbecue sauce from its prison of black. The crop job is a little messy, but honestly, it's not bad for someone who had to Google how to do it.

So this is what my advertisement looked like when I rage-quit and went to bed on Monday night:

And here's what it looks like now:

It's no professional job, that's for sure, and there's a lot of potential for someone to think I spent about five minutes on it (I SPENT AT LEAST AN HOUR ON IT, YOU JERKS), but I'm really happy with it. I even caught a spelling error in the logo and was able to fix it. I hope I get more opportunities to play with InDesign (or, you know, an editing internship) because I really, really like it.

As I should have explained earlier, "Apportez LE BLEU chez vous!" translates more or less to "Bring home THE BLUE!" "Les Biftecks Bleus" (The Blue Beefsteaks) is the name of the imaginary steakhouse/hamburger joint chain that my partner and I made up for our Commercial French class. It's a swanky place, y'all. The food isn't actually blue (that would be gross), but The Blue is the overall experience you have at the restaurant. We're now selling our signature barbecue sauce in grocery stores so that everyone can Bring Home THE BLUE! And now there's an ad for it.

And they all lived happily ever after. The End.

The Result of Technical Difficulty

Just to clarify my frustration last night, this is kind of what I was going for with my advertisement:

Doesn't that look awesome?

But this is what I got...

Bleeeaaurghhh. I was so frustrated with trying to get the bottle of barbecue sauce to look the way I wanted it to that I totally didn't realize how hard it is to read the text. And sadly, the bottle still doesn't look the way I want it to. I gave up trying to stick in pictures of delectable meat. It just wasn't working. At all.

If I can find the time before the final draft is due, I might try to snag a computer at the library that has Adobe InDesign. Maybe I'll have better luck with my photo editing and stuff that way. And I think I'll try to print it out with my own printer, because I suspect my printer will do a better job and I won't have to pay fifteen cents a page for it.

Wish me luck.

* Les Biftecks Bleus logo originally designed by Jordan Cooper, my partner in this project who is probably having better luck with it than I am

Technical Difficulties

Three guesses why this comic is done in pen.

I have to make an advertisement for one of my classes. I thought, "Oh, I'll just use my tablet! It'll look awesome!"

Except it doesn't. Because I can't get the software to do what I want it to do. I don't think I'm using the right software. But I think I'm too angry to care now.

I hate it when I think something is going to turn out epic and then it just looks like I played with it for five minutes in Paint.