I was supposed to put up an end of the year praise post and a progression post and go comment on a lot of gorgeous entries I've seen lately, but with LJ being even wonkier than usual and my tooth still giving me major pain I think I'll leave all that to the following, hopefully better days. Too bad, those would really have been my idea of a new year's party :p

My only real resolution this year is to STOP PROCRASTINATING, because it caused me a lot of stress and feelings of guilt this year.
I also have some iconing resolutions but I'll talk more about them in the progression post maybe.

I love that it's very quiet and peaceful here now, this is surprising cause students usually take any excuse to have loud annoying parties and seeing that I live in a student house I was kinda prepared for worse.

If anyone knows any fun end of the year memes, I'd love to fill some to pass the time =)

From half of my flist. Seems fun :)

holiday love meme 2012
my thread here

Weird stuff #1:

I had a dream where my sister applied to an elite icon comm, not sure which one. She doesn't even make icons! Instead she had this one HUGE... object... a real physical object that she just decided to call an 'icon'. Like a rectangular plate or something. And she sent it via regular mail, somehow, as her application. I wish the dream had continued so I would have gotten to see the response, lol! I mean wtf??? What does this tell about my subconsciousness??

Weird stuff #2:

There was a random naked guy in the corridors last weekend, and he was making an awful lot of noise. He seemed to have no clue about where he was. Not sure if he was on some drugs or just a regular crazy person, but I called the police anyway so they'd get him somewhere where he'd be a) safe/taken care of and b) less of a disturbance to everyone at 12pm! This sounds ridiculous now but it wasn't funny then cause nobody wants to listen to endless yelling (like, from the top of his lungs screaming!) and seriously wtf stuff like 'I'M DEEEEAAADDDD!!!' and 'WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING???? I DON'T KNOW WHERE I AM!!! DON'T KILL ME!!!' (which nobody was trying to...).
I really hope he was just lost, maybe a party guest who wandered off, and not like a new neighbor or something. Also I wonder what happened to his clothes o.O

How is everyone else? Haven't had much time to talk to anyone lately! :p

My mom called me yesterday and reminded me to go vote the next day. I wondered there a bit about which icon challenge comm she meant, until I got that it was an ACTUAL ELECTION (municipal).

Clearly in my head iconing >>> Finnish politics :p

I'll go vote now anyway.

My computer has been a total pain in the ass for the whole freaking summer and I'm starting to get a bit fed up with it. I just installed some more RAM and it works beautifully, I love how fast it now is, but there has been some malware popping up every now and then, mostly trojans, and it's just not cool at all D:< the whole system is old (haven't changed it since I bought the computer with my graduation money in 2007!), there's all kinds of crap on my system and it's hard to keep track of what came from where and when and what's important, and of course there's the whole load of 'important' windows dren that's impossible to remove. Oh, and something has definitely infected my dvd drive and I can't watch anything except from files. This something was on my startup programs too but I think I stopped it. Still can't get my Doctor Who vids to work though :(

So I decided that if this won't get better very very soon, I'll wipe out everything and start all over and install a Linux this time, possibly Ubuntu. I just hope most of my important programs will work on it, especially Photoshop cause I don't think I could icon without it anymore :( I outright refuse to get a whole new computer though, cause you can make any system as good as new if you know which components to buy. My hardware is fine (especially now with the lovely new RAM, god PS is so fast!!), it's just the software side that's a bit cranky, lol.

Icon randomizer picked a 100% appropriate icon this time! :P

I'm fucked. Really. I have FOUR programming projects and a few other things I need to take care of.

Project 1: most inspiring, but needs the most coding. I'm familiarizing myself with php, CodeIgniter, CSS AND JavaScript all at the same time. It's rewarding and inspiring, but also quite difficult and frustrating at times. Right now having trouble with DOM. I still think my icon site would be the best site concept ever but fear nothing will come out of it cause I'm so slow and stupid. I'm especially concerned that I use CodeIgniter 'wrong', meaning I don't fully exploit its useful functions, but just type plain old regular php and html there. Also I'm redesigning the forms for the hundreth time cause I suck at usability.

Project 2: a python+Django project I haven't even started yet and I have no idea where the dude I'm supposed to do this with has disappeared. STRESS.

Project 3: I FUCKING HATE THIS PROJECT. It's not coding, just architectural designing. Sounds easy? WRONG. It's pretty close to the hardware level which I have NO understanding of whatsoever, and the worst is that I'm doing it with two older and way way WAY more experienced guys who talk like pros and I just sit there silently cause I have nothing to say cause I only get half of what they say, barely. I hate being the most stupid person out of a group. At least when I work with the lazy folks who show up all tired and hungover to the meetings I feel I'm important to the project and worthy and skillful. This project just can't be over soon enough. ;_;

Project 4: This is coding, but it's just old C++ and it's just some object-oriented trickery which I've already done a lot so it won't be much of a problem. I just haven't heard much from my partner here either so I wonder what's up with him.

Why am I posting the most useless post ever? I should be coding. Argh, send me your mad coding skillz please D:

I'm really busy (THAT'S PRETTY MUCH A CHRONIC DISEASE FOR ME OK?), but I'll make a short post saying that I'm still very much considering that icon journal idea. Now I'm really starting to icon other fandoms than Farscape and I think it would be much clearer to separate the 'iconing me' from the 'posting random ramblings me'.

And then I kind of thought it would be really cool not to do it alone, you know? I have many friends here that I know are really talented with icons. It would be a great honor to me to have an icon journal together with some of you. Idk, I just think it could be fun. Let me know if you'd have any interest in this? If not it's ok and I'll probably make one for my own use soon enough :)

Also, I've been asked to make a few guides/tutorials for farscape_land, which is OMG SO COOL and such an honor. So I'd like to know if there's anything in particular I should teach? I'm thinking more of guides of certain aspects than 'here are the selective coloring numbers, make this same icon I made' type of tutorials, but if you'd like I could definitely make a step by step tutorial for some of my icons too if I just knew which ones you'd be interested in. I already have ones for these two:
 
, just haven't posted them yet :) But is there anything else? It would be no trouble at all, I actually really love to write them :D

Really, I feel like a fucking war hero or something. I managed to somehow divide my extremely limited time between reading for an exam and making two big school projects, the hardest task being a HUUUGE programming project. Yet I didn't give up, even though I totally considered it for a while. I'm such a lazy person by nature, and also so much into my freetime hobbies, that it took a tremendous amount of self discipline not to do anything else than these school things during a day. Honestly for the past few weeks all I've done is program, eat and sleep, and somehow still manage the two other projects. It sounds so cliched, but I think this project made me stronger. It certainly taught me how hard-working I can be if my mind is really set on something. I think I also got traumatized enough by the unbearable stress level that from now on I'll understand to a) start the projects EARLY and b) not try to do everything alone even though I'm an unsocial geek and don't usually feel like asking complete strangers to form a group with me.

This must sound awfully lame to someone who doesn't program and doesn't know how extremely frustrating it can be, especially when making your first bigger program like this was to me, and writing it in an unfamiliar programming language too, but really, I'm so proud of myself. :) It was also kind of cool to stay at school and program like crazy till 3am the day before deadline. I think I've lost some pounds during these weeks (and I didn't have many to begin with), I didn't even realize how little I ate and slept. :p

But God does it feel good to listen to some music, make some icons and just RELAX for a little while (a full exam week is lurking behind the next corner, but at least I'm better prepared now). Also a random note: 100x100 icons feel soooo big and roomy now after I've had to make tiny little 20x20 icons for the program.