Here you go, Carlien.
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
With nowt but vacuum cleaner and soft paintbrush (of course not stolen from Liezel, who’s doing much more interesting things this dry-dock), this has got to be one of the most satisfying and easy jobs on the ship.
So, dry dock continues.
I’m not hugely productive, alas.
I just can’t seem to build up momentum to get a whole lot done in a day. I suspect a large part of it may be how horribly messy AV is right now. I’ll spend as much time as I need tomorrow in cleaning up.
So, other stuff.
A List Apart is a really cool website. I’ve done enough web design to find the articles very interesting, and was just reading some of the ones about typography. I think I need to work on my blog to make it a little more beautiful to read.
It’s unfortunate, I spend just enough time on the web and doing designy things to not be comfortable using the default layouts and all that, and want to make my own, but not enough to actually be able to do it very well. So the titles & dates, on this blog, for instance.
I modified the design last year while on furlough, and, having not spent enough time to really get my brain all the way around EMs and ENs, alignment, leading and everything, used something of a hack (I think) to get the date and title of each post a little closer together.
It looks OK to me, currently. However, if I forget to put a title, then it shifts up the date do that it overlaps some of the blog text.
Not good.
So, the answer, of course, is to insert a non-breaking-space into the title block.
But blogger won’t let me do that! So, instead, I’ll just have to keep on remembering to put in titles.
I’ll be thinking a lot about vertical rhythm of text layout, and possibly make some changes to size and stuff later. I like learning these things as it helps fill in gaps in my head.
I sometimes wish for a fuller education. But given that I’m interested in EVERYTHING, it could take a while. Someone suggested I take a Liberal Arts degree or something like that. But then that doesn’t really cover physics, electronic engineering , accoustics, psycology, software design, or that. It might help my spelling, I guess.
If I get a chance (which means, a bunch of years in a stable job with enough free time), then I may try and do something like that by corrospondence. But otherwise, I have wikipedia, a list apart, google, and the other tools of the 2009 home-educator’s mind…
I found out that some of our panels were modified by someone in the past to do … interesting things.
Home built new video-patch panel. Waaay more sensible, understandable, and usable.
Before:
We bought two new audio patch panels too, Behringer ones. Strangely, Behringer also seem to do unbalanced patch panels. Fortunately, the shop had both, and I noticed. What on earth would anyone want unbalanced patch panels for?!
That’s all for now, I’ll post more shorter posts later, with more pictures.
So. Short post.
We’re in KK, Malaysia. Beautiful place.
A whole bunch of people left, and a whole bunch of new ‘uns joined.
The crazy Swedish dude left my AV team and headed home, after two years on board, and now I’ve got a new American the team. It’s fun training him, although kind of strange. I’ve taught AV stuff to so many people now. It’s hard to remember what I’ve taught to whom. I’ve got a basic Doulos AV curriculum, finally, but it’s difficult to get it all together. Theres so many little bits of randomness.
So now the team is one Korean, one Brit, one American, and one confused-not-quite-sure-ean(me).
Amongst the new recruits is one of my friends from the UK, which is very cool. She seems to be enjoying the ship so far, and is working in the “Accomedation” team, cleaning the inside of the ship, doing the laundry, running the bookshop cafe, etc.
Anyway. So. This was intended to be a short post, and mostly informational…
Yeah.
It’s my girlfriend’s birthday tomorrow. The whole present-buying-birthday-celebration-rituals-cultures-thing terrifies me. Like, I dunno. Something about my INFP/TCK nature, I guess. I want everything I do to be meaningful, and genuine. Especially with those who are really dear to me. That’s the INFP side… But also, I feel like so many things (such as buying presents on birthdays, putting up signs, cards, etc) are very superficial, and just a crass part of some culture.
I want to buy presents that are really real - not just bought “because” of the birthday. Yet I don’t know if buying presents *for* the birthday, like, “doing the birthday thing” is also a way of being real, within a culture?
I don’t totally relate personally to any culture, really, and find almost all cultures have things which offend me, and which I don’t fit into.
Also, on the other hand, more practically, I know that there is an element I also probably ought to have of simply “Daniel, just grow up, accept the fact that you’re not all that great at buying presents, so get over it, stop making all these stupid theoretical excuses and work harder than everyone else to actually do it well, and on time. Stop being so lazy.”
We’re not sure of the difference between baseless optimism and faith.
Just a random thought.
I was walking past a sign today, I don’t remember what the whole sign was about, but it contained the phrase “love makes you blind”.
Does it?
It’s a weird concept. I know what it means, but isn’t it kind of antithetical to what we would want to believe?
We say love (in it’s purest form) is the highest of virtues, biblically, it’s one of our main goals, God uses “love” to describe himself, Paul waxes lyrical about it, and almost every page of the scriptures are saturated in it. Songs have been written from the beginning of time about it.
Surely love does the opposite of blinding. It’s only in love that we are actually able to see. Without love, we are blind.
If what we call “Love” causes us to no longer see (flaws, problems, sins, etc), then is it really love? Or infatuation, idolatry?
Ever wonder what a stainless steel bolt looks like when it completely rusts into oblivion?
Well. Now you know. This fell off one of our lifeboats. Makes you feel very secure, right?
This is the latest addition to the AV room:
It’s getting quite full, these days. Well, it has been for YEARS now. Any time we want to change anything, it gets quite major and complicated, trying to shuffle things around. Basically, I was fed up of having our stationary drawer jam because of too many tools inside it, so had the carpenters make us this. Makes me feel all reminiscent of the keyshop. *sigh* good old days.
Here it is, in place. As you can tell, the room isn’t all that tidy, still. Just SO MUCH STUFF! Other additions, the mug hooks on the wall, the per-day form hooks too, and also a removable wall-mount for the fan (which always used to just sit on the floor and get kicked…)
and lastly, we’ve FINALLY got the slot on the door for request forms!
exciting! I’ll post pictures of the opposite side of this amazing slot soon. It’s small, subtle, elegantly engineered and discreet. You’ll love it.