Photoshop for Dummies

What have I done in one week’s time?

Selected as one the members of PnP Department for EDX, the timing of the unexpected one week holiday could not have been better. Although I whine about it at first, the temporary halt on all academic activities means that I could focus on improving and sharpening my Photoshop skills.

But I must admit, there’s so much more for me to learn as my current knowledge about Photoshop is only slightly above basic level!

I had only begun to explore Photoshop during last semester’s break.  From being dazzled by the arrays of weird buttons placed before me when I first open the software after installing it, at least I have progressed by knowing the main functions of each tools (which I initially called them “buttons”). Of course, knowing is not enough, I had yet to practise and use each of the tools to their full potential. Right now, I’m extremely interested in ‘vectors’, which are readily designed shapes and images for Photoshop that can be freely manipulated. There are tons of them that can be downloaded for free from the internet. That’s only one aspect on Photoshop. There’s a lot more new terms I will learn soon hopefully as there’s always room for improvement, only time is the limit. 

Photoshop talk brushed aside, I had done nothing except the mundane, from fervently buying back my friends in ‘Friends For Sale’ in Facebook to watching an outdated movie ‘Dragonball Evolution’ that I accidentally stumbled upon in my computer. Who knows how many movies I had downloaded but never have the time to watch? 

To update things, on Thursday, I dined with my family and bought some supplies from Giant supermarket. My returning load has increased to an additional bag, filled with the supplies I’d bought earlier and stuff that I’d initially forgotten to bring back before the semester started.

On Friday, I went to Damai station and followed Calvin’s car back to UTP, along with Kalai and Arun as well. Thanks Calvin for the ride! To be able to drive long-distance journey on busy highways is not an easy task (at least I think so, because I’m not a hardened road warrior yet), so kudos!

We arrived at UTP around 7pm and I was wondering how the ‘health screening’ was going to be conducted. Seeing that they had divided all the villages’ residents into different dates for the screening, I was expecting a throughout health check which will probably be time-consuming, hence the different timeslots to avoid the sudden massive crowd of students coming back on Sunday.

But to my surprise, after filling up a form, each of us only get a less than one minute forehead scanning and temperature record! Forgive me, I admit I do not know how sophisticated that forehead scanning device thingy is, but I couldn’t help but doubt its reliability since it did not even made contact with the skin, so how accurate can the temperature recording be?

Those within the normal healthy body temperature range are given a slip verifying that we are healthy, and we are required to bring the slip along at all time in the campus for a week. Upon returning to our rooms, I had another surprise. Our rooms are untouched and there was no detoxification process carried out. Well, at least my food, bed sheet and clean clothes are spared.  They closed down the campus and advised us to evacuate so that they can carry out all these cleaning and detoxifying, do they not?

I cannot make head or tail on what’s going really going around here but I hope the management know what they are doing. I certainly do not hope that UTP was closed down again (although it is unlikely for an institution to be closed down twice @_@). Enough with dousing us with cold water and plummeting us back to holiday mood just when we had warmed up our engines and ready to get the semester going.

Now that we had gone through the few introductory lessons to our courses in the first two weeks, the real challenge shall starts after this week! That means less blogging too, unless I have the time to complain about my how busy I am! Bye for now.