With blue cheese, even! And pickles and ketchup (neither of which we had gotten around to buying here) and homemade French fries.... YUM :-)
Seems like it should be so obvious, but it took reading a book for me to really understand that it’s okay to scrap “out of order!” All of a sudden, I wasn’t three years behind—I was a hundred or so pages ahead. And I am VERY HAPPY about that :-)
I’ve been frustrated with the performance of my laptop lately, and so have been entertaining the idea of a fresh install. The Windows Home Server is nicely established, so I have backups there, on mozy and on the MO’s big-ass hard drive. After much dithering, I took the plunge on Monday and installed Windows 7. So far things have been (mostly) awesome!
First of all, the installation process was clever enough to realize I already had Vista, and offered to keep all my data (and programs, I think—not really sure because I didn’t choose that option) or go with a blank install. I wanted to wipe the slate clean, so I chose the install. Then I still had the option to keep a copy of my old stuff! Very cool. Yet another backup, I guess….
The install picked up all the basic drivers except for my card reader, and I found those with the “look for this on the web” option. (I haven’t hooked up my printer or scanner yet, so I suppose I shouldn’t get too giddy, but still.) Network, WHS, various Live applications, all so far so good.
EXCEPT. The one thing I didn’t bother to check for compatibility—Windows Live OneCare. Which I have just paid my subscription for. And is apparently being end-of-lifed by M$! Soooo, something called Avast is now pulling virus protection duties. I am still irked by this one. But 7 is purty, and for this magpie, that goes a long way, so I suppose I’ll get over it before long :-)
If your man agrees to bring home some postcards for you from Dubai, and then can’t decide which ones to get so he gets them all, and then also writes one to you each day he’s gone so that you will have some to keep as well as some to send, then he really loves you. If he also brings you some Arabic-language fashion mags, a newspaper and some pretty money, then he’s really racking up the points!
My awesome parents sent me the Dover Pictura Butterflies book a while ago [OMG – I can get Dover books on Amazon? With Prime?! Watch out pocketbook…] and there are a few full page illustrations that I thought were particularly gorgeous. I wanted to add something to the illustrations, so I scanned a table of numbers from an old builders’ reference guide and faded that into the background. Then it occurred to me that a customized PostCrossing “cancellation stamp” would be a cool thing to have, so I poked around a bit and sure enough, found a tutorial. Translating the “warp text” instructions to gimp-speak was a bit of a challenge, but I eventually found the text along path option and was on my way. (You’ll need to click through to the original images on flickr to see my cool cancellation stamp :-)
1. moths and maths 05, 2. moths and maths 04, 3. moths and maths 02 Created with fd's Flickr Toys
The last two of these will go out today!
These urban silhouettes by PRaile were my inspiration for this series. I’m kind of surprised that I have so few downtown-type pictures, given that I can see it from my front porch, but I did find this picture that I took a while ago of some random bar.
Instead of completely silhouetting it, I played with the “photocopy” filter in GIMP and kept some of the wording. Then I masked out the background and tried a bunch of different scrapbook paper backgrounds.
I’m quite pleased with the results, and one of them even got a fave on postcrossing! How cool is that :-)
These were lots of fun! I sorta-kinda followed a tutorial on PSD Tuts, although I obviously changed the theme. (Unless you consider “medieval” really vintage, I suppose….) I had to do a lot of research to learn about layer overlays and some of the other techniques, and how to accomplish similar effects in GIMP, but that’s the whole purpose of these exercises, after all!
I ended up with three versions, two of which have reached their destinations. (Click through the pic above to see them all on flickr.) I only have two cards traveling right now, so I need to get on the ball and come up with my next batch! Maps seem to be a popular request, so I’m thinking maybe I’ll try something along the lines of this map collage that I did a while ago.
