More GIMP Goodness

I’m getting more and more confident in GIMP now. Last night I forced myself to do some layout work for Leigh’s dance studio site in GIMP and I’m very satisfied. I have the example of about two hours of work. Yes, I probably could have made it in about one if I had Photoshop, but thats all part of getting better at something. I may soon feel confident enough to never fall back onto Photoshop again. Anyway, here’s the layout so far, below is a snippet and it links to the full size 800×600 layout. Really only the header is “finished”. And even it is going to be a bit lighter in shade.

GIMP Combat

I’m a long time Photoshop user. I started in high school in journalism class and I’ve been through several versions up to CS2 today. I love Photoshop to death. However, I run Linux now, and dual booting would suck. Qemu doesn’t cut it eaither and I don’t think Wine handles CS2 very well at all.

There is a program called GIMP, GNU Image Manipulation Program, for Linux that is equivalent and I’ve tried many times to come to grips with it’s different interface. I used to despise GIMP, well, I still despise GIMP, but at least now I can work in it.

Here is my first piece of decent work to come out of gimp. A nice, shiny, flare-y, striped glass web 2.0 bar. It was a good learning experience and I thought I’d share it’s beauty.

Wonderful Old Things

I was wandering through the contents of an old hard drive and found some neat stuff I made back in freshman year. The first article is a spastic little animated gif of a few pages of notebook paper. Sam Hair. Rad.

The next two are videos. One is a painfully rotoscoped video of my room mate Joe swinging a light saber around. The next is a short claymation of a turtle and a bird. I had a lot of spare time freshman year. Click the links to view them.

WMV (423 Kb)

AVI (97 Kb)

Expired Mayonnaise Really Doesn’t Taste All That Different

Last night I was relaxing and reading “The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe” and said to myself: “Myself,” I said, “I think I’ll have some delicious left over turkey.” So I went and got some turkey out of the fridge. I also grabbed the sealed, new mayonnaise jar out of the door, because, let’s be honest, turkey is better with a little mayo. Anyway, I broke the seal, scooped out some tasty whipped egg and wheatgerm and whatever else is in that stuff into a bowl and proceeded to devour the turkey with aforementioned mayonnaise.

This morning my mother wakes me up at about 7 and asks if I ate some mayo last night. I told her yes, because I had. She told me that the mayo had expired. In 2004.

I ate over two year old mayonnaise last night.

The real question I intend to ask her tonight is why there was old, unopened, expired mayonnaise in the usual mayonnaise spot in the door, and not, say, an absence of old, unopened, expired mayo instead.

Ew.

Javascript Colorshifter

I wrote this little function because I wanted a little background color shifter without having to deal with a big script animation library. Really simple, and it takes some time to run through itself. I’ll rewrite it to be faster, more flexible later.

Actually I probably won’t.

Anyway, here it is, and heres a demo. Multiple clicks will get you psycho function timeouts all over the place and some strange color changes. Rad.

function colorShift(strTarget,sR,sG,sB,tR,tG,tB) {
  if(sR == tR && sG == tG && sB == tB) { return; }
  if(sR != tR) { (sR < tR) ? sR++ : sR--; }
  if(sG != tG) { (sG < tG) ? sG++ : sG--; }
  if(sB != tB) { (sB < tB) ? sB++ : sB--; }
  document.getElementById(strTarget).style.backgroundColor = "rgb("+sR+","+sG+","+sB+")";
  setTimeout("colorShift('"+strTarget+"',"+sR+","+sG+","+sB+","+tR+","+tG+","+tB+")",1);
}

Now that I look, it's sorta related to the Javascript Attention Grabber from earlier this month.