User Experience Diary of October 15, 2025

Took two slices of an english muffin and placed them into the toaster for breakfast. This toaster can accomendate 4 slices, but at its present state toast 1 1/2 slices. Therefore, I have to angle my pieces of muffin so they will get the most even toast, which is somewhat around the middle-ish, and the left-side slot will not toast the right side of the bread. I hit the largest button on the machine after confirming the settings, which is represented by a line of numbers, 1-6, a light strip, and a horizontal slider for said numbers, representing time. It's always set to five for english muffins. The light strip has a row that will correlate to the chosen number. The lights will blink and turn off as it toasts, showing a count-down essentially by reversing visually the numbers. The english muffins rises after it reaches 1. They are hardly toasted. I wish cereal wasn't so expensive.

I need to print out some assingments for a meeting with a proffesor today. I would have prefered to save paper but they have to be printed, and I plan to do so after a meeting with another faculty member at NSCAD at 10 am this morning. I have been writing them all in Scrivener, an offline writing program that has replaced Google Docs for me mostly. I made the switch after Google started getting more into AI intergration, and could no longer really trust them for storing any of my writings, which there are years of. I like this program because it has lots of organization, a pageless mode like Google Docs that I prefer to write in, and it's run locally. Worth the 75$ license in my opinion. However, compiling and exporting can be finnicky as it's meant for larger, polished pdf or epub files and not a simpler, "straight-from-the-program" exports for small assingments. So I go to the "project" that has all of my writings for this class, which are organized into folders by the week I did them, and named by what exercise they are. I had been asked to print everything, but if I needed to find something specific then it would have been easy to do so since everything has its proper place. Organization on this program is automatically customized depending on how you do it, which is nice. I hit cmd + a, cmd + c, and in an open, blank new document in Google Docs, I cmd + c the file to the online program. It pastes everything without the style I was using in Scrivener, which is suitable for this task. I go through everything in every folder that has been asked for, and dump it into this new file on Docs thats meant for printing later at Fountain Campus, NSCAD. There were also some other things that were already on Docs I wanted on this file, so I open a new tab to acess those and paste them promptly. Process did not take long, and I exited both programs after checking everything was in place.

I almost always listen to music when I am out walking. I put on my Airpods, which are old and drive me insane these days since they can barely hold a charge. I have a widgit on my phone that displays the percentage of battery of my Bluetooth devices when connected, but it doesn't always show up. However the light is green when I open them up, so there is no concern. If it's orange, I cannot tell if that means my Airpods or my Airpod case. Was it so expensive to have a third light that means either of them instead of combining them both, Apple? Anyways, I put them both in. Only the left ear makes a noise, the other one is silent. This is usual, I presume that it's also connected and will test it out shortly. I now open Apple Music. I go to search, which already opens to search my own library and not the whole service's catalogue. All of my recents are there, and I pick one artist who I already had in mind and wanted to listen to for this walk. Their albums, sorted by date descending, come up. Usually I either do a playlist or just shuffle everything like a mad-woman, but I just hit shuffle on the artists profile that displays everything of theirs that I have installed. It does so, and I like the first song well enough to not skip it. I walk out my door and continue a bit until the song ends, going to something I was more "eh" about. I skip, and it takes me to a live recording of a song. Sometimes I don't mind them, but I prefer just to usually have the studio editions when I am shuffling music like this. However I do like said song, and don't really feel like the live version right now, so I open up the interface again. I scroll to the bottom of the list of albums since this is an older song, and select said song that was playing live previously. Now I am listening to the same song, but the studio version from the album. After it, the next song from this album plays instead of shuffling. I do not know if there is a way to go back to shuffle after picking a specific song to listen to, but it would be nice to not have the whole system reset if you wanted a specific song for once. But I like this album a lot so I don't care, and listen to it the rest of the way. When I reach my destination I put away my Airpods, which turn off automatically, but the song I was listening will be saved, as well as it's runtime.

I used my access card with the campus security machine. It's sensitive enough so I can just shove my shoulder bag around it without taking it out. It beeps, but I do not hear it because I am listening to music. However, it has a red light that'll blink green when the door is unlocked. So case of accessability benefiting everyone, including me who can be lazy and not take out her Airpods.

After the meeting (not a good one ☹️), I go to print what I needed. I head into the white computer room next to our class since all the lights were out in that one (can I just mention that I call that lab the "Lynch Lab"? Something about the meat-like texture and blood red colour of the plastic floors is so liminal to me, I find it funny). I go to Safari because I have to sign into Google, and I hate all the extra stuff that Chrome will do when you log in, like trying to set a theme or whatever before you do anything. Safari is just Safari. Anyway, no issues signing in. I go to Docs, and there is the file I made for printing. Cmd + p, downloads as pdf. Still need to print, so another cmd + p. A menu pops up confirming the details of this printing job. I confirm, and then enter my NSCAD credentials so they know who is hogging the printer paper today (shout-out to whomever replaces the paper by the way in these machines. It has never run out on me which is so impressive). I then go into the printer application on the Mac to ensure it goes through and doesn't get stuck authenticating, which would mean I entered my credentials wrong. I laugh at two other jobs logged in this Mac that are stuck authenticating and haven't been cleared. The two same files, one with an additional 2 at the end meaning they would have done another copy, shows someone not understanding the printer system. I can relate, it is a pain to figure out, and presume this is a 1st year. The printer is pretty slow but these are around 11 double sided pages. I have to walk down the hall to fetch them, and almost leave without signing out of my Chrome account. I usually don't do that, no clue how I almost forgot. I then leave the building.

Since I hadn't done any digital illustration in a while due to schedule and personal life, I decided to do something quickly just to keep the skills fresh. I open up the program Clip Studio Paint. It is a non-subscription based (mostly) alternative to Photoshop. It has none of Adobe's craziness, and that's why I use it. I also connect my Macbook to my Wacom Cintiq Pro Tablet. This is a drawing tablet with a screen, which grants me as well a second monitor thanks to the benefit of using a laptop for creative work. I plan to get a proper gaming PC when The Witcher 4 comes out, but I'll probably stick to this Mac for my Wacom since I am used to it, throug latley there have been some cable issues. This time was without issue, but sometimes when I connect my laptop to the Wacom, my pen will not work at all. I use a lightning cable since Apple removed the HDMI port on this Macbook model (and the USB! Apple seriously??). There are 2 lightning connectors on the left side of this laptop, which is also not convenient since the space I have for this laptop is on the left side of the Wacom. Little wiggle room for the cable. And then I have to try different connectors and twist the cable around in case the pen is not recognized. Sometimes it charges my laptop at the same time, sometimes it doesn't. There is zero rhyme or reason to this dance.
Anyway, I had been doing image editing work previously for a reduced photo, so my usual settings were weird. I had to adjust the file for normal illustration. There are arrows to adjust canvas size. There are templates but I don't really like any of them. I accidentally hit a slider for file size when hitting the up arrow, which makes it jump to something ludacris like 50,000px wide. Uh, no. I have to go right back down, and finally land on a normal size (3700px x 3400px or so). DPI of 300, not intended for print so it doesn't matter really. Once this canvas has been made, I go to my laptop screen's window, seperate from the Wacom, and go into Pinterest. I intend to just practice my rendering skills today and not really do anything original, so I was looking for a neat portrait of someone. Pinterest... Is a very interesing image search engine these days. But I will give them credit, they finally introduced an opt-out to AI generated pins. Not a lot of large social medias have done that, and I had been wanting this forever so currently Pinterest is higher in my books this month than usual. I didn't identify anything AI, which is amazing. I found a suitable image eventually after jumping through pins.
And then I do my thing on CSP. If I got into this fully, this would be an essay and not a journal entry. So I'll mention a few things and not the whole, miraculous wonder of digital artwork. CSP tracks my time on the side. You can turn this on or off. I am a try-hard who prides herself in being very fast when making art, so I keep this on always so I know my average. There is a background save ongoing, but the program doesn't let me know when this happens. So I hit cmd + s often, and there is an indicator like VS Code that lets you know when you haven't saved any changes. I work with a lot of photo textures in my work, which I have a file of to access. I need to organize this some day but for now I go off of memory for finding what I want. The program is relativly fast, this is a simple 1 layer sketch. It can get slow with some factors, but this is all light-weight work. I spend exactly 55 mins* on this sketch, then save as PNG. It automatically goes to an art file I recently made. I used to let things go wherever (awful I know) but now I have a dedicated location. It saves the quality fine, and I shut off the software and Wacom (there is an on/off button on this tablet).

Went into Brightspace to double check on a meeting I have in another class this evening. My browser had automatically entered everything in, and per usual I go to acess my account. But I get an error message, saying either my username or password is incorrect. Strange, never has happened for all of four years here. The user is correct 100%, so I re-enter my password manually. I have never changed this password. It doesn't like it still. I go to the link that is the Brightspace system check, but it only checks my browser and says its fine. I remember there was a password checker once and I was trying to find it. Went to the school website after typing in "nscad password manager" and clicked a link called the same thing that came up on a page from the NSCAD website. This link was dead however. So now I go to Self Service. You can read that below. I try Brightspace again at 1:31 and now it's happy for some reason. Guessing someone tripped over a wire. I go to the class I needed fine enough, it was on the top of the drop-down menu but I still go to the wrong one by default since it's an online class, and I'm so used to clicking that one instead. I go to content, scroll down to where times of meetings and students are publically posted, and confirm it does match up with my calendar.

Since I was having issues logging into brightspace, I try logging into something else that shares the credentials by default. And it works fine. So the issue then is not me or my password being incorrect, it's just Brightspace having a problem. So now I have to wait and hope it's resolved, and also hope I recorded the correct time for the meeting this evening on my calendar app.

At this point I'm gonna call it a stop here for recording my interactions.