I’m not proud to announce that I haven’t done as much as I could have, in the past week, when it comes to writing. On the other hand, I suppose that the whole Christmas holidays thing isn’t “the right time to write” for many people, and that I’m no exception.

I’m slowly reaching my 75k goal—I should be there tonight or tomorrow at the worst, but the beast isn’t finished yet. It seems I’m really crap at estimating the length of my works. Now I hope that by 80k I can call it a quit, since I know myself well enough now, and if left to my own devices, I’ll add ten more plot twists to the whole thing, just because I have too many ideas spring to mind, once I’m within my rut.

It’s weird, but the period between Christmas and New Year is always a period of “depression” for me. Not in the clinical sense of the word, I’m not sick. Just feeling tired and not motivated about anything, including writing/drawing. I bet this is the downside of the pre-Christmas hype, gifts run, housework, and then spending every day at a different member’s of the family. It’s stressful in its own ways, and as a result, I don’t have much energy left. To be honest, the most productive things I’ve done in the past two days was to install my programs on my laptop, look for UxTheme and a good free PIM software, skin my Windows XP, and play Sudoku.

Ah, but after New Year I have another week of holidays. I hope that I’ll be able to use that time to its full extent, with inspiration and without tiredness. It’d be a shame to waste it!

Y Tags: holidays | writing

At least I still had the time to do that. Good thing that I’m not too rusty practicing, and can still wipe off a vector drawing in one hour!

Y Tags: card | christmas | holidays | wishes

Things are becoming speedy now, what with preparing Christmas, finishing the last-moment gifts, wrapping said gifts, managing the food supplies, and related activities. I’m not going anywhere this year to see family (family comes to me) or to spend the holidays (money will be kept to finance a laptop… or more likely the next batch of taxes to pay), so I’m supposed to have time to write, but let’s not fool myself, I also won’t want to spend Christmas Eve thinking about the next blog entries to write.

Therefore, blogging will be slow in days to come, or may consist in short posts only. I’m not gone, just enjoying the winter’s break.

Happy holidays everyone (and whatever other wishes fit with the various countries/places/religions/beliefs)

Y Tags: blogging | christmas | holidays

Here’s a blog project I haven’t advertised heavily, since I first wanted to start it and see if I could get it going for more than just a few days. The answer to this being a definite yes, I’m therefore proud to announce that Vectorized is alive and kicking, and that everyone is of course invited to go and take a look at it, if the theme remotely interests you, that is.

So what’s the theme? Illustrations and animations done in vector-based software such as Illustrator, Freehand or Flash. What’s often called “vector art”, for reasons of convenience, is used in advertising and logo-making, among other fields, due to the scalability of the images it produces. I’ve even written entries there on what vector art is and what vector art isn’t. I use this media a lot myself in my illustrations, and I’ve come to realize that there weren’t many blogs dedicated to it (in fact, I found one only, and a handful of “personal” blogs which creators put their own works on). My resolve was strengthened. I decided to launch the blog.

The template itself isn’t totally fixed yet, but this is something I’m working on as well.

Y Tags: blogging | illustration | vector art

I admit it, I’m an extension junkie, and I lay my hands on whatever gets out for Firefox. Nothing surprising, then, to the fact that I grabbed the Performancing extension, which allows you to blog about a page in a split window within your favorite browser (well, alright, my favorite browser). Currently testing it to write this very post, I must say that so far, it’s proved quite an interesting add-on, and worth the try, if only because one doesn’t need to bother with pop-up windows or, worse, leaving the web page one’s blogging about.

I can’t say yet how it’s going to behave with different kinds of blogs, but at least on Wordpress.com and right now here on WP 1.5, it seems to be working well enough.

So, the word is out, if you want it, grab it here: Performancing for Firefox (Firefox 1.5; aye, kids, you need to upgrade from time to time).

Y Tags: blogging | extension | firefox | performancing | wordpress