Iva’s personal site - Squirrelism.net

.::uni stuff::.
I am pretty much comfortable with the fact that I didn’t pass the second year of my four year studies for…god, you don’t want to know which time. However, I’m not comfortable with the fact that, when I get to the last year someday, I might have someone from 2001 generation I’m a part of teaching me. Sofija is a better student than Mila and me, she is at the beginning of the last year now and she was rather surprised to see one of our class mates from the first year as professor’s assistant. And then, well, I have to wonder. When I was 18, looking at what to choose for my degree, I picked something I really liked. I could have picked English language and I would’ve probably obtained my diploma by now…but I always thought of English language as some sort of an universal, rather easy thing which wouldn’t be that interesting to get deeper into. I could have picked my native language, but what would be the use? I’d have to spend the rest of my life at a highschool or elementary school teaching a bunch of kids with hormones set on overdrive. This way, I hope to find something more creative to do for living.

.::g33k stuff::.
I think the most of the site problems are solved now, apart from the ongoing issues with every single Gravatar plugin I try to use. They all either display no gravatars at all, or they display the default one for every single person. Why do the Gravatars hate me? I seriously don’t get this anymore.

The commenter plugger and the threaded comments plugin hate each other, since the first one is plugging *me* after I reply to someone else’s comment. I can live with the ridiculous idea of plugging myself on my own website, but it’s still…stupid.

I am currently making myself some link buttons. I feel bad because I owe one to Sam and I just SUCK at making buttons. So, well, hope these on the domain page are at least satisfying.

And I am desperately looking for a plugin which would enable me to blog in Serbian as well, without too much fuss or without installing another WP.

.::stuff stuff::.
Either way, here’s my little reward for the day. My wonderful friend Marian from New York sent me a letter, a little something for which I can’t still figure out what it is, the both Dani California singles and one of the Tell Me Baby Singles…2 of those 3 were bought via gift certificate from my Amazon associate earnings; the third one was a gift. And, the best part of the gift is the November 2006 issue of Guitar Player Magazine, with John Frusciante on the cover. The article is amazing, he’s talking about recording of Stadium Arcadium…in fact, he dissected every single song to atoms, he revealed the secrets of what he was using in terms of equipment. My mother was, as usual, annoyed with the cover, she compared John to Genaro Gattuso, she accused him of wanting to gain more female fans by wearing an unbuttoned shirt and she was pretending not to hear me when I said that John today is what Hendrix and Page were back in the days. Blah…either way, if you want to see the whole article, head over to Invisible Movement; I should have it up there soon.

So…all hail Marian and fingers crossed to her because that wonderful woman is going to two Red Hot Chili Peppers’ shows this week and she deserves to have the best time ever. I am as excited as if I would be if I was going to those shows.

I got rejected for a job…in the worst possible manner…without a reply to my email, without explaining WHY I am not the right person for the job. The person who was supposed to hire me didn’t even look at what I can do as a web designer, he acted as if he has no idea what kind of applications I can maintain and what experience I have…and he rejected me ON A PUBLIC MESSAGE BOARD! He didn’t bother to send me a reply to my email, where I analysed the state of the current website to details, where I said what could be done and he acted as if a 3-year-old wanted to help out…not a serious grown up person.

I want do die of sadness now :( Seriously. Some a$$hole who already has enough money *(and probably designs shitty, 1996-styled websites) will get that job instead of me and do it worse than I would’ve done it…without love, without interest in the subject of the website and not half as good.

My last chance would be that choir and that wonderful language/IT school accepting me to work for them. Otherwise, I think I might as well sign up to be a cleaning lady. A designer loves to do new things, loves to explore and even though my primary job at the moment is reorganising pages of books and making them ready to be converted into programs, I prefer to design.

…Despair.nu
Despair.nu is a nice thing. The site itself is nicely designed, powered by a script without bugs and the general idea of commenting on three random people’s blogs and having three people comment on your blog. Well, that’s how it works in theory. In reality, I commented on three people’s blogs (and one of them was an absolute angel by returning the comment, a proof that not all the people in the blogosphere are robotic…thank you, Soup!) and got just one comment…(once again, from a very cute person, so thank you, Marsha, as well!). I already got three new sites to comment on. And, well…one of them is on a hiatus, of them has an UNBELIEVABLY HUGE .png as a backgroun and I’ll have to check it from Lynne’s office, as it killed my poor 38.6 Kbps dial-up. But I commented on the third one and, once again, I liked the entry I commented on.

…the problem with I-M.net
I finally found out what was the problem with I-M.net and why the number of visitors per day suddenly dropped: Google, Yahoo and the rest of the gang need some time to get used to my new permalinks. The number is already increasing and I guess it will be back to its old glory by November or so. Yay! I love my site.

…October
Happy October:) I am looking forward to this month, because I’m rather desperate about deciding how I’ll continue at the university. I want to switch to the new system, the one the most of European universities are using and I think I do have an option for that. The “modules” the system is using sound like a nice way of keeping students’ attention…the system my STUPID university is still using is, well, crappy. My friend Mila and I are currently brainstorming about what we should do and what rules would affect us if we do switch.

Of Plugins
Perhance, does anyone have the commenter plugger and LJ-crossposter plugins? I get errors when I try to look them up from WP-Plugins and I think they could come quite handy here. But I think I will replace Gravatars2 with Alexander Bishop’s Gravatar (and userpics)…I hope it works for me, because this one doesn’t…and, well, I always trust people who write their everyday stuff in cyrillic, we’re smarter;) Мозгови!!!! Легенде!!!! ЛОЛ!

As Victoria said here, sometimes it’s really hard to blog when there’s nothing to blog about. But, well, I’m trying. :p

I always end up whining to my friends about how their lives are more dynamic than mine instead of doing something to change it. This week, my friend Laura encouraged me once again, for the second time this year. It has nothing to do with looking up to others, as I lead a specific life, being the only person in my household who works AND studies at the same time; it has something to do with stopping the whining and getting to do something! And that’s exactly what I’ve done.

Sooo…during the week that’s just passed, I worked on two different part-time projects I get paid for, worked on websites of three of my friends (you just saw one of them in the previous paragraph…:p), went to Via del Gusto with mom for some delicious pancakes with cheese, ham and sour cream; as well as considered one of those courses over there at Educon…why? Because they provide their students with certificates valid all over Europe! I think it would be quite handy for increasing the income from part-time design jobs while on university. Oh yesss…and, out of the blue, one of my dearest online friends, whom I’ve known for 2.5 years now; decided to visit me next month. She’s not supersticious about her arrival date being Friday 13th. I haven’t had anyone visit me for more than, like, one day; since my beautiful and intelligent Spanish friend Cristina/Calitoe was here in February 2005. I’m sooo excited about this:)

Regarding the personal sphere of the web design/blogging universe…I’d been out of the loop for months, maybe even more than one whole year, I’ve been surfing around, trying to catch up with people (many of them deleted me from their friends’/reads’ pages, guess they think I’m dead or something), redesigning all my websites apart from the ever-so-popular Invisible Movement, saving my friends’ fanlistings made with malicious out-of-date scripts…in other words, I’ve been busy for the past couple of weeks. An useful advice to everyone: don’t break your routine, don’t procrasinate, it will turn into a bad habit and you’ll end up having way too much catching-up to do. And then, while you’re catching up, people who are used to your updating a fansite by the speed of light will go ballistic and think you’re ill or something. So…it’s almost like a neverending circle. I need Iva #2 to help me finish some things, but that would also require a computer #2, I’m afraid.

This site has been updated as well…surprise, surprise! I stole a survey from Sam (like your layout number 14, btw) and filled it out; also, I’m halfway done with redoing my quizzes and creating an archive of my past layouts. Then I’m off to redesigning some other sites and, one nice day when everything is up to date, I might make my old site themes WP 2.0 compatible. Before any of that, I need to make *this* theme Firefox compatible. I used one of the pre-made themes to see what WP 2.0 has to offer as a template for this layout; thinking it would be all valid…yeah, it IS valid, but in Firefox, it’s a complete mess. I really have to figure out what went wrong.

Either way, all of you who come here and lurk…say something;) It’s nice to know that you’re here. And, well, that makes me want to write more. Many thanks to Milica who said she enjoys reading my blog here.

A sick pervert who might as well be someone whom I see in supermarkets or in the street sent me a sick message on MySpace, leaving his freakin’ phone number. I am so going to report him; because I changed a MSN account because of him once already and I deleted an account on one of those sites similar to MySpace. He could as well be sending that crap to any girl from this city whose profile he finds online, but I don’t want to take any risks, I’m reporting him.

So, anyway…thanks to everyone who welcomed me back. I am sorry that I (still) didn’t reply to everyone, especially certain two friends of mine who are siblings and who probably wonder what’s wrong. Nothing is wrong. I have two emails sitting in my drafts, to each of them, and they both start with “I’m a slow idiot”. And, together with dozens of other emails, they’ve been sitting there since January.

The certain album of the year, as said by many, leaked on the internet last night. I didn’t get it, but I might. I won’t feel guilty since I am getting the OMGWTFBBQWRC (eeeh?) special edition from the fanclub. I sure hope it’s worth it.

Regarding my last entry. Whatever it was, it didn’t work out; but one of my dearest friends on this planet made me feel as if it had worked out. She has superpowers, but looks like they don’t work against the evil powers of Shengen. Nevermind, it shall work the next time, I hope.

Until that next time (whenever and wherever it could be), seems I have many things to do. It’s 1st May and that’s an international holiday, yet I have a work meeting. I should also reminder some of my other bosses to pay me for finished work. And one nice day, I might finish my portfolio, since I have many things to add to it right now.

Still working on the new theme for this site, btw. It might be a bit shocking, though.