I ❤ lynda.com

Okay, after my Photoshop meltdown, I decided I had better get some extra help. While our teacher is wonderful and has given us some excellent written materials, I felt I needed more. Fortunately, I knew where to turn: The fabulous, miraculous, life-saving, lynda.com! (By the way, while the founder, Lynda Weinman, spells her name with conventional capitalization, the company's name is all lower case.)

[Immediate disclosure: I only learned about lynda.com when they invited me to create a course for them on the statistical package SPSS, which I gladly did. You can see a preview of it here. As one of the authors, I both get money each month from royalties (but not a lot) and I get free access to the site, which is normally $25 per month. That said, I love it and I would gladly pay.]

Anyhow, it's just fabulous to have video lessons that I can pause, back up, repeat, and so on. Now I understand why my statistics and research videos on YouTube have been so helpful. (You can see those at youtube.com/bartonpoulson.) I've been going through lynda.com's introductory courses for Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks. When I have a little time, I hope to go through the courses for Python, CSS, HTML, Google Analytics, typography, etc. Also, the "Creative Inspirations" series is a gem, too. It has extended interviews with prominent professionals where you/I can see all of these tools in use. My personal favorite is with one of my high school heroes, Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo. Whee!

Photoshop-Induced Cognitive Failure

[The above image, "Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X" by Francis Bacon is illustrative of my current mental condition.]

Well, my last post was all about how wonderful Photoshop is. This one is about how overwhelming it is. Ay yi yi! It's all very, very confusing – masks, channels, layers, fidgets, blotters, who knows what. I can't keep it straight. I guess the upshot of this is that it gives me much more compassion for my statistics students when they get lost.

(On the other hand, I DO intend on going back over all of the class materials, the PDFs, Adobe's own online tutorials and some of the tutorials at lynda.com. I'm sure I'll get this all straightened out.

I am, however, excited to be working on my collage!

First Day of School

It's the first day of school for my 26th full year of formal education. Whee! My first class is FA3000: Design for the Net 1, taught by Martin Novak. (I'm going to see a lot of Martin this year.) One of the things that we're going to spend a lot of time on this semester is in creating a couple of web pages, which will be set up on the Fine Arts server for the semester. One will be a personal web page; that is, a page about us. The other will be on something else. Rather conveniently, I recently bought two domains: BartonPoulson.com and DataLiteracy.Info. I haven't done anything with either one yet, so this class will give me an ideal opportunity to work on them. Very nice.

I was also scheduled to take FA3400: Digital Visual Effects later today with Rosi Hayes, but it looks like I'll need to skip that course so I can work on some other things that came up (specifically, the opportunity to create a new course for lynda.com and the possibility of working with CIDAT).

Update: I have a draft version of BartonPoulson.com that is temporarily housed on the Fine Arts server here at the U of U. Also, while I still own the domain DataLiteracy.Info, I also purchased Data-Literacy.com for another WordPress blog; I'm actually making posts on that site.