Job Description

An ICT Technician (or just "computer guy") who does his job for long enough will inevitably receive some strange requests in his time. There are all sorts of stories out there about the bizarre questions technicians have been asked, and I'm not going to try and compete with them because I'll lose. Working at a school allowed me to fall under a false sense of immunity to these strange sorts of requests; but I've learned as much about people as I have about computers since I started working here.

The headmistress' birthday approaches and I've been asked to help design invites for her party. Okay, I suppose this can be classed as an extra curricular activity. Only, the details kept coming. I had never heard the name Maria Sharapova before. Apparently she's Russian, one of the best female professional tennis players in the world, and very tall. My blissful lack of exposure to television and that sort of thing keeps me quite ignorant of all sorts of important goings on, including the identities of popular Russian athletes. Regardless, I have been asked to superimpose the head's head onto Miss. Sharapova's body for the birthday party invites.

We do actually have a few licenses for Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Standard, but the programs have all been installed to the relevant machine. Even if we did have more licenses (or if I ignored the license rules) the computer in my cupboard/office couldn't hope to run any of the programs on the discs. For a start it doesn't reach the minimum specifications and the clever software on the disc doesn't allow you to try anyway. It'd likely be tortuously slow anyhow.

So it's a job to do at home on a decent computer with decend hardware and software.

I'm also wondering what the invites are going to look like in the end. I've got a meeting with the headmistress and any other fellow conspirators (this is all supposed to be top secret, which is why I'm yacking on about it via the Internet) this Thursday. Yeah a meeting. About birthday cards.

It's been a while since I've had a Photoshop project to do. Ages ago I tried my hand at making planets after reading a really good tutorial (they came out quite well), but since then I have hardly touched Photoshop for anything but colouring any drawings I've been bothered to scan. Speaking of which, there are two drawings sitting on my desktop waiting to be coloured in but I just haven't found the time or motivation to actually do anything about them. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, there are still loads of projects awaiting my attention and I just haven't had time to get around to any of them properly. I was supposed to be making another music video like the ones I put onto YouTube, there are drawings galore I've yet to finish or start, there's the D&D campaign which still needs writing up properly, I've got the d20 Modern bank robbery adventure to write, Dark Heresy to read and write adventures for, a novel I started years ago and never got anywhere with, a GMod comic to finish restarting, that Oblivion plugin I was part-way through designing last month, a better web page to be building, a webcomic to be writing... oh yeah and there was the little matter of finding a place to move to and a better vocation to take up.