It’s 7:11 PM and I’m super bored. I’m having one of these days when I feel like doing something different than what I usually do. I want to start some kind of project but I lack inspiration. I want to go out and do something but there’s nothing to do. Too cold and dark for a walk and too late for shopping and things like that. So I’m sitting here in front of my computer. Enough with this! I’m going to try to find something to do. If all else fails there’s always cleaning. Yes, I clean my apartment not only when it’s needed but also when I’m bored.

I’ve been terribly uninspired when it comes to web design but thanks to making journal skins at DeviantART I got back into the groove. Journal skins are themes for the in-site journals at DA and are pretty simple things coding wise. I guess that’s partly why I decided to make a real layout. I got tired of the limitations of the DA journal skins.

It wouldn’t have taken me so long making a new layout if I wasn’t all over the place when it comes to creativity. I do many things but I focus on one thing at a time. Last year it was digital painting, then this year it’s been resources in the form of journal skins, Photoshop brushes and vector/PNG stock. I get very caught up in what I’m doing and focus strictly on one thing for months at a time. Having many talents is my blessing and my curse. I never excel in anything because I have way too many creative hobbies. If I focused on one thing instead of ten I would become very good at one thing rather than pretty good at ten things.

By the way, if you’re using IE 7 the layout will look completely fucked up. If you’re using IE 8 it won’t look as pretty as it’s supposed to. If you’re using IE 9 everything but the custom fonts will work.

I’ve always made hacks to make my site look good in shitty shite IE too but I’m getting sick of it. As everyone who’s into web design knows IE sucks and older versions of it ignores CSS standards. That’s why I’m tired of making hacks. There’s nothing wrong with my code. The problem is completely and entirely IE.

The apartment itself has also been undergoing renovations. When I moved in the place looked kind of shitty. The kitchen was absolutely horrible with sloppily painted purple walls, a ugly beige floor, a tiny stove, a malfunctioning fridge and a dirty ceiling. The rest of the apartment was also very dirty since the last tenant didn’t clean it as well as he should have before he moved out. I know my rights as a tenant so I complained about the walls, the fridge and the cleaning to the landlord who had the fridge replaced, the kitchen walls and ceiling painted and the apartment cleaned. I also got a new stove. And I got all of this for free. With the new floor I paid for myself the kitchen is now almost fully renovated.

Kitchen before renovations.

Kitchen after renovations.

The living room walls are white and the floor beige. I would have preferred blue walls but at least white is a neutral colour I can live with it. The colour theme for the living room will be black and white so I’ve bought a new white book case, a black armchair, painted a old chest white and will be painting the old showcase black. I’ve also bought a wooden floor at IKEA for the living room. The current floor looks god awful. It completely ruins any chance the living room has to look nice. No matter what I do it looks shitty because of that floor.

The hallway is grey and looks OK I guess. I wouldn’t have picked that wallpaper myself but I can live with it. The bathroom is white and pink. It was very white and very boring when I moved in but with the help of pink tile decor, a dresser I painted the same colour of pink and a lot of small details like pink towels, pink perfume bottles etc it now looks much better.

See more photos of my new apartment.

My apartment now feels like a home and Västerås is starting to feel like home too. Living here again isn’t just great though. I lived in Hultsfred for six and a half years so during the time I was gone things has changed. Most of my old friends have either moved away or I’ve lost touch with them. The city itself looks the same though so at times I feel like I’ve travelled back in time. When I walk the road I walked to school I feel like I’m eighteen again. But I’m not eighteen and most of my friends I had back then don’t live here any more. I’m not the same person, life is not the same as it was. At times I get a bit melancholic over this. I want life in Västerås 2011 to be like life in Västerås was back in 2002 but of course that’s impossible. I’ll have to build up something new.

My family is also moving back to Västerås. My father already have a job here so he lives with me four days a week and then go home to Hultsfred for the weekend. It’s kind of weird living with someone after having lived alone for nearly five years but I’m getting used to it. I’m glad I have someone from my family with me here in Västerås but I would of course have preferred dad having a place of his own. I think he would have too. It can’t be fun living in someone else’s home, sleeping in the hallway.

Enough with the talk about Västerås and my apartment now. Besides things connected to my move I’ve also been occupied with digital art. I bought a Wacom tablet back in February 2010 and was so excited about learning to draw digitally. I thought that drawing with a tablet would be like drawing with a pencil but I quickly realized it was not. You don’t have the same control over a digital pen as over a regular one and I could barely draw a straight line. This led me to the conclusion that it would take forever and ever to learn how to use the tablet so I put it away and didn’t touch it for nine months. Then one day I decided to give it another go and realized that I could draw with it, as long as I used the pen as I would use a paintbrush. You don’t have the same control over a paintbrush as you have over a pen and that’s how it is with a tablet pen as well. I’ve been painting with oil colours for years though so I know how to use a paintbrush and when I started using that technique with the tablet pen I started seeing results. My first two paintings were cheat works. To get accustomed to digital drawing I painted on top of photos. My next two paintings I only used reference photos for. I’m surprised at how fast I got the hang of digital painting and I’m really proud of my latest work, my fourth ever digital painting. Here is the fabulous Party Poison aka Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance. Click on the image for the original size version.

Speaking of My Chemical Romance. Their official web shop is selling replica jackets looking like the ones they’re wearing in their music videos for their latest record. The album is a concept album and in the videos they portray characters belonging to that concept. I bought a replica of the jacket Gerard is wearing while in the character “Party Poison”. As you can see it’s the same jacket as in my drawing.

I’ve been working on my site for three days now. Day one I replaced a malfunctioning font plugin with CSS 3.0 font-face code, day two I edited photos and updated the galleries they’re in and now on day three I’m blogging. Be sure to check out the updates in the sidebar. There’s lots of new photos and also new digital art in the creativity gallery. Mostly My Chemical Romance fan art since I’ve been kind of obsessed with them since their latest record release last year.

And that’s all folks. But I’ll be sure to keep updating my site and keep blogging.

I turned 27 the 29th of July and I promised I’d show you photos of what I got so here we go. Besides these things I also got money.

Rug which fit my kitchen perfectly.

Movies: Bridget Jones Diary, Push and Chicago.

Books: Drömmarnas flod (River of Dreams) by Gay Courter and Alltid Amber (Forever Amber) by Kathleen Winsor.

I wanted a cake with strawberries so my family made me one. Strawberries is a must when your birthday is in the summer.

Another lovely thing that happened this summer was the trip to Stockholm I did and the cruise I went on. The 4th of August I took the train up to Stockholm to visit my friend Milla and on the 6th I met up with my family for a one night cruise to Finland. You can look at the photos here.

As you can see the Happenings gallery is up and running again. It’s my photo blog where photos of the things I do will end up. That means everything from parties to walks in the nature. Photos of the latest stuff I bought and such will still be shown here in the blog.

Other than that today is a big day because it’s my first day of school this term. This fall I’ll study 3D modelling, Graphic design for the web, Information Technology and Swedish working class history. The first three classes are more or less related to web design but the last one is purely for fun. Contrary to most people I find politics very interesting so I’m really looking forward to this class. Studying graphics will be great as well since I’m ok at the coding part of web design but suck when it comes to creating graphics.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I want to finish this with thanking those who stick with me and my blog even though I so rarely update it nowadays. Lots of love to you.

Anyway, have a look at the new creativity gallery which holds my art, furniture design, sewing and photography.

I’m kind of obsessed with having my entire site validate correctly but why shouldn’t I be? Valid code is like correct spelling. Sure you can read a text that’s badly spelled but it’s probably harder to understand. It’s the same with browsers. Sure they can display invalid code but often it looks kinda funny and not at all how you intended it to look.

What I hate even more than invalid code is code that’s valid but works differently in different browsers. This layout should work fine in all browsers besides maybe the most unusual ones but I think that has more to do with those browsers not being that good than my code. Still, it’s annoying. I remember back in the days when you coded for one browser and put up a disclaimer stating which browser (and resolution) your site should be viewed in. Not very user friendly, but still, easy.

It’s interesting to think about how coding has evolved in the past ten years. When I built my first web page back in 1999 I coded in HTML and didn’t use any CSS whatsoever. My first site was basically two frames. One with a text link menu and one main window for the content. The menu frame had a black and white background with tree branches (a photo I scanned) and the main frame was black. It didn’t look too bad considering what many other sites back then looked like. I’m proud to say that Whirlwind never have contained ugly clipart, dolls or annoying moving GIF images. Besides my celebrity blend phase I’ve always kept it pretty simple, not using too many colours or too much graphics.

I wish I still had my first layout saved but every layout I made up until 2001 were lost years ago. There wasn’t that many of them but still, it would have been cool to be able to look at them.

When did you start web designing and what did your first layout look like?

You see high school doesn’t count, because even though here in Sweden you choose a major most of the courses you take are mandatory ones you haven’t chosen yourself and can’t get out of. The jobs I’ve had doesn’t count either since sure they’ve been all right but not what I want to spend my life doing. I want to work as a web designer and now I’m studying web design, moving towards that goal. For the first time in my life I’m actually doing exactly what I want to do. And it makes me feel oddly at ease. Right now I can ignore the fact that I hate the town I live in. I can ignore problems in my life. Because at least one piece has fallen into place. I’m moving forward and I’m kind of happy.

Uni is going well so far but I’m expecting it to get harder. So far I’m doing nothing but reading in my Flash Animation class and the first assignment in the CSS class is so easy it’s not even funny. Right now I fear that class will only involve things I already know. If that’s the case I guess it’s not too bad anyway. I’ll get a good grade and having studied this class I’ll be able to get into a more advanced one next semester. I reckon I continue with my studies this fall and right now I’m even considering studying through the summer as well. That will insure I have a income between June and August and I do need a income. If you live with your parents not having money for three months might not be fun but you can manage, living alone and not in a dorm though it’s absolutely necessary to have a income every month. I guess I could get financial aid of some kind during the summer but why not just keep studying? Besides that one maths class in 2008 I haven’t studied for eight years so I don’t think I’ll run out of motivation for a while.

Moving on, from a serious subject to a not so serious one.

Just looked at my little “to do list” for my site. I don’t think anyone but me understand much of it. And if you don’t speak Swedish you understand even less of it since I mix Swedish and English. It easily happens when it comes to site related matters since after all, my site is in English and so is all code but Swedish is still my first language. Just look at this confusing little list. Even I have trouble remembering what all this means when I haven’t looked at it for a while.

twitter time link
linkimages shadow
tags osv underrubrik
image background shadow
image address /
80×15 banner pink
whirlwindarchive swe ww
galleries divs i wp?
sidan hoppar vad göra?
bakgrundsfärg playlists + 1px för mkt top
copyright inte x2
searchbar

Anyway, this is the current list of things I need to fix on Whirlwind. Everything from looking into whether there is a way to use div tags within a Wordpress page (and with the help of div tags set up the gallery) to making another banner. I always have at least three things on my site related to do list. Whirlwind will never be “done”. There’s always something to fix, things to do better. Sometimes that bothers me but I know always striving to do better really is a good thing.

I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent working on this one but somewhere between Friday and Saturday I stayed awake for 36 hours, coding non-stop. It was all worth it in the end, of course, because here it is and I love it!

I noticed something when I upgraded Wordpress. I’ve always uploaded my photos into www.whirlwind.nu/images but now even though I haven’t changed the image code the photos won’t show! If I use use the full adress img src=”http://www.whirlwind.nu/images/pic.jpg” it works but not if I use img src=”images/pic.jpg” like I’ve always done. What is this? Why is this? Is it because they want you to use the Wordpress media manager update thingy or whatever it’s called? Well I won’t because I’m old fashioned when it comes to coding. I upload by FTP! I wish Wordpress wasn’t so automatized. I want to make changes in the layout by coding, not by changing settings in the admin panel. Like I said, old fashioned. It’s just the way I’ve always done things.

The gallery isn’t up yet. This is because I made major changes in the coding. The only part of my site ran by Wordpress used to be the blog section. All other sections (she, site, gallery, www) were my own code. I preferred it that way but making first one layout for Wordpress and then another one looking exactly the same down to the smallest pixel, while it was structured in a totally different code, was a real pain. You really couldn’t tell it was always two layouts and I’m proud of that. Enough is enough though. It’s just too much work. First making two layouts and then making sure those two works in five different browsers (I test in Opera, FF, IE, Safari and Chrome). So, now my entire site is ran by Wordpress. Not the way I prefer it but I just can’t be bothered with all that extra work any more. Now I need to figure out a way to structure my gallery. I don’t think the way I coded it works in Wordpress, with using pages and all. Oh well, I’ll figure something out.

So, what do you think? See any errors? Let me know if something isn’t working like it should. Thank you!