No Fixed Abode

Today I have been geeking-out on vector graphics. That means that I’ve spent a large part of the last 12hours staring at the laptop and following lame tutorials for Adobe Illustrator. It was day one of self-tuition, crawling the web looking for designers who host free tutorials on their sites, most of which are glorified weblogs (I have a long way to go). In particular I was looking for basics, being a complete Illustrator novice, and I ended up tracing lines and curves with the pen tool. Rock and roll! It just concluded with me making Fran a lovely pink shamrock in honour of the Irish rugby victory today and of the St. Patrick Day parade in Belfast next week, where there has been moves by the council to only allow the parade under certain criteria, such as banning nationalist flags and, would you adam-and-eve-it, the colour green.

The word ‘vector’ reminds me of being in primary school and, having finished all the maths that the teacher could be bothered teaching me at that age, playing naff little computor games in class. It was a two player vector game. You had to collide into the other player’s arrow, before they got you. You would put in a vector (direction and magnitude using start and finish co-ordinates) to move and their arrow would respond through a pre-programmed secret mathematical formula, and vice versa. Confused yet? It was a kids game, catch up. We even took it out on to the playground one lunch time. Not the computers, no. We would walk around the concrete yard as if we were the little arrows on the screen. Oh my, that is one of the geekiest things I have ever heard.