crazybobbles

Last night was rather awesome. B came over for a bit to witness our fruit of labour. The house was ok looking, not good but ok. The main concern was getting my room clean, and that was kinda ok looking (which results in the rest of the house looking kinda ok)

Our main plan of action today was suppose to be music making, but because B wanted to go shopping at Wimbledon that plan was aborted and it was just a random shopping and stay at my place for a bit day. Her didnt want her to stay over too so we were pretty much stuck with doing the bare minimum.

We stayed at my place for a bit, B mainly went on myspace and the typical sites she goes on. We only stayed at my place for 30-40 minutes before we started to head to my daddy’s place for a meal. We had a nice chinese dish and all. Not much bantering with my dad today because B wanted to head straight to Wimbledon to buy her art stuff.

I miss wimbledon, havent seen it in ages (perhaps a year). The main shopping center was having its water fountain type area where people threw money in it refurbished. We managed to head into a book shop where B bought a few brushes. They werent quality branded but it’ll do, she was going to paint a photo of a car wreck and needed all the materials to get ready for it.

As my student loan was still in limbo, I wasnt able to spend much (due to my overdraft and all (yup, managed to save NOTHING when I was at IBM, but buying a laptop and other things (travelling up and down England being another one) (Yes I’m abusing the bracketting system, but most of my lines are filled with subplots and sub explanations hence why theres alot of bracketting involved (which is awesome)) was a good enough reason as to why I have nowt))…ANYWAY…. I managed to find computer book section at the book shop and the books they were sellling was AWESOME!!!! They were filthy cheap. I managed to get myself a copy of “Beggning Javascript” by WROX. It was a 1056 paged book introducing Javascript n00bs to…Javascript.

The book was priced £6.99!! It used to cost £30.99 so I was defintiely saving a hell of alot of mulla by buying this book. I really wanted to learn Javascript as well (kev being my main inspiration of learning it, damn his awesome DHTML and DOM stuff).

After getting the book and brushes we had a look around a lots of random clothes shops and the odd “Trade Secrets (hair salon)”. It was funny how I got quite grumpy when B shopped at clothes shops and then afterwards, B got grumpy when I looked at book shops and other random shops I like, we need to learn how to compramise more hehe.

After that we headed back to my place again, just so I can leave my javascript book there as well making sure B appreciated the fact that I spent quite some hours cleaning up the place. I showed her some random videos on youtube (including the guy who can do the Amelie tracks and manage to pose the whole way through here. I tried asking B to help figure out the notes on the left hand of one of the tracks (La Valse D’Amelie). We didnt get anywhere, guess if you want to do something, its better to do it yourself hehe.

We had about 2 hours left to spend doing something, and after showing off my nicely designed myspace profile page, I thought I’d customise B’s myspace page too. She wanted to put the print on her tshirt as her background. The design was pretty awesome, it was full of bunnies, angels and allsorts. The difficult part of it all was to GET the whole thing onto the page. The first things we did was to take a picture of it, I told her to put the top on the table so we can take a photo of it with my digital camera. MY camera was capable of detecting borders and changing the perspective of things so it looks straight rather then weird looking. This came in handy when we used white paper as borders for the t shirt. We got the image sorted but our next task was to convert the image into a background.

As you can imagine, the photo wasnt particularly useful as a background image, there were some lighting issues involved, this meant that something was needed to be done in order to make it an awesome looking pattern. I managed to install a programme called Inkscape (a vector programme) which was capable of detecting edges on images and tracing them into vector diagrams. I downloaded and installed the programme (at Inkscape.org) and managed to make a very nice looking vector image of the print (was pretty smug from then on). We then produced the pattern she wanted using the tracing we got (filled in purple), and a nice blue box. The image was filled with little bits of dots and stuff that were created from either Inkscape or the camera, this was obviously stuff we didnt want to have on as its not on the T shirt. As it was only a blue and purple coloured t shirt print, it was very easy to do fixes for it, I engaged into path mode and simply deleted all of the little nodes so that the dots werent there anymore. We then exported the image into png to see how it looked on her myspace profile (using Edit Css). The main problem we saw instantly was the fact that it wasnt a “pattern” you could very easily spot the edges which didnt look too nice on the eyes. So it was back to fixing the image up some more.

My first idea was to simply shove a duplicate of the image side by side of the original and fix the original edges so that they linked together. this worked really well, though we ended up using ms paint to solve this (node moving was very tedious) so yeah, the edges were pretty much modified using B’s imagination of how the pattern should be. We modified the image so that the top linked with the bottom and the left linked with the right.

Here was the output

Once that was done it was time to tweak up B’s profile page. I quicky added my css injection into her “About me” section, the rest involved asking B how she wanted the site coloured up. Edit Css is a god at these things, made the process ever so easy (rather then saving the css each time, looking so see if its right and then saving it some more). Some of the stuff she wanted insulted a web developer like me:

• “I want luminous yellow for the links”
• “I want the visited links to be white, so noone can see”
• “I want a green blob! Nobody has a green blob on their profile, I want a green blob!”

Some things I caved into, but some things I had to put my foot down for (the green blob in particular).

So yeah, to see how the page looks now, check it out on http://www.myspace.com/babsie

That was pretty much our evening, we headed back to Hammersmith via bus and took some random photos of things. One in particular was a lift, she went up and down a lift taking photos and videos of it, at one point I was just going to leave, it felt like it was the first time we’ve been on a lift and that it was so amazing that we had to do it again (it was a glass lift so you could see yourself elevating which is a consolation of some sort).

The rest of the evening was spent eating, watching fifth element, playing a modified version of “cheat” and sleepies

The morning after,
Was abruptly woken up by the urge of going to a car boot sale in barnes, it was rather funny. B managed to get herself a sailor suit. They intially sold it at £10 but after visiting the place a second time they said “that’s £1″ though the guy who priced it at £10 managed to jump in and raise the price back to £10, B made the comparmise and got the suit for £5. Twas funny how we could of got it for a pound though. They sold some weird funky stuff, including a bag of $150…. ripped up into shreds. Some of the stuff people were selling haha, nowt much interested me, though I did catch my eye on an Aphew Twin demo cd.

Here’s B in her sailor jacket (she couldnt wear the trousers, they were crazy and were designed for man hips (not lady hips hehe)

Afterwards we went home (managed to get myself some awesome cup noodles haha). I went to sleep whilst B popped off to homebase for oil to mix paints with). She’s going to spend the rest of the evening at some random club event at Koko, art students only (la di da) haha.