Pisces Moon Studio

I’m not sure this qualifies as creative, so I’m not tagging it as a 365 days. But hot damn, I am proud of myself.

See, I do all my work on a laptop. With the fibro, I’m no longer an early bird jump-out-of-bed-and-get-going kind of person. Most mornings, though, I can sit in bed and work on the computer and be productive even though it takes me an hour or two to get together enough to get up. I have a wireless connection to my cable, so it’s reasonably fast. I can read and answer email, listen to streaming music from Sky.FM, check the blogs (shhhh, don’t tell my clients about the blogs), and work on websites.

A couple of weeks ago I started having problems with the wireless connection. It would drop out at random intervals and I’d have to go downstairs and kick the router to get things going again. This was annoying.

Research told me that the particular router I had was well-known for doing this after about 18 months in service — the capacitors start to overheat and the thing cuts in and out. Since I wasn’t prepared to open it up and attack it with a soldering iron, I determined that I needed a new router. So I looked around, found the Netgear WGT624, which had good reviews and was supposed to be very fast and stable. Got it last night, installed it, set everything up, and went to bed.

This morning I set up the laptop and connected to the router and immediately erupted into a spate of severe tut-tuttery. The Netgear was indeed really, really fast. It was fast at connecting and even faster at dropping offline. Like every minute or so.

I spent the day in mounting frustration as I searched the internet and tried remedy after remedy. Everything worked fine when the computer was connected to the router by cable, and it even worked sorta-kinda okay on wireless downstairs in the studio. But it would not work, not for toffee, upstairs.

Finally, in a throwaway comment on a tech board, I found the answer. Wireless access points — all brands — ship using a default broadcast frequency (channel 6) very close to that used in most cordless phones (2.4GHz). And I have a cordless phone next to my bed. The commenter suggested changing the frequency to a different channel and see if the interference stopped.

So I did. And the thing has worked like a champ for the last two hours with no dropouts at all. Too cool!

Although I’ve been using Adobe Illustrator since version 4.0 about 1994 or 1995 (starting on a black-and-white classic Mac), I’m constantly surprised at the things it can do that I am just now ready to learn.

Case in point: Yesterday I made a nice drawing of this little floral spray based on a Japanese textile motif. I wanted to fill the flowers and leaves with a graduated yellow-to-green fill and then float the drawing over a textile background.

Hmmm… I can do the graduated fill behind the drawing with no problem… but how to remove the parts I don’t need?

I could export it into PaintShop Pro and erase all the background, or try a mask… Hey, wait a minute, can’t I do masks in Illustrator, too? Head for the tutorials, read up on clipping and compound masks, and come back to the drawing.

Fill all the flowers and leaves with solid color.

Make clipping mask.

Oops. I seem to have lost my outline.

Oh, wait!

Undo several steps, going back to the outline on graduated fill. Copy just the outline of leaves and flowers and store the copy off the edge of the drawing.

Redo the clipping mask steps to get back to the fourth picture. (Bless you, Ctrl+shift+Z.) Now move the outlines back on top of the masked drawing, et voilá! The drawing, she looks as she was imagined.

Now to go down to the studio and photograph the fabric I want to use behind the drawing.

Don’t you just love it when a plan comes together? :)

I have traps dug for every one of your comment spams. I’m deleting them before they ever see the light of day.

Now go away before I taunt you again.