Discovering Perspective

Mekki and I had a very pleasant day yesterday thanks to reading week /relative/ freedom.

The late morning (we enjoyed sleeping in) was spent organizing papers and so on to get started on MekTek income taxes. I make a very good secretary. You should see me file. I worked a bit on the MekTek website, added a mailing list sign up. Not quite as fancy as I would like but at least I finally figured out how to change the default subject and body for the email. Next is trying to figure out counters that aren't tacky.

Speaking of tacky... momentary flashback to Sunday night. Katie threw a very entertaining cheap and tacky party. The rules were as follows:

1- Well first off, don't dress to impress, wear whatever you have that
was cheap, borrowed, handed down or that you love and won't part with,
even if its seen its best days. We will vote, and someone will get a
cheap tacky prize.
(I wore my roomate's purple pants and my old Dairy Queen uniform shirt that looks like a bowling shirt)

2- Bring a gift for the cheap and tacky exchange. This can be anything
that you didn't pay for. Being that I can't do this an example would
be a half used tube of toothpaste. I can even be homemade (I live next
to the garbage shoot if you don't like it so you can toss it when you
leave. )
(I brought a box of half-eaten waxy mint chocolates)

3- Dinner would be best if it was pot luck... and cheap. Spaghetti is
my suggestion. Everyone could bring part of the meal and it would cost
about 50 cents each. I have sauce and pasta. Let me know what you can
bring so I can keep tabs on whats coming. The less you spend the
better, but please no truly terrible stuff. Oh and if you take it from
your parents pantry thats technically free.
(I brought one of the six dozen eggs my roomate's mother brought us last weekend, boiled them up and made devilled eggs with cajun spice)

We proceeded to play pin the hair on the Backstreet Boys, wax dripping fortune telling and apartment building foyer video camera charades. Very amusing.

/end of flashback.

After having enough of the paper work (if there is such a thing), Mekki and I went to Costco so that I could pick up a roll of film from my trip to Italy last February and to have my perscriptions switched over since their dispensing fee is $4 and Carleton's is $12. Slightly annoyed, we finally picked up my drugs an hour later after wandering around aimlessly. We picked up a monster size container of white hot chocolate, two new pairs of cargo pants for Mekki and looked at the bestar office furniture.

The evening was considerably more entertaining. We flipped a virtual coin and decided to try the new Asian Fusion restaurant at Merivale and Capilano (the other choice was Dick's Burgers and Dairy Dip). A very pleasant meal. The sushi was super fresh. The Mongolian beef was a bit grissly but the sauce was amazing. And the pineapple seafood fried rice was beautifully presented inside a half pineapple. The sushi prices are decent for sushi but the overall meal would have been pricy if it weren't for the $10 coupon.

Then off to the new Rainbow Cinema at Saint Laurent Shopping Centre for a cheap movie. I haven't been to the theatre since LOTR: Return of the Kings in December 2003. We saw Phantom of the Opera. Nice eye candy. I was disappointed with the choice to make the singing more poppy than opera and the lipsyncing was less than believable. It was an interesting mix of stage and movie performance. I noted the influence of certain impressionist and contemporary painters in the set and costume design. I was telling Mekki that it is quite common in period movies. Since the main historical source for what people wore and what their environment looked like, you can often pick out the style of certain painters, down to composition, lighting, etc.

I got two pleasant surprises yesterday in studio.

First, I arrived at my desk to find a red foil wrapped chocolate heart. I looked around and noticed that similar ones were carefully placed on every desk in studio to greet everyone else as they arrived.

Second, it appears that I was among the top runners for assumed distributor of the hearts. I was asked several times if it was me, not in the tone of they were running around asking everyone if it was them. A few people said they were sure it was me, or maybe my roomate. It's sort of a nice feeling to think that that is the image others have of me and a bit disappointing for myself that it wasn't nor something that I think I would have done.

Interesting. And a big thank you and Happy Valentine's Day to the secret heart distributor.

Mekki came across this post to Slashdot and passed it along to me. It is an article by Bruce Sterling about computer-sculpted buildings conceived of by French Architect Francois Roche. Always interesting to see when architecture "coughs up an anomaly that's unthinkable" despite Sterling's belief that this is uncommon.

"Termites build skyscrapers by spitting and smoothing mud, then removing the structure if it gets in the way. A mound is shaped by the activity of the society within it. Roche imagines his viab as a busy termite with a body full of wet cement. It crawls ceaselessly across the structure, spewing new form and gnawing out old form, obeying an algorithm directly linked to the needs of the people inside."

After assuming that I fixed the problem with my new web design, I thought I would check it out on the Macs at school just to be sure. Mac IE 5.1 seems to not respond to the only solution I could find to making my iframes transparent in IE 5.5+. My background is white and really throws off the page. I could make it black but then that removes the possibility of it being transparent in Mozilla and IE 5.5+ which is what the majority of viewers are likely to use.

How much trouble is it worth? My concern is that this page is meant for potential employers and a lot of architecture firms and graphic design businesses use Macs. So they are the ones I want to impress most and the users that will get the less appealing result.

Anyone who is interested, the new design is up here. Have I mentioned that Internet Explore is the bane of my existence. allowtransparency="true". Ridiculous. But that's what I get for using frames. *gasp*. I haven't tested it extensively but it seems to be running the way I want it to. Beware of the .pdf's though. I will likely change those to .htm soon to ease the pain.

Another studio project completed and my grad application is now out of my hands and into the hands of fate.