Okay, I\u2019ll admit it, I\u2019ve been a bit remiss[1] of late. Someone pointed out that I\u2019ve not really blogged as such for a while merely posted a pretty picture or two with a couple of words of introduction. There are good reasons for this, okay, they may not be that good a reason, but they\u2019re the best excuses I could come up with:-<\/p>\n
Some of the above are true, I\u2019ll let you work out which ones, though I can point out no one sadly paid me not to write one \ud83d\ude09
\nIn truth I have been busy, I completed an online Apple App development course so I\u2019m now qualified to develop Apps for the iPhone and iPad – maybe I should point out that the course was terrible, a monkey could have passed it – in fact a monkey could have presented the course better, the online tutorial videos were so bad the instructor regularly made mistakes or paused while he worked out what he was supposed to be doing. So while I could make a basic App at the end of the course it wasn\u2019t an App you could realistically sell or use to promote yourself with. I\u2019ve gone back to my usual technique for learning stuff, reading all I can on the subject and working it out for myself.
\nOther recent activities which kept me from writing a \u2018real\u2019 blog included designing a couple of websites, both proved to be interesting in different ways (one site needed an online store which is something I\u2019d not worked on before, but is certainly an avenue I\u2019ll follow up on another time). Finally the rest of my time has been taken up with photographs, painting, and of course sketching wizards hats \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Living in a rural location in the North of England with little heating to speak of in the house means watching paint dry can be a long drawn out process in winter. It gets to the point where you think twice about getting the watercolours out when there\u2019s not much time to paint. This could be the reason I spent so much time recently painting digitally, in fact a project which I\u2019d intended doing on paper with watercolours and ink ended up being completed on screen in Painter 12. Looking at the finished piece the digital approach was the right one for that piece anyway as it allowed for changes to be made that would have been impossible with watercolours. Still, I had the urge to paint something with real paint and when I saw a photograph online that a friend had taken I had to break out the watercolours and brushes, yes the house is to cold for the paints to dry in anything under an hour but it does give me plenty of time to watch the paint dry.<\/p>\n
[1] remiss (adj.)<\/strong> early 15c., “weak, dissolved,” from Latin remissus, pp. of remittere “slacken, abate, let go”. Meaning “characterized by lack of strictness” is attested from mid-15c.; that of “characterized by negligence” is from c.1500.<\/p>\n