Well, I am just wrapping up the remainder of “Hell Week” with a few days to spare.  The last week of the semester is enough to draw insanity out of the dark realms within the crevices of our minds.  Yep, it’s almost over guys, and we ROCK!  I currently finished an online test while acknowledging the movie “The Shining” playing on my tv in the background.  “Hello Danny.  Come and play with us.”  That is the bomb of a movie, I’ve always loved it.  Now of course I am thinking about tomorrow’s “Dexter” episode.  The best!  What is going to happen next?  What is Lyla up to now?  Will Dexter finally bite the big one?  Oh the suspense is killing me!  Isn’t it refreshing to think of other things besides homework and school for once.  It’s the best, the end is the best, hey, sometimes the end is always the best.  THE END FRIENDS

Break is only about a week ahead and I feel like I’m drowning here.  Teachers just love to pile things up into a big mountain of poo just for me to climb up and stick my face in it!  My eyes are dilating tremendously, my hair has turned into a complete S.O.S. pad, and my social life is dust.  Thanks guys, I always love it when you throw it all at us at once.  Must be a popular subject during your meetings, “How will we stick it to ‘em this year?”  Oh, did I forget to mention Christmas?  OOops, haven’t put the tree up yet.   It is amazing how this transformation occurs to me as a student.  Summer, my house is clean as a whistle, dinner is served three times a day, and I sleep maybe 6 hours a night.  This semester, well, my house could be cleaner, A LOT cleaner.  Dinner is served at Mickey D’s and I still sleep about 6 hours a night, yet the stress keeps me up late, so maybe only 3 hours a night.  Yeah, I’m really looking forward to Christmas break, that way I can get my tree up and maybe a bit more sleep.

Wow, what a program! I felt Fireworks as a very simplified version of Photoshop. It allowed me to insert images and to edit them easily. The most frustrating aspect of Fireworks would be the Rectangle Tool. Now, perhaps I am being impatient, yet I feel that when I try to delve into the drop-down menu for additional shapes, it reacts lazily. That remains my only complaint about the program. Being a Photoshop-aholic, I truly enjoy working with the various tools. I was a bit saddened by the fact that Fireworks didn’t obtain a Quick Selection tool. The lasso tool was quite satisfactory, yet I enjoy the Quick Selection tool. Very awesome program! Love it!

Yes, Happy Thanksgiving! Who says it’s HAPPY? Thanksgiving is one of the most depressing holidays of the year. Thanksgiving represents togetherness, friendships, happiness, and joy. Togetherness, a holiday that practically forces everyone to spend time with those relatives they don’t want to deal with. Critical Aunt Nancy, Ignorant Sister Sarah with Little Bobby, your bratty nephew who must have spawned from the devil himself, Lazy Ass Uncle Hal, Drunk Cousin Jim who always creates a scene, and of course, Snotty Cousin Jessie, who doesn’t want to be there. Resentful Thanksgiving is an obligation. Ahhhh, joy, where the hell is joy when you are sweating over a stove for hours at a time. You are consistently arguing with family members to get off of their asses and help. You are washing the dishes again and again until your hands become mere representations of dried lunch meat. Commonly, everything tends to go wrong during this washed out process. Little Bobby gets sick and pukes all over the living room floor. One of the dogs takes a horrific crap in the entry way and Little Bobby steps in it, tracking the over-processed dog food all over your carpet. Your spouse gets on your nerves and you begin to yell at each other in front of everyone about the fact that his mother is a fanatical Pentecostal control freak. Oh, and don’t forget, his brother is a leaching, free-loading, lazy, ungrateful, bastard who’s wife is never satisfied with anything. Now that everyone knows all about your spouses mother and brother, things begin to simmer down. Everyone sits and eats, dishes pile by the dozen, and nobody touches your fluffy fruit salad that you took almost 40 minutes to make. When alls finally over, you switch from sweating over the stove to sweating over a hot sink full of water doing the atrocious amounts of never ending dishes that nobody bothers to help you with. All of your thankful guests leave full and happy while you are drained, tired, and doing more dishes. Whooops, Little Bobby threw up again in front of the bathroom door. Little booger could have at least tried to make it to the toilet. Why the hell didn’t Ignorant Sister Sarah clean this up?! You are relieved when everyone is gone. You sit in front of the television set after finishing dishes, vacuuming, cleaning stale vomit, and spraying room spray over the entire house to cover up the scent of dog crap mixed with vomit. The house begins to smell normal again, you have cleaned away everyone and your thankfulness which had arose with you that morning has turned to resentment. You think to yourself, “Oh no, I am not doing this next year. I’ll leave it up to little Bobby’s mom.” The next year rolls around and you repeat the same process all over again. Resentful Thanksgiving all!

Looking beyond those ridiculous annoyances that Copyright has to offer, it does claim to be quite beneficial in a few circumstances. I mean, why else did that one guy invent it centuries ago? Copyright was most likely an entirely different concept back then, ya think? “Intellectual Property” as it is currently portrayed, puts a padlock on the earth’s hidden talents, causing them to remain hidden. Why have artists put their beautiful works on lock down? Must they get paid, paid, and paid again? Look at Disney? They don’t look like they’re going broke anytime soon and they have put our beloved characters such as Donald, or Goofy behind bars! I believe allowing one to post an author’s magnificent piece on their website would open hundreds of new doors. I mean, hey… the author’s talents would be broadcasted all over the vast crevices of the world wide web. They would enjoy recognition galore! One question though, why do so many artists disallow this advantage? Could it be trust, perhaps? I totally grasp, in this case, that Copyright is going a little awry. That brings us all down to one disturbing conclusion, we don’t trust anyone. Now if we don’t trust anyone, how could we trust ourselves? No, don’t get upset, is that the way we must live our lives? It’s become a very GRINCHY world folks, you as well as I understand that too well. If we have a specific talent, it is nice to be paid for it, but wouldn’t it be cool to share it too? Copyright has fallen into the hands of greedy individuals and trust me, it is going to get much much worse. I know you have some beautiful talents out there, why don’t you show your stuff for free? Not like we can afford anything in this era.

Upon experiencing a program such as Dreamweaver, I have been thrilled. Dreamweaver allows users to apply html and styles to web pages with just the touch of a button. It automatically arranges coding layouts in any format the user wishes. It makes web design simple with the proper knowledge of the Dreamweaver program. As I was locked in the dark realm of CSS, I’ve been troubled with applying abbreviations that I have no knowledge of. I felt like a new waitress writing up various orders. Placement became another annoyance such as positioning text or images. I could definitely use more experience with Dreamweaver for just a few months won’t cut it. This amazing program is my introduction to web design and I could never imagine applying proper coding manually. Thank God Adobe had invented an ultimatum.

“NO!” yelled the waitress, “That is not yours it is HIS!” A group of friends and I visited a local Thai restaurant last night for an eve of joy, laughter, interest, food, and humiliation? My husband and I, as always, arrived as the rude friends, walking through the restaurant door thirty, no, forty-five minutes late with the “We got lost” excuse. Our pals graciously accepted our apology with the quaint expressions of happiness by simply seeing us. They had just finished picking through some overly fried popcorn chicken, gnawing on it and avoiding it’s likeness to chicken chewing gum. They offered us a piece and we joined them becoming cows chewing our cuds at the table. The waitress arrived, lovely and rushed. I antagonized our amigos’ four year old a few seats down from me by tossing his squeaky toy about and sending him crawling aimlessly around under the table. His parents, in the middle of their order, stopped to pull him out from beneath the table and the waitress waited impatiently. I felt quite bad for the interruption, yet I, as well as the boy, were so caught up in our fun, we didn’t care about the waiting waitress. About 20 minutes later, our orders were taken. We sat together talking, laughing loudly, chewing chicken gum, teasing the children, and discussing the improprieties of folks we know. Our table was located next to the door of the eatery, a magic porthole to another dimension, transporting folks that had been appearing consistently before us. These nomadic beings would await their tables, stare at us chewing our chicken gum, and listen to our talk of utter nonsense. Finally, a plate filled with beef, mushrooms, peppers, and onions, delicious, appeared before my friend sitting beside me. Happy to transition from chicken cud to real food, she interestedly began to scoop up the wonderful arrangement of goodness. Abruptly, the waitress shouted, “NO, that is not yours, that is HIS!” The waitress swiped the plate away from her clutches and served it to my husband. My friend sat alone and oblivious. I gave her a slap on the wrist and said, “How dare you, that was not yours!” We all laughed and she uttered an interesting comment, “It must be cultural that the man is served before the woman.” With that thought in mind, we peered at the other folks eating around us. Sure enough, men were eating and women were waiting. More food arrived, I was served, my friend’s husband was served, and the young ins were served, but my friend was not served. With pity, I gave her some of my food to tide her over. It had been a good fifteen minute wait before she received her plate. More nomadic beings appeared before the magical door, longingly watching us eat. I said to my pals, “I don’t like eating in front of hungry people.” The angel in me wanted to offer them something. The devil in me desired to take slow bites and tell them, “Oooh this food sure is good.” After our meal, my friend stated, “Well, I guess men, women, and children are served first while OLD women (being herself) are served last.” We all laughed and left the restaurant. It was a good dinner, strange and quite controversial, yet good.

This rather interesting, fascinating, and constipating assignment sent me to the deep dark realm of the infamous CSS. As I enjoyed the wide variety of benefits involved in the Firefox Web Developer Tool bar (fabulous tool by the way) I began to realize that this web design jazz is not as simple as I thought it would be. In fact, CSS is downright SCARRRY! I surfed to the most loved and loathed MySpace site and hesitantly applied the View CSS option. AAAARRGGH! A list the size of the Bible appeared before me featuring headers, footer, fonts, background colors, tables, links, images, what have you. I applied the Print Preview option to receive a mediocre copy of MySpace’s page in print friendly view. I have a great respect for those geniuses who are able to apply these CSS Rules with their hands tied behind their backs. Curiously, I decided to escape the clutches of MySpace and move on the Hasbro’s My Little Pony website. I had no idea those lil ponies involved soooooo many CSS rules! Background styles, image styles, colors….. oooh the colors, links, borders, headers, margins, columns, and widgets? Excited to put a picture of this site on my wall, I applied the Print Preview option. My Little Pony’s print preview was not that bad. It did look very different from the website and the images were still available in their overly-colored glory. I have a very long road to travel before I can add up to those My Little Ponies, yet we have to start somewhere.

I stumbled upon a challenge assigned to me by my Web Design instructor to find four websites matching the four common color schemes Monochromatic, Complementary, Triad, and Analogous. I fished through the world wide web to come up with these four possibilities.

I thought Hershey’s.com was a great example for the Monochromatic color scheme. Hershey’s features a rich brown tinted with a neutral brown followed by a light gray and silver hue.

The following site features fabulous e-cards, yet the site is a bit of a headache inducer. Jacquie Lawson exhibits the Complementary color scheme with the bold blues and reds.

The Harlem Globetrotters brings out the dark yellows, blues, and reds necessary for the Triad. This scheme in particular was a tough one to follow due to it’s over exaggerated brightness.

Last but not lease and one may beg to differ, I felt the Homies World website expressed an accurate Analogous scheme. It’s bright oranges tapering off into a dark red reflected this color schemes artistic simplicity.

Exiting the world of color schemes leaves me with the wonder of possibility; how color could affect the general purpose in web design. Wow, what an experience.

Now, can I ask you a question? What kind of roads does snow create? That’s exactly right! Icey, slippery, dangerous, disgusting, snow congested, disastrous roads. Now, how do we drive on these roads? Nooooo! Not fast and crazy-like, SLOWLY. Meet one of the slow, grandma drivers of Fairbanks, you know, the one people like to flip-off when they pass at a crazy rate. Based on a few interesting experiences of my own, I have been trying to be a careful and cautious driver when it comes to winter driving. Why must we decide to drive fast in such terrible conditions. We do care about our cars and ourselves, right? Well, just remember, getting to where you need to go a few minutes late is better than not getting there at all. Accidents are a pain in the ass as well as EXTREMELY costly (I know from experience). So, if you are not familiar with driving in these conditions, please be careful, your car and your well-being will thank you for that.