Ija being Random

It's almost middle of August already?

Gosh time sure zooms.

I still need to :

• register for IELTS (will use money from MMU’s Deposit + RM30)
• scrape enough money to save RM500 in ASB for July’s savings even if I have to eat grass for the next 18 days

sigh

FYP Update

After a devastating interim presentation in Trimester 2, the groupmate and I sat down and got crackin’. We mutually decided that he’d be doing all the dirty works (documentation, research, compiling, presentation slides) whilst my job would be nothing but purely coding and designing for the next 3 months.

In the end, we nailed it!

Gotten ourselves an A- each. That’s amazing, considering the fact that we screwed up really nicely during the first half of the project.

Whee!

In Love with Photoshop

My new job requires me to design software and web application UIs on top of doing minor programming works. Good enough. After all I’m pretty comfortable doing something that I’m really familiar with.

Here’s a kicker - I’m expected to use free tools - eg GIMP.

Crap.

Dont get me wrong - I think it’s a decent, free raster image editor. But after spending 11 years with Photoshop (starting from Photoshop 3 when I was 15), I’m accustomed to having 101 shortcut keys doing things that I expected them to do. I did almost everything graphic with photoshop - starting with a website banner, to menu images, to photo editing, to image enhancement, to photochopping (super-impose) KT Tunstall’s head on top of Halle Berry’s Storm costume. Looking at Photoshop UI makes me feel like home.

The boss asked me to cut the umbilical cord and learn to use open source products with Photoshop shortcut keys plugin (GIMPshop). I tried it for a day and whenever I couldnt execute things fast enough due to its steep adaptation curve, I sat at the pantry and did some serious Sudoku to keep myself sane.

I know where he’s coming from - he cant invest the company’s money in something that costs the same as a new laptop when I’m the only one who knows how to use the damn thing. Truthfully, it’s not that I cant do things with GIMP - I just cant do things fast enough. It’s akin to asking a chef to chop things with a slightly blunt knife.

To solve this problem, I downloaded the trial version of the software, will keep it running on my 512MB office laptop for 30 days and buy a copy of it as an investment after it expires. After all, I’ve been using it for years and will keep on continuing to use it even if I dont work here anymore.

So here’s the BIG question. How can I recoup back the purchase price?

I have a big feeling that I may go back to doing tonnes of freelancing.

Bye bye Saturdays.

Pay It Forward

One of the thing I vowed to do after earning my own paycheck is to put aside at least 5% of my gross salary for charity. At current salary rate, the amount is sufficient to buy me 3 and a half paperback books every month. Now, some people think that it’s outrageous for me to spare some cash for charity when I’m swimming in study debt myself. Sometimes I do wonder what was I thinking when I drafted my budget for July - Dec 2008.

Two emails arrived at my mailbox today, saying that two of my small microloan contribution have been disbursed. I was happy. Too happy, in fact. My small pocket money can be used by people; mainly women in another countries to lift themselves out of poverty. How amazing is that? We as lenders dont get any profit of course, and I dont really mind if they dont pay back anything.

It feels really good to help out sometimes. Even if it requires me to cut a latte or two, packing my own lunch and walk to/fro work once a week.