April 2006

I read this on Butch Walker's myspace blog. I don't know where he got it, but he said it was written by David Eggars. It's extremely long, but I think well worth the read. I found it inspiring and it expressed a lot of things I feel.

Finally getting around to doing this music meme from Annika's blog.
Step 1: Put your MP3 player or whatever on random.

Step 2: Post the first line from the first 20 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing the song.

Step 3: Post and let everyone you know guess what song and artist the lines come from.

Arrested Development is one of the best TV shows ever aired in the history of television. Consistently brilliant. It's one of those shows that I kept hearing about over and over again until I finally broke down and started watching it from the beginning. I'm glad I did. Genius.

So today I found Google's new Google Calendar. So far, I'm impressed. As of yet, Google Groups has not been able to steal me from Yahoo groups, as Google doesn't have nearly as many built in functions (though I'm sure it will only keep improving), but so far, the calendar has impressed me. It is one step closer to converting me form Yahoo.

You can have several different calendars in one such as personal, work related, etc. Then you can view all your entries at once or just view the ones you want. you can invite friends to events on your calendar, and share calendars with friends, co-workers or whoever. I've only just started playing with it, but thus far, I likey.

Stolen from Annika!

Instructions: Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three events, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

December 28

Events

• 1836 - South Australia and Adelaide are founded.
• 1895 - The Lumière brothers have their first paying audience at the Grand Cafe in Boulevard des Capucines marking the debut of the cinema.
• 1897 - The play Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand, premieres in Paris.

Births

• 1922 - Stan Lee, American comic book writer
• 1933 - Nichelle Nichols, American actress and singer

Death

• 1984 - Sam Peckinpah, American film director (b. 1925)

Got this via email today, and I found it quite amusing. I will be adding these terms to my lexicon.

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are this year's winners. Read them carefully. Each is an artificial word with only one letter altered to form a real word. Some are terrifically innovative:

Well then, check out this open source, free alternative called GIMP. Unless you're actually a developer, you'll want the pre-compiled binaries (in other words, one nice easy package you click on to install, just like every other program you've ever installed). Available for Windows, Mac, and Unix/Linux.

It can be a bit daunting to follow the trail of links and figure out exactly what you need to install, but it's not too difficult and in the end you'll have a Photoshop equivalent product for free! I'm certainly not a super advanced Photoshop user, so GIMP may lack some features, but from my limited exposure to it, it seems like a great alternative.

As a Windows XP user, I also installed the Deweirdifier plugin, which puts all of GIMP's windows into one single window on the taskbar (like Photoshop and all other programs) instead of having a separate window/taskbar instance for each of GIMP's separate windows (brushes, layers, main image, etc.)