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Writing Nonsense One of the company contractors demonstrated Macromedia's Fireworks software today. I loaded my copy on a laptop and we fed the output through a Datashow projector so the internal web developers could see what it looked like. I've had Fireworks for a couple of weeks, but haven't really tried to learn it other than to open an image or two and stare at them, scratching my head. The demonstration made it clear what it does and that it's not hard to use, nothing like learning PhotoShop, for example, so I ran through two or three of the tutorials this afternoon with good results. Maybe I'll come up with something this weekend. The technology advances. A whole lot faster than I do. This is something I've wondered about, how slowly I seem to learn these tools. Part is just my fighting it, other parts I don't know. Still, time passes, and I learn a little, and then some more time passes, and I learn a little more. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to go and all this fretting is my perfectionist streak making trouble. (Insert long dissertation here on perfectionists and how they generally fuck up everything they touch.) Fireworks, I don't know, maybe it will be a big help, maybe it won't. You can slice a larger image up into pieces, one part a jpeg, for example, another part a gif, allowing you to reduce the overall image size and have it load faster. This is useful. You can also turn out animated gifs and sophisticated roll overs like pancakes, which is swell, if you like pancakes. On your pages. The new owners are barbecuing their dinner on a large Weber charcoal grill outside my door on the patio and their dog, a nice old never do any harm kind of a dog, is sitting beside it. Mr. Wuss has decided not to go out and check the garden this evening until later. There's no fuss, no inquiring looks, just an "ah yes a dog", go back to the bedroom and find a comfortable place to sleep. With the new owners futzing around on my, well, their patio, I've shut the door. Perhaps they wonder what I do at this computer in the evenings, perhaps they don't. Another month and I'll be in a more private place in front of the same computer and Mr. Wuss will be looking over the edge of the balcony four stories up remembering this place with its garden where a cat could go outside. I keep talking about this. Just think about cars. And a busy street. Thursday evenings we put the garbage out for Friday morning pick up. I've been slipping in extra stuff in anticipation of the move. A couple of large Novell binders full of marketing materials, an old motherboard or two. Not enough to make a dent, I should have been doing this every week for the last ten years. What do I need these cables for? If I buy a new piece of equipment, I buy a new cable, I don't even check these boxes. Printer cables, modem cables, serial cables, ribbon cables, all of them new. I have half empty 500 foot cable rolls. Maybe I'll run some Ethernet in the new place, but I doubt it, so they sit in a closet while I sit here writing nonsense. |
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