2012-09-29

How to Make a Sandwich

Not just any sandwich, though, the best sandwich.

First, butter your bread. This step is essential, don't try to tell me you don't like butter or whatever, you're a liar and you know it. Butter's delicious. Butter both sides. Really slather it on.

Next, chop up some avocado. Some people like to squish it up and spread it over their bread in a thin layer that you can't even taste. Those people are wrong. And if you even think about arguing that you don't need to spread butter on there because the avocado makes up for it, just leave now.

Next slice a gherkin¹ into thirds, lengthwise and then cut the slices in half the other way. If you like, you can do a second one as well. Sometimes I do, sometimes, I just go with one, as illustrated here.


2012-09-13

Looking for an image editor

I'm looking for a decent program to use to edit images. The problem is that I have a few specific requirements, and so far the only thing I know of that meets them is an old version of Paint Shop Pro, from back before Corel bought and ruined it.

I can (and do) still keep using that, but it is pretty outdated and has some weird quirks, like being able to save PNG files with transparency but not load them (transparent areas get converted to an arbitrary colour), so I've been looking for something decent to replace it with. So far I haven't found anything that quite measures up.

So what am I looking for? This:

Click to embiggen.
What we have here is a single window with spots to dock toolbars on either side. I've got the tools palette on the left, the colour picker on the right and the tool options and layer palette floating, because they need more space.

It's not entirely essential that the toolbars be dockable, but it is pretty nice. The important thing is that I can open up several images within that one window and move them around over that grey background. I absolutely do not want to be able to see my desktop, it's too distracting, I don't want multiple copies of those toolbars, and I don't want images to open maximised to the full size of the program window.

I've tried Paint.net, Stylepix, GIMP, Krita and even Photoshop and none of them work for me. Is there something out there that works the way I want it to, or should I just stick with PSP?

2012-09-12

Blogger is inumerate

I went to post something on my other blog today, but when I loaded the page I noticed something odd. Apparently I already posted something. I didn't remember posting anything on the 11th, but there it was.

"last published on Sep 11"


So I went to the post list to see what I'd posted. And here's the last post I'd made.

"9/10/12"

Wait a minute... the tenth isn't the eleventh! Why do you lie to me Blogger? And it's not the first time it's contradicted itself either. Take a look at these pageview stats:

Seven plus eight equals elev... wait a minute!

Something doesn't add up there. What the hell is going on here? What does this mean?