OddballGreg - Consumer Law, Web Design And Butterflies

Pretty Pretty Butterflies. No, still prefer unicorns though.

What does Consumer Law, Web Design and Butterflies all have in common? Absolutely nothing, not counting the fact that I've had an interesting week involving all three. Let's talk about that.

First and foremost, I should point out that I have no idea if these multi-topic posts are preferred over the older single topic style. You should probably mention which you prefer somewhere I can read it. Just maybe. Anyways, onto the interesting events. 

First and foremost being consumer law. This week while brainstorming new IT related services for GITR, the IT company I began working for in earnest recently and mentioned in last week's blog post, I had the interesting task of writing up a Terms and Conditions contract specific to the hardware repair services we were brainstorming for. As it turns out, the consumer laws are fairly easy to understand in South Africa, (at least I thought so), and after a day of contemplation, revision, research (with much thanks to paralegaladvice.org.za for the linked document concerning consumer law), I managed to write out a set of Terms and Conditions which accurately covered everything necessary for the job to a degree that people who've written contracts before was impressed with. (I should stop bragging now.)

My work successes aside, I should point out that there are a great many personal benefits to knowing the laws of the country. You hear about it every day in South Africa as officials attempt to coerce bribes out of people, and in many cases the laws are broken by companies looking to pocket easy cash at the expense of the customer. The law is not difficult to understand, so do yourselves a favor and read up on it. (And suddenly I'm doing Public Service Announcements.)

Also, I've recently found all my time spent learning HTML and various other web design related skills to be of great use as part of the GITR services. As you might expect, the internet is kind've a big thing these days (*golf clap* Thank you, I'm brilliant at stating the obvious I know.), but for a lot of people, taking the time to learn how to simply do it all yourself is simply not an option, which is why companies like the one I work for now exist. Web design is somewhat rather hard to do thanks to a large variety of loops to jump through to get things to work usually. (This also happened to be part of what made me realize that a job is nothing more than you doing something crappy son that someone else can do something less crappy. Amazingly profound realization I know.) Still, it pays the bills and fits the bill for interesting and allows creative juices to flow. For those of you interested in learning about Web Design and such, and have the time to do so, be sure to read up on Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla, and maybe check out General Assembly's fantastic HTML tutorial to get a groundwork understanding of what's happening on the web these days. You won't regret it.

And that bring's us finally to Butterflies. How the hell do butterflies have anything to do with the previous 2 topics? They don't. For the most part, they came up at random as a request for a birthday present from a rather hilarious new acquaintance. Considering my erratic behaviour and usual reaction to such things, I figured, hey, why not, drawing a butterfly sounds like fun.

Beautiful, beautiful grayscale butterfly with a deformed body... Turns out that the camouflage is pretty good at confusing my sense of scale.

While I quite like my work... mostly, I think. I can see all the flaws, none-the-least being my inability to draw complicated insects properly even with guidance, I think the wings do look quite pretty. Perhaps next time i'll even get the wings to look like they belong to the same butterfly next time... maybe. For 6 hours of work though, it's not terrible. That said, as I was drawing this butterfly and realizing how different it was from the source picture (as seen in this posts header image), I couldn't help but have yet another of my profound epiphanies regarding the fact that every drawing I do while working from a source photo eventually hits a point in which it stops being a copy, and begins to be an artwork of it's self wherein I'm actually just drawing it from then on. It's an interesting thing to consider that even copies are unique in their own way.

Lastly, I felt it worth mentioning why this blog post was being put up so late at night simply because one one hand, I had thoroughly enjoyed the snarky commentary offered by the YouTube channel Dartigan as he proceeds to tell you why games are awful in a way only he can. (In the style of Cinema Sin, but we won't mention that. Teehee) In any case, I've linked the two video's that took up my time this evening below, which you should definitely give a watch and maybe subscribe to his channel if you enjoyed them.

In any case, that's more or less the interesting parts of this week that I've had as far as I can remember. Do you like the new multi-subject blog post format? Or do you think there is something that I could be doing that would make the posts even better. If so, do be sure to let me know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We here at TCSA love to hear your feedback as it helps us know that you like what we're doing. And of course, if you enjoy finding out about awesome stuff on the web and in the world then do please be sure to like the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left to get all the latest posts as they're published. Also, do be sure to share posts you enjoyed with your friends as it helps us out a great deal. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Try not to work too hard my friends.