18.10.13 — Journal
The Uni Room Blitz
Okay – so I missed another day again (for which you can blame Rhea for chatting away with me until the early hours of the morning) but I do promise that I will improve. I must do better. Anyway…
In between catching up on uni lecture notes and the sorts, today’s task has been to rewire my LED-heavy and poster-ridden university bedroom. First up – my desk. It used to have a couple of spotlights over it, but I wanted a more natural ‘daylight’ glow, so I’ve wired up some warm white and some blue LED strips over it and now it basks in a nice cool ambience.
Also, my walls of posters got a bit of TLC – I’ve put all the ones back up which fell down and now I’ve a collection that looks something like this. The posters are a random mix of work I’ve done, work I’m currently doing and work that I wish I had done.
I know you might be wondering why there’s so many LED lights around – it’s because I really hate the fluorescent tube lights that we all have in our rooms. They’re noisy, they take ages to turn on and the light they give off makes the whole place feel like it’s about 100 years old.
You may also question why this uni room is so chaotic when my room at home is clearly minimal through and through – and it’s because I like to swing from one extreme to the other. Sometimes I want to be living in a pure white box and sometimes I want to be living in a Salvador Dalí painting – it just so happens that I’ve decided my uni room should be the latter.
The LED lighting is what makes my uni room feel my own, and it’s only temporary so I can shift it all around – I used IKEA’s Dioder sets and a lot of extension leads to create the setup. Being the control freak that I readily acknowledge that I am, I had to have all the switches and controls in one place – next to my bed (so that I don’t have to get up to turn it all off), so I mounted them all on the side of my bedside drawers.
And so to conclude, I’m afraid to say that because I’ve been so enthralled in this little spot of amateur electronics that I have nothing else really to report back on. Today all graphics work has had to take a back seat whilst I channel my creativity into designing lighting systems – but I’m now happy with my little creative hovel and I’m ready to tackle the mountain of work that I’ve collected for the weekend…