Ye Olden Times Bites Me in My Fuzzy Butt!

Mrah!!! I have been so busy but haven’t realized it! It has been one of those weeks where the “simple outcome” I want turns out to have their OWN wants, and those wants have their OWN outcomes too! It’s a long chain of wants that leaves me feeling stretched out more than I’m comfortable with. But you know, that’s the nature of simple outcomes for ambitious cats, which is why Adventure Cat Doctrine states in one of the earlier directives that The Pounce is the Beginning or something like that. There’s more to it and I should look it up.

Anyway, the gist of The Pounce is that a good muscular leap is enough to get you in the moment of things, but after that WHO KNOWS what’s going to happen. In my case, I just wanted to finish my Deno WebApp Prototype so it could host very basic webapps. I was good about restricting the scope of what I was coding, despite thinking of a zillion things I’d like to add, and kept it pretty tight. But then the job opportunity popped up and left me flat-pawed with regards to having a resume and a portfolio I could show, as I mentioned in yesterday’s entry.

What Got Done Last Night

Last night I wrote a new portfolio mosaic for my PKMS, so I could make an attractive clickable set of links. This was something I didn’t want to write, but I found a passable-enough library that with a little fudging produces this Demo Mosaic!

Demo Mosaic

Eleventy Images Utility

Mapping with Master Vantage Points

GHDR Tracker Diagram

2025 Nanowrimo Calendars

Personal Cards Revisited

Ship Diagram Process

I think this looks better on the wider pages without a sidebar like these Story pages. The new PORTFOLIO page will be different!

I’m particularly pleased with the way I wrote the image shortcode to be scanning friendly, because who likes hurting their eyes looking at lines of text scrunched together? Here’s the example syntax!!!

{%Masonry id='test'%}

[image_location] link=[url]
[text description]

[image_location] link=[url]
[text description]

{%endMasonry%}

So, each one of the images in the mosaic is two lines, separated by a blank line. This makes it a lot easier to edit on-the-fly, which is how this cat likes things. On-the-fly is The Cat’s Way!!!

What Got Done Today

With the basic ability to make nice-looking image layouts, I can now actually make a digital portfolio page, which would mean I can put that link on my resume (which is still TBD), which means I can finally upload something. Whew! But I still need to find all my portfolio pieces and decide what to include.

So that’s what today was…tracking down the high resolution source files for every single piece of design work that I could find. I started printing out the ones I liked on actual paper so I could have a visual file to reference, but quickly ran into a problem:

Adobe Type 1 is a very early vector font format from Ye Olden Times, and they haven’t been supported for years. Without these fonts, I couldn’t generate high resolution PDFs of the artwork. And many of these files were made using an ancient version of Adobe Illustrator which won’t run on current hardwareIt occurs to me that I still have old hardware from 2007 and old versions of Adobe Creative Suiite that might work. But that seems like a last resort.. Sigh.

It turns out that there is a utility called TransType 4 which will convert the old format to the current standard, OpenType, and it’s US$97.00. Being able to convert my old collection of thousands of fonts just so I can generate PDF sources is a cost that is probably worthwhile, as having a complete modern digital archive of past work is pretty important. As for importing those old Adobe Illustrator files, the software I’m using now is Affinity which seems to have pretty decent Illustrator conversion so long as I have the right fonts available.

The point is that today was a frustrating day of solving problems that were related to the evolution of technology, and of finding things buried in old archives and trying to make sense of which ones were worth putting in a new portfolio. And also thinking about creating a new master archive of all my work going back to when I was but a small kitten.

Wiped Out!

I’m really tired. Too many detours into problems that I didn’t want to deal with. I can handle one or two such things when I’m focused on finishing something, but a lot of things just take a long time and I have to accept that.

And with that, I shall disappear for the next few days and hopefully return refreshed and excited about my missions! They are, again, uh…

1. Deno WebApp Prototype
2. Launching the Stories Section on the Website
3. Launching a Web Revival Social Group!

And now there is this new mission-of-opportunity:

4. Get organized to apply for jobs!

You know, preparing for jobs is a good kick-in-the-pantaloons to make me think about what it is I really do. I feel a bit overwhelmed by the extra task and the time pressure I’m associating with it, but it’s good training. Mrah!