iCraft

iPods dominate the world of mp3 players, being the choice player of over 70 percent of American consumers (Disclaimer: this is a Wikipedia statistic. Insert grain of salt). This means that 70% of the people in the United States who are listening to an mp3 player right now have owned or do own a pair of those awful white earbuds.

They're uncomfortable, get dirty almost immediately, and crap out right when you need them most. Even so, wearing them is a status symbol - It's like saying, "Hey, you might not care what mp3 player is in my pocket right now, but I'm going to tell you right now that it's an iPod." Other people, like me, just wear them because we're lazy and they're free.

I, having gone through three iPods (a first generation mini that was outdated almost the instant I got it, an iPod touch that was outdated almost the instant I got it, and an iPod classic that may be outdated, but, by God, it has enough storage space that I no longer give a shit what anyone else thinks), had a small hoard of those chintzy white headphones, and not a single one of them worked properly. So I, being the crafty girl that I am, and also being in pursuit of anything to do that wasn't homework, decided to put them to good use.

With a bottle of super glue, a pair of scissors, and the little spring-loaded squishy thing that was supposed to keep my laundry bag shut (I actually dedicated some time to finding the name to this sucker: it's called a cord lock) in hand, I went to town.

The result was, I think, Plankton's audio-robotic cousin.





He now lives on my bookshelf, and I am the happy recipient of this eternally judgmental glare.

Science!

One of my favorite classes that I have taken at Lawrence was Weird Science, which I originally took to knock out a graduation requirement, but actually turned out to be an amazing class.

We didn't really learn all that much chemistry, which is what the class was supposed to be, but we did learn some good things about science in general, and about ourselves as people. We all came pretty close to death at least a few times, I'm sure, using fire, tools, and dangerous chemicals without the proper safety equipment or procedure, and I saw more beakers broken in that class than I ever knew was possible.

The most underrated part of the class, however, and the most weirdly underused, was the chalkboard lab tables. I left lovely drawings on there quite often, although no one got to use the room and enjoy them besides our class.

This one is my favorite.





It turns out that drawing in white on a black surface is really difficult, at least for people who are more used to sketchy line art and are suddenly crippled with a complete inability to sketch at all, instead relying on picking up highlights with gentle washes of white.

Difficult, but fun.

Now, if I could only get better font for handwriting...

Job Monkey

Ah, yet another long hiatus, and yet another return with more random uploads in one giant post dump.

In my most recent Computer Science class, our final project was to make a web application using Java, similar to one that has already been created by a company called TaskRabbit.

In case you don't feel like reading the article, the basic gist is this: employers post jobs, and potential employees make bids on the jobs. Employers select the best fit for them, and then the site facilitates the completion of the job.

My group and I decided to name our project Job Monkey, which was one of the more creative titles, if I do say so myself. We divided the assignment into three parts - design of the employer side for one of my teammates, design of the runner side for the other, and design of the administrative component for me.

Since designing GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces, or windows with buttons and text fields and the like)is fairly simple using our design program, I took a few minutes to whip us out some graphics for our main page.

They are by no means the most amazing graphics ever created, but I am pretty proud of them for a few reasons:

1) I finished all three of them within about two hours.
2) I used no stock art, reference images, or ideas outside of my own mind.
3) We were the only group with any graphics at all.

First I created the site logo:





And then the icons for each individual side of the site:









It rekindled my love of graphics, and of photoshop, and was, overall, delightful.
Also, monkeys are cute.