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I make! Robot postcard edition

Robot watching gear fireworksTada!  It’s the first postcard I’ve made…in about a year, it seems.  For the same person.  For approximately the same reason.

So, I think I’ve said before that I’m not participating in Lettermo this year because I just can’t get my act together.  You wouldn’t think it’d be that difficult to send out one piece of mail each USPS business day, especially when you’re only sending out postcards, but surprisingly it can be.  So anyway, I opted not to join Lettermo this year and give myself an ulcer.  Not that I’m predisposed to getting ulcers.

But, just because I’m not participating in Lettermo doesn’t mean that other people aren’t.  I’ve kept up semi-regular contact with one challengee from last year.  Semi-regular in that, now and then, he will send me his steampunk related cards and postcards that he makes…and I may or may not send him something back.  Well, I try and send something in return, but it may not always be handmade.  I think I may have sent a robot-themed Where’s Waldo postcard once…

ANYWAY!  Mr. Challengee sent me a steampunk holiday card at the end of last year.  I thought that was very nice of him.  I don’t celebrate those varioius end of the year holidays, so I didn’t really think it was appropriate to send a holiday card back to him.  But then I thought of New Year’s and how fireworks might be appropriate for something like that.  And how gears and cogs look a bit like firework…uh…blooms.  And the idea for a postcard about a robot watching gear fireworks was born.  I had every intention of sending it out in time for New Year’s too.  But…I was really busy at the end of the year and didn’t have time to make it.  Sugh…

Well, just recently I received his postcard for Lettermo 2013 and he mentioned how he really liked my robot/gear themed postcard from last year.  I figured I really ought to send him something back, even though I’m not participating in Lettermo this year.  I really wanted to do the fireworks postcard still, even if it wasn’t really season appropriate.  BUT THEN!  I remembered it’s Chinese New Year (or at least it was when I made the card and still kind of was when I finally mailed it)!  Fireworks are still appropriate!  And thus, here’s is the postcard.

Details:

  • The postcard is 4″x6″.
  • All shapes were cut out using my Silhouette.
  • The gears and cogs were…uh…coughmumble.  I would tell you, but then I’m afraid it would make more difficult to do what I did.  I’ll just say that they were semi-hand drawn and some old Cricut software was involved.
  • The robot there was hand drawn.  I mocked on out on paper first and then drew it in Sketchbook with the mirror function on.  Makes it easier to draw symmetrical things.  Then I imported that into Silhouette Studio to resize and cut.  Erm…he did have legs, but then I got lazy and didn’t draw them in Sketchbook, so of course the final robot didn’t have legs.  The other thing I ended up doing with the robot was to cut his head off and paste it back on at a jaunty angle.  I drew it that way on paper, but not digitally.  Then I regretted it, so I just cut off his head and glued it back on the way I liked.  I meant to detail his arms before laminating, but it looks like I forgot.
  • The buildings were just a bunch of rectangles I welded together before cutting.  I meant to draw in some windows, but it looks like I forgot to do this too.  Sugh…
  • The rest of it is cardstock of various colors and a strip of vellum.  I am terribly pleased to note that I was able to use scrap pieces of cardstock for just about everything for this postcard.  I also like the messier torn edges of my supposed gradient to a black sky.  The yellow part was edged with those Fiskers paper edgers (Deckle, I think).
  • And finally, there was a liberal dose of glitter glue.  It wasn’t supposed to be as liberal as it turned out to be.  But I didn’t check the tip size of the bottles beforehand and some of it came out in a big glob.  Sugh.  You’d think I would have learned the first time, but no…it seems like I do this every time I have to squeeze some liquidy substance out of a bottle.  I did what I could to spread it out.
  • I used a glue stick to glue everything because I didn’t want any wrinkling and the final product would be laminated, so I didn’t have to worry about anything falling off.
  • The postcard ended up being kind of thick even though I tried to minimize the amount of layering.  In retrospect, I didn’t have to use a black 4″x6″ base and should have built everything on the index card instead.  Oh well.
  • Because the postcard is thicker than a normal postcard (it ended up being 0.054″ at the thickest part), I used first-class postage.  I am reasonably certain that it will hold up to the sorting machinery the USPS uses.

Keyboard layouts

Have you ever wondered about your keyboard layout?  I mean, you’ve probably noticed slight differences from keyboard to keyboard, especially between laptop keyboards because they’re always moving things around based on the size of the laptop.  But have you ever considered the differences between a US keyboard layout and other countries?  I mean countries that use a Latin/Roman alphabet.  Have you considered that they would be different?

I never really gave it much thought until recently.  The other day, JoAnn (fabric and craft store) was having a sale and texted me a coupon code.  The text said that I could save 5 euros off my purchase of 35 euros or more.  This isn’t the best sale ever, but that’s not the point.  The point is that they said I could save 5 EUROS.  Or really, what they said was I would “get €5 off your purchase of €35 or more!”

This was really confusing to me.  I live in the US and JoAnn is based in the US, so why are we talking about euros?  The US dollar is our official currency.  I suppose it’s possible that JoAnn wanted to use a global currency.  It’s true that there are more Euros than US dollars in circulation now (in terms of cash value), but I’d say an approximately equal number of countries still have their currency pegged on US dollars and euros and no one currency dominates as the global currency.  Also, JoAnn doesn’t have a presence in any of the countries in the European Union (where the euro is used).

So, I was thinking that maybe this form of social media was being farmed out overseas (which would be ridiculous) and that whoever was typing up these messages was using a non-US standard keyboard.  But…that doesn’t really work.  I took a look at keyboard layouts thinking that there were big differences between keyboard layouts.  There aren’t.  There are three major standards for keyboard layouts, one for the US, one for Japan, and one for the rest of the world (the US and Japan are special, I guess), and they all involve the $ sign over the 4.

US standard (ANSI-INCITS 154-1988)

Japanese standard (JIS X 6002-1980)

Worldwide (European) standard (ISO/IEC 9995-2)

You’ll see that the worldwide standard also involves an Alt Gr command to insert the euro sign.  So, if this person typing up the message had a European standard keyboard, it’s possible that this person could have inserted a euro sign in place of a dollar sign without a bunch of ridiculous keystrokes à la Unicode.  BUT, the euro key and the dollar key still share the same physical space on the keyboard.  It’s just a matter of pushing the shift button or the Alt Gr button.  I don’t really think that’s an excuse to use the euro sign over the dollar sign when sending out a message to customers IN THE US.

Now, I did say that I received this coupon code via text.  I suppose it was possible that this person used a phone to text their client list.  If so, I think JoAnn seriously needs to reconsider how they sound out these messages.  Using a phone to text large numbers of people the same text is kind of ridiculous.  But anyway, if they were using a phone, it still doesn’t make sense to use the euro sign.  This person would have been in the US to text, to save on texting costs, and that would mean using a US standard phone.  That means the dollar sign is much easier to get to than the euro sign.  The euro sign is there, but you’d generally have to go through a few menus to get to it, whether or not you have a hard keyboard or soft one.

This saving of €5 off your purchase of €35 or more remains a mystery.

In other news, now you know that the three major standards for keyboards don’t really look that different.  It’s still in QWERTY format and big changes are normally solved using overlays and new function keys.  The the biggest differences are on the right side of the keyboard with differently shaped/positioned enter keys, backspaces, and possibly extra function keys.  Tada!

Also, in researching the euro sign, I found out that early versions of Comic Sans included an eye in the symbol!

I really wish they kept it.  By the way, did you know that Comic Sans wasn’t originally developed to be a font for distribution?  It was supposed to be “speaking voice” of Microsoft Bob assistants.  But Microsoft Bob was scrapped and somehow Comic Sans made it out into common usage, where it gets a lot of hate.  People are weird.  And I still wish they kept the eye in the euro sign.