Yrae Chronicles

Facebook: Good afternoon, Anna! Clouds are clearing today in Adelaide. Enjoy the sunshine!
It's 34 degrees, you irresponsible dickwits.

In other news, I had my first lady-date on Tuesday! I've turned off the 'looking for men' option on Tinder and also downloaded Bumble to do the same, and by golly, gee whizz, does that narrow the options. There are literally six people to cycle through of an evening, across the two of them together. I've significantly lowered my bar to the point where even people without any text in their profiles are being swiped right.

Anyway. So I finally got a match! Chatted with her a while over text, discovering we're in much the same boat of having had boyfriends but never a girlfriend, so we met up on Tuesday after work :D First to Cocolat for a nice cold smoothie where we talked for a good hour and a half, then to The Apothecary for a cocktail and impromptu platter of antipasti that ended up constituting dinner because the smoothie had been pretty filling, and finally once the sun went down to the Parade of Lights on North Terrace, where they've illuminated a whole bunch of historic buildings (museum, art gallery, uni buildings, that sort of thing) with basically painted light animations. It's part of the Fringe Festival, which started last Friday. This was the highlight. They have a bunch of smoke machines around the lawn in front of the museum, and fire big flat sheets of lasers through the smoke above your head, so you lie back on the lawn and just watch this play of light in the smoke. It's seriously awesome. So surreal, like being on an alien planet, or maybe under the sea, sometimes like the Northern Lights depending on how the smoke was behaving at the time.

The date itself was no more than a friend date at this stage, just chatting about family, work, the Fringe, wine/food/cooking, small talk that lasted until about 11pm. She was suuuuper nervous at the start so I didn't want to make any moves or scare her away XD She's also tiny. I have a good foot on her XD She's a PhD student, previously worked for the CSIRO, super into sciencey physics, kinda shy but opened up a lot as the evening went on. Easy conversationalist, almost as much of a foodie as I am, and just a fun, casual, relaxed time. Already so much less pressure than any first date with a dude. See where this takes me X3

Unrelated, last weekend I finally presented Katie Hawtin with her first proof of her website. This is something I instigated a good, oh, two+ years ago now. I designed her business cards at work and we print them every couple of years, and the last time she ordered them she mentioned in passing that she hated her website and didn't want it on her business card because it's so outdated and ugly. In an effort to add some real clients to my digital media design portfolio, I offered to design a new site, bells and whistles and all, for $100 just so it felt more like a business transaction. TWO YEARS LATER and she has a proof! She's phenomenally enthusiastic, absolutely loves where it's going, so I'll get started on actually creating it in March with the aim to finish it by mid-April.

I'm also in the middle of updating my own portfolio, which is slightly broken and very out-dated. I have no idea where the slightly broken came from, since I haven't updated it since I made it, but the navigation icon up in the top corner now scrolls instead of sitting there nice and fixed, the gallery images on the print page are off-centre by about 70 pixels, and there's a 5-ish pixel gap at the beginning of each client. Also the header on the blog is now an error message. NO idea where all this came from, but that's this weekend's task. Just what I want to spend my weekend doing, bug fixing of my portfolio. Yay.

And I saw Black Panther on the weekend. It was pretty gosh darn awesome. The warrior ladies had the most badarse character design, omg. Also the villain was probably the best Marvel villain in a while. His motivations were just bang on. Loved this movie!

WHY.

JUST.

WHY.

Everything is perfect in Chrome and Opera.

Print breaks ONLY on the last slide in edge and Firefox, which, instead of making a box for the sliding gallery that's the same size as everything else, it makes a long line of slides and scrolls for days. IE is perfect (wtf).

Fics break ONLY in IE and edge, where the text goes over the image.

That's it. Two pages, each in two browsers, both with the same COMPLETELY PAGE-BREAKING PROBLEM.

And I have NO IDEA how to fix either of them.

WHY.

6:30 ALL RIGHT I've done fitness and had dinner now I'm going to FINISH this goddamn print page!
11:20 ... I'm going to bed.

HAHAH. I mean. If you're in Safari on a Mac. Nobody else should notice any difference. I fixed it up during lunch breaks over the past few days at work, that being the only Mac I have relatively steady access to.

I'm now a solid portion of the way through this--I've since done that big gum tree you see on the ref and the trunk of the one next to it, so I'd say maybe 3 hours left there. Taken a break from it tonight to get started on the logos and lettering page, so I've got all the logos presented and ready to go and the header images. Going to get as many lettering bits together now as I can and gather up some quotes for drawing during lunch at work. SHOULD be able to get that page done tomorrow, and then I'll FINALLY be almost caught back up after the delay the damn gallery caused me. Stupid thing. Wish I'd found touchTouch first instead of wasting time on PhotoSwipe. Oh well, live and learn.

It was raining ten minutes ago. Probably only long enough to make it damp and humid, but after last night's gales and 30-ish that kept waking me up, a bit of dampness just puts your mind at ease for a bit.

:B By golly gee whiz I love coding. Especially when it works in ever browser you have access to except IE. I super duper love that.

I swear web design is about 5% actual design, 10% coding, and then the remaining 85% is troubleshooting. Of which at least half is just troubleshooting IE.

Plus side, I'm about a day and a half ahead of where I had planned to be by now. The fun tricky part will be working out the actual gallery bit. I want to make it be able to swipe on a mobile. THAT'll be something to learn. I've set aside an entire week to figure that out.

Today, we stop IE from distorting the thumbnail images. Yay.

The blog is pretty much done! It's all now powered by Wordpress, so all the links--like making a comment or clicking the categories and dates in the sidebar also work, and I can make posts to it and IT WORKS! I did break it on Saturday when it was SO CLOSE, only the mobile view was giving me sidescrolling and whatever I did to try and fix it... broke everything else. So I went off to bed in a huff and the next day played Banjo-Kazooie, but I was up to Rusty Bucket Bay there, which has always been my most hated and frustrating level, and so I just got myself more frustrated and didn't touch it again until tonight. But yes, all fixed now!

Also, for a delightful bit of serendipity, the mobile view now works on Internet Explorer! And Firefox picks up the fonts now! So now Opera is the only browser anywhere that it doesn't work in. So awesome. God I'm so proud of myself for figuring this out. HEE. Few little fiddly things I want to fix before I actually start putting entries on it:

o The date, which should be in the form 'Monday 12 October 2015' with a break after the day of the week. Not sure exactly where to change that.
o On that note, date seems to have a random tab or many spaces or something at the end of the line? It's not padding--Chrome's handy inspect element thing proves that--so idk what that's doing there.
o Figure out if there's a way of stopping Wordpress from automatically putting a <p> around every new paragraph in an entry, because it's putting one around my in-post images. Doesn't matter so much on the wider views, but on the mobile view I'd like the image to stretch all the way across the screen, which I can't do if my paragraphs also have the 40px of padding, cos of course that then gives the picture 40px of padding, too. So that's annoying.
o Link to the rest of the portfolio. At this stage it's just the index, but I'll be expanding it a bit more shortly.
o Take a better photo of that moss (it was late and failing light so it's a bit blurry) and probably redraw the (th)inky thoughts. The g is bugging me, and the swash on the y isn't smooth enough.
o Rename the folder from /wp_testing to just be /blog, aka LAUNCH THE THING YAY!

I'm sure there are other pages I could code up to be pretty, but if I keep fiddling then it'll never actually function, so just those bits for now. That'll all be tomorrow's task, except the moss photo, which I'll do over the weekend when it's sunny.

Tonight I'm going to celebrate this achievement by writing :D