Easily Distracted

A while ago (a year?!), I made this cute little bug graphic for Nemiver, a C/C++ debugger for GNOME.

Nemiver has since changed icons. More recently, Shirley pointed out to me that my bug had been used on a Mac site! 😮 (Of all things!) Heh. I only posted the graphic on the Nemiver mailing list, so I was really curious how the author of the post on the Mac site, Tanya Palta, managed to find my graphic. I’m guessing it was a Google Images search for “dead bug”. 🙂 I’m actually rather flattered that my graphic was picked for this post, but it’s worth mentioning that the license wasn’t followed – which is par for the course with the Internet. The image and it’s source was (and remains) released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License (It’s a mouthful, but it’s pretty simple).

The bug originally started with this:

I remember Jesse commenting that it looked like a barbeque. Hah… so it did! 🙂 I went through lots of different iterations:

And ended up with the graphic at the top of this post. I also tried simplifying it and making the eyes bigger to support lower resolutions, but I didn’t really put any effort into fitting it within the Tango guidelines.

Anyway, that’s this bug’s life story.

All images and SVG source available in zip file (dead_bug.zip – 330KB) under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. Images created in Inkscape, an excellent opensource vector art program.

It’s ironic: I spend days sorting and reducing the number of clothes I’ve accumulated over the years, but then just today I go out and spend $100 dollars – mostly on clothes. It’s not illogical, as I need these clothes for work, but it is ironic… and it makes me a little sad. I hope I don’t have to throw these out any time soon. I have a really hard time discarding things when nothing is really wrong with it… I’m a total pack rat. A cheap pack rat; the worst kind.

Anyways…

Ah, the last day of freedom. Take a deep breath and enjoy it while you still can. Many people will be going back to school tomorrow, and some, myself included, will be going to work. I’ve got a few things to catch up with, blog-wise. Here it goes…

UBC Button Design Results
I didn’t get first place or 2nd. Congratulations to Shirley who tied someone else in 2nd! The winning design is really well done, and it is clever, but it’s not something I would have chosen for a button or a logo. Apparently it was an overwhelming victory for this design. I would expect this design to be chosen by a group of adolescent boys… so I guess it makes sense that the general CS population favoured it. Perhaps I’m a little bitter. Anyways, it’s still better than anything I’ve seen for the CS department, before.

The old site with the 12 designs people had to choose from is gone due to a badly needed (and badly handled, it seems) site upgrade, but here are the 14 I originally submitted:

Hmm.. I’m tired. Looks like all other “updates” will have to wait. Had to write something, tonight, though.