Happy Mondays: Movin' On Up

[lizzie_and_ari]

Hey kids!

1. Boiler broke. We were *&*^*%&*%*ing cold. I managed to fix it temporarily about a minute before Ari's head exploded for want of a hot shower. Someone then came to fix it, but didn't have the parts, so stuck it together with putty and masking tape. It has now been fixed with real parts. Apparently.

2. Am nearly 20,000 words into Nanowrimo. Behind, but not too badly so - I plan to write another thousand words by the end of today and be a wee bit more on track. They have a good statistics bit which tells you how many words you need to write a day to finish on time (2036) and a 'at this rate you'll finish on...' section, which I managed yesterday to bring down from Dec 14 to Dec 09. For perspective, I put in John's current word count, and it told me that at the current rate he'd finish on June 9th 2011.

3. However, John has officially given up, largely on account of that he is going to Thailand on Thursday! It is going to be very weird without him around.

4. As a separate point so as not to detract from the John News, we will now need to be renting out the room to someone else. We'll be putting the ad back up on Gumtree, but personal recommendations would be better, so if anyone knows of someone needing short term accommodation, we're charging £50 a week. Ta.  

5. Had an awesome day on Thursday where everything went right:

• I won £12 on the lottery
• I finished my tax return for 09/10 and I'm getting a substantial wee whack back. This should help see us through into the new year.
• I finished an interview for The Skinny, which is my first proper full length interview.
• I found £3.26 in change.
• Ari's exciting news: She and Siân have been selected for a ghost writing project that someone approached her tutors about. A 93-year old man wants to write up his life story. He's spent a lot of time in Bhutan and altogether seems to have had a fascinating life. They're getting scones at the Balmoral and getting paid a nice fee. Hurrah!
• To be clear - The Balmoral Hotel, not Balmoral. 

6. Have more work coming in in the New Year:

• I'm going back to do a few days for Hearts & Minds, who are made of lovely.
• I'm going to be running a day course in proofreading for Leith Academy! It will be in February so I have time to prepare, currently feeling nervous and excited about that. I'll be officially on the Edinburgh Council payroll and so if it goes well there may be more similar stuff. Eek!

7. The baby is still undeniably adorable, and having gone through names of Amos, Finlay, Ivan and Gwilym he is now called Seth. I had the chilledyoutest of communing sessions with him sleeping on the sofa as Emily did the hoovering. It was lovely. Toby is still similarly beautiful and exciting and a fabulous big brother.

8. Ordered some business cards, from Moo. Thanks for all who gave feedback on the designs. I've ordered a short run so I'll see if they work. I've also been working on my website - look and feel mostly, I need to have another look at some of the copy. I've designed a bit of Ari's site too. I'm using Wordpress but customising the CSS really quite a lot. It's fun.

9. Generally speaking having a very productive time. I have so many projects on the go that I basically do have work to do full time. So we've been getting up in the morning, properly working all day, taking a break at lunch and stopping for dinner. Weekends have been for weekendiness. We've got a good joint work ethic going on and Ari has written the first chapter of her novel. It's all looking pretty good. Money sources are still somewhat scarcer than we'd like but things really are looking up.

10. The only downside of this, combined with the weather, is that we have been prone to staying in all day and lacking fresh air and exercise. (Ari less so, on account of touring) On Tuesday night we were both so cabin fever-y that we decided to go out for a walk. Ari being in charge of the route, we rambled all around Regent Terrace and up Calton Hill. We were out for about an hour and got back just before midnight. It was joyous.

Happy week!

Lizzie xxx

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Can I suggest using a .png rather than a .jpg for Ari's header banner? Pixellation around text is pretty icky.

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Sure - what is the actual difference?

Will change it, but I like to know the backend of how/why these things work.

Cheers

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Is that better now: www.ariadnecassmaran.com ?

I'm also trying to work out how to make the header a home page link as it drives me mad that it isn't so far.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Lol. Not exactly, give me a minute.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Okay! So, the difference between a jpg and a png, as I understand it, is that the way that jpgs guess at the pixels in an image, particularly when compressed a bit, lends itself well to photographs and paintings but very badly to line drawings and in particular text, basically because the 'wrong guesses' it makes become really evident. Pngs by contrast work more like gifs, detecting where wide swathes of an image are all the same colour and assigning it to them, so you vastly cut down on pixellation. This means that png photos are huuuuge, but for images like Ari's header they're basically the same size as a jpg for a vastly better image.

Here's an example (with a similar font and not the same one I'm afraid as I wasn't sure what it was) of Ari's banner as a png:


It's 17k to your 13k.

Here's a close-up of the two side-by-side:



See the dif? That's down to the different ways pngs vs jpgs calculate the areas of colour on the image.

Am I right in thinking that the one you created there, you just reopened the jpg and resaved it as a png? In that instance it just retains all the pixellation from the jpg. You need to resave the original file as a png.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

PS: Obv the arabic text is a little jaggedy on the version I made 'cause I ripped it from the original and blacked out the background to use in the example. Your lines would be smoother.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

...Although the one you have up now is fine. But I still advocate a png.

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Well I opened the xcf as resaved it as a png. (Created using gimp)

But ok cool. Will reformat tomorrow.

Thanks!

[marrog.livejournal.com]

D'you want photoshop 7 if you're going to be doing lots of playing with images?

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Aye that'd be awesome if you have a copy.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

*nod* Bring round a key when you next pop over, or remind me when I'm coming round.

*A memory key, that is.

[andrewducker]

PNGs are lossless - they don't actually throw any information away. JPEGs are lossy - they chuck away pixels they think you won't notice.

However, obviously sometimes you don't want any pixels thrown away at all - usually when dealing with hard edges (like you get with text). In those situations PNGs are definitely better than JPEGs. JPEGs work very well for photos (which tend not to have those hard edges), so if you're trying to save space then JPEGs are good for photos. Otherwise PNG is a better file format most of the time.

(Edit - that wasn't supposed to be lecturing you, just thought some context might help)

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Not lecturey at all!

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the cool thing is that it's lossless and super clevar.

I like pngs
I really really really like pngs
I like to save things as pngs
Because I'm a geek
Oh oui oui oui, plus fort...

[andrewducker]

It is very clever. The files are bigger than JPEGs for photos, but how often do we really care about that?

And I assume that's a reference to a song that I would recognise if I was more with it :->

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I just use jpegs for photos, because really even a top quality jpeg is still smaller than a png. But for text-based images (and also icons) pngs are The Thing, and I really don't understand why everyone doesn't use them always - I mean, I know IE6 and earlier doesn't recognise the partial transparency stuff but it still reads solid ones just fine.

[andrewducker]

Some people, I suspect, have only just got over GIFs...

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Oh how I love my geeky friends! The pair of you have made me smile today with your uber-geekiness.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

*like*

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh so much spiffy news in here. =)