windows, linux and friday afternoons

I’m getting there.

I think I’m going to finally have some time next week to work on documentaries. I did get another couple of jobs yesterday (one a web banner for a property company and one an illustration for Nature) but neither are too taxing, so I should have finished them by the end of the day.

Curiously, I also got wind today of someone at a museum looking for a film about trilobites… one of the subjects I’d wanted to cover, but haven’t been able to (mainly due to time constraints) track down people to interview. Maybe if there’s interest, I can put it higher up my “todo” list.

That’s the thing with working with really low budgets – it just takes a little contribution to really get things moving. Also, because I’ve got no commissioning editors, I can move quickly if I need to change direction.

Updating my website
Because I had a little time this afternoon, I thought I’d start on updating my website… www.darkin.demon.co.uk

I think it looks good already, but I can’t help feeling I’m missing out on work from it because it doesn’t put enough stress on the corporate, businessy stuff and concentrates instead on science illustration.

Of course, the scientific stuff is still important, and it’s what I’d like to do more of, but I don’t think I need acres of shots of (for example) dinosaurs to show I can do that kind of work… whereas I do need a few examples of logo animations, text work, ident graphics and web banners to show the business and TV community that I can do that stuff as well – even though they’re not necessarily as pretty.

People looking for someone to do a quick piece of animation or a business graphic often don’t have time to look at the techniques used in a particular set of pictures and work out whether they can be applied to something they’re looking for. They’re more likely to simply see whether there’s something on an artist’s site that looks a bit like what they want and ask for something like that.

It’s more like buying a car than commissioning an artist. There’s a tendancy to say “can I have that in blue?” rather than thinking “well, if he can animate a Trex, then a logo will be child’s play”



So anyway…. I got about 2 minutes into the re-vamp before I hit a major Windows Vista orientated snag.

All my source files for my site are on a portable disk which was first formatted on my old windows XP machine. That machine now doesn’t work, and thanks to the fact that Vista Home Premium doesn’t support “dynamic disks”, I can’t get to any of the data on it.

Why doesn’t windows Vista Home Premium support dynamic disks? Not a clue. It’s just one of those stupid Microsoft things that suddenly make it impossible for you to work without giving you any prior warning of the problem.

I searched the Internet for most of the afternoon, and the only viable option I’ve found is to download puppy linux – a version of linux which can be run from a CD. Puppy linux will apparently allow me to access my drive and copy files over to another drive.

What a pain.

I have to add a whole new operating system just to get data from a drive because it’s in the form Windows told me to put it in a year ago.


On the plus side, My first experience with Linux is great. It’s easy to use and things just WORK – I guess it’s the advantage of that whole open source thing they’ve got going, but it’s a really good system.

However, I promise not to become one of those Linux bores – so I’m not switching and I’m not going to go on about how much better it is than Windows because I just can’t be that techy.

Friday afternoon
As usual, Friday afternoon ends with Monday turning into a headlong rush…. This time it’s the new newsletter – which I was asked to write, but which then disappeared off the map for a couple of weeks, but which now suddenly needs doing on Monday. Added to this, the web banner I did today needs finishing off and the image for Nature needs another tweak – all of these things came in at 6:15pm.

That’s Friday afternoon for you. Especially since Tuesday is my day for looking after George, so “any time before the middle of next week” now means “Monday or else!”.