I got illustrator for my birthday

[ritaxis]

I got the student and faculty suite of photoshop and illustrator plus a bunch of junk I don't care about. Now, of course, my computer is infested with demands to register at adobe.com and the update spam I had already turned off (several times) appears to have been turned back on. Damnit.

However, they are shiny!

I am flummoxed in Illustrator though -- when I make a vector object, and I want to go on to a new one, how do I tell the program that the next thing I'm going to do applies to the new vector? So far I have only gotten to the next vector by accident. In paintshop 9, you clicked "apply" to exit one vector and start another. Illustrator seems to have no such thing.

Also, very bad, stupid, terrible manual, which doesn't actually tell you stuff like that. Mostly it tells you how wonderful the program is. I did learn some things from reading the manual, but until I can do this one thing, I won't be able to do anything. Because, as it is, weird artifacts show up between the objects when I go to start the new one, like chunks o'color, or extra line segments, or everything changing to the properties I want the new one to have. Or worse -- stuff I really can't identify and don't know how it got there.

edit: I can't make photoshop do anything either.

On another front, I can say "Muj syn je student na universitu karlovy. Studuje medecinu. Moje datr studuje morske biologie." Only that's missing all the antennas because I'm lazy, and the antennas on the r in "marine biology" indicate a sound that nobody who is not Czech would imagine making voluntarily. You might make it if someone was licking you and you weren't sure whether it was delicious or creepy.

I can even say "Muj manzel je mrtvy." The only thing missing are the antennas. The U in muj has a little tiny O hovering over it to indicate a sound that I cannot distinguish reliably from a regular non-palatized longish U. Or sometimes it seems to sound more like an O. The Z has a little V that turns it into the sound of the S in the English "treasure" (quite straightforward, relatively). The y in mrtvy has an acute accent which makes it sound like the i in atropine instead of the i in pin.

In case it's not obvious, I said "My son is a student at Charles University. He studies medicine. My daughter studies marine biology. My husband is dead."

I had to look some stuff up. Mrtry (dead) was the only word I had to look up for more than confirmation.

I can give terrible directions in Czech, too. I can't say "the station is to the left of the post office," but I can say "Look at the post office. The station is to the left."

In general, I find that I am learning much more Czech philology than useful language, and I wonder if this is a personality flaw of mine.

On another note: Jason's mama offered to take care of the dog and cat while we're gone. I'm floored: it's too much! But I agreed. Now I have to clean the house, out of respect.

On an unrelated note: the keyboard appears to be finally losing its mind -- one key at a time. Right now the letter C is unreliable and I have to pound on it sometimes. So if you see it missing, you know why.

Head thing is a tag because after I realized I had to chage the tickets I had almost a whole week of not sleeping and not doing much of anything else either.

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

In Illustrator, you deselect the path you just drew (check the menus) and then (if you aren't near an end of the old one) the next pen click draws a new path.

There are good tutorial videos at Adobe's web site, but you may have to register to see them. Use the updates if they're free--they often contain security fixed.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Photoshop I know my way around pretty well. If you reach the point where you can ask a question in text (which can be messy, I know, for these very graphical interfaces) I can probably cobble up some kind of answer.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Also useful: Ne mluvim cesky. (Spelling from memory, hachek on "c" omitted.)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Re: Czech directions... I remember getting completely thrown by knowing the place I wanted to go to, but not how to inflect it into the right case. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, of course, since I clearly wasn't a native speaker, but it just seemed perplexing that I could all have the words, but not know the how to use them.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

YouTube is full of people who are eager to explain things to you. I've used it for issues in InDesign, converting eBooks, and Photoshop. There's a lot of explaining going on there.