Yet Another Bikeshed

How I Spent My Summer (other than being pissed off)

In the case that Really Simple Syndication is too difficult for you or that the rss software you are using needs to deny that other RSS feed work, here is a list of tutorials and things I wrote this summer. Also, a list of tutorials and things I didn't write and sometimes why.

completed and online for a while

Lum-type Layer Effect

I can't remember the reason I wrote this. Those ducks that should probably not been walking on the streets here are on that page also. My site is a mess. Everyone deserves better than this, me too.

2.4 Splashes

I tried to make one that made me look like I am racist. It would be a wrong thing for me to actually be like this in real life, except that I have some questions because there does exist differences in things like the metabolism and such. I get treated like a northern Eurpean all of the time, and get warned that food might be too spicy for me. I was a waitress for long enough to know that sometimes, you gotta do stuff like that. Don't be offended and blame the Debian maintainer of GIMP for this. Although, to be honest, I think he was trying to make me compete with new tutorial writers and try to be the first person with the liqued resize tutorial. Screw that. "They" seem to want us to war with each other. "They" can screw off.

DVD and CD template generator

Is it because Windows users are used to not looking things up and doing a little math for fun and education?

Fake moon

Now I get to see respectable people make fake moons.

Mathmap

I think I annouced this and the mathmapers at flickr ended up giving their cars to a boingboing blogger. Then, I learned that I am the only person at wikimedia commons who has to learn tolerance and understanding.

Build GIMP

Dual processors like to make software. They tell me how much they love it while they are doing it.

Tutorials and things I didn't write

Planet making with polar coordinates

It is very easy to do. Jeff Waugh is so busy helping himself that there is really no good reason that I can see to say nice things about that software (even if the tute would have been funny). I like those Waughogs that make the blwaugher seem to be so totally cool and beyond reproach. I keep reading that crap because I must like it.

Mathmap stereo projection for polar planets

There is some stuff on this planet I have been living on that I do not want to project this stuff that is being dished out to me (direct satellite or food -- take your pick) to anything or one that might be a stereoism of me.

Liqued Rescale

I showed the author everything I knew about writing a plug-in. Then I requested that it get compiled for Windows so that Jakub Steiner could use it. Then I become accused of being a racist. Then I think, screw all of you! and I didn't write the tutorial. You can see what it can do here.

line2height rewrite

Mickey Mouse snuck in while I was away. Mickey Mouse is not welcome here.

That is really too bad also, because long ago, I had a conversation with someone about my dads KIM-1 and it could have been a great tutorial.

how to search the pdb

If you need that much help, you probably won't get that much help from my web pages.

California keeps it real

I read this about what Ricardo Montalban said on wikipedia -- so who knows if it is accurate or not. It is quotable regardless, the five stages of being an actor:

1. Who is Ricardo Montalban?
2. Get me Ricardo Montalban.
3. Get me a Ricardo Montalban type.
4. Get me a young Ricardo Montalban type.
5. Who is Ricardo Montalban?

what the oligarchy knows

There is online a lot of tutorials that are better than mine. I spend my days wondering what gives a child with no experience 5x the yearly income that I ever had and knowing that I was pretty good at both capitalism and free software.

Perhaps Jakub doesn't write GIMP tutorials because he is afraid of being relocated to California where they get to tell you how everyone wants to live here and how you did not accomplish the things that you did. Little people, checking the integrity of everything you say on his laptop. Who wouldn't want that?

My mom started this summer off by telling me that my dad was using crazy talk when he told me that one of the reasons that I lost my shitty little job which would not have allowed me to afford to live where I was working was that "They don't like it when you take over."

The last piece of advice she gave me was "They will not let you do just anything, I remember this time you are going through..." (something like that).

To any of those people who know who "they" are and are in communication with "them" (mom perhaps?), ask "them" this for me "Can 'they' make a rock that is so big that 'they' cannot pick it up?"

Entertainment

I saw some movies, as soon as I prove that I am not going to become an alcoholic or heroin addict, I will probably write about them. Until then, I recently saw Henry Rollins and wrote about the problems of working for Butch when she has to prove something. Where is Gwar when you need them?

I liked the Adult Swim 'toon "Lucy Daughter of the Devil", sometimes I even laughed.

The Bee Movie, I think I caught a metaphor in which Seinfield gets a bunch of people who get high and go to sleep in there. Also, the font they used for the closing credits (the whole half an hour or more of them). "a,e,n & m" which are lower case, while all of the other letters are upper case. Those letters spell enema. Was that the intention?

Do you want the kind of life in which you are told what is best for you or the kind of life in which, after 40 years of living it, you get asked what is best for you? Jeff Waugh, perhaps an interesting blwaugh about your feelings on this?

my family this summer

biological

My mom spent this summer being the bridge that doesn't join in the middle. It is too bad when a perfectly good human being replaces herself of a broken record version of a story she did not even write. (For the children, 'a broken record' is an old-fashioned phrase which describes what happens when the vinyl album finds a scratch on its surface and skips while being played, causing that portion of the music to repeat itself over and over again. We used to actually try to avoid this kind of blemish to the surface of the recording.)

adopted

I am sorry that I shared my biological family secrets with them; I thought that we would always be there for each other. I also find it interesting when grown men can figure out that a religon that has them confess things to a celebate figurehead probably will not get them that close to God, cannot also figure out that these same people cannot dictate what a healthy relationship between two people would be like. Like a religon lobotomy where this thing hurts and is really not well thought out so I don't do it, but this other thing that hurts just as much and is also not really thought out, I do do this. These people should not call anyone crazy.

So, I cross out almost all of the 1990s. Everything I have from then is stuff that I learned on my own -- nothing that the adopted family shared with me. The one thing that I would really really really be interested in reviewing from that era is this. Hilary Clintons national healthcare plan from then. Perhaps it is flawed; I would really like to read that document anyways. It would really make it look like the presidency was real and not something that was just cheaper to replace with a sex-scandal -- at least for me.

television and whoever occupies #gimp right now

They are not as intelligent and strong of people as the ones I met -- GIMP ircers that is. Also, when the TIVO seems to be using all sorts of psychology to manipulate you (instead of producing good programs and selling goods and services) it is time to turn it off.

That being said, I have learned one thing from that damn thing, and I thank Carlos Mencia for this: how to talk to over-assuming Mexicans. The Mexican who I was most familar with in Michigan had those religous lobotomy problems that the Michigan boy had in the nineties. Not a gender problem. What reasons are there to follow guidelines that were dictated by people who were unwelcome in most places they entered in the 14th century?

GIMP people. When I became involved with things in 1998-2003, I worked kind of hard on my day job because I really did not think that I could make a living from the things I did for the awesome free software that you wrote and continue to write. I did think that I could make a better living (like be able to afford to live where I worked) from those things that made me successful both while managing the web rewrite and while managing my little shift at the grocery store which we had saved but has since then failed where I was living.

Capitalism is not like those movies you can see about slimy salesmen selling things to people that they don't want. Capitalism is about demand and supply. I was good at capitalism. Free software was for me about choices. So what if Photoshop is better than GIMP -- it actually has to be better because capitalism is about competition and without GIMP, there is not that much competition for Photoshop.

Do go buy photoshop, and remember that it is better because GIMP is so good.

If you discover like me, that your direct satellite hook-up is only using psychology for the masses and not actually presenting entertainment and selling goods and services successfully -- turn it off. Hell, after I saw Spielbergs ET, I bought Reeses Pieces for a while. It is easy to make it work right. Cohen brothers did not manage to sell Huggies to me because I wasn't following a set of guidlines that had been written fifteen hundred years ago -- but maybe if you were following these rules, you could write a little something on your web log about how you used this product after seeing Raising Arizona and really appreciated the pointer.

Right now, I think that 3 Musketeers wants people to search for mint bars. Screw that! Princess crap might not work for the people who might like that product. What the hell are they doing? I think they are talking down to you and I know they are talking down to me.

The idiot box is mostly off.

my muse

I am not becoming an alcoholic. I don't know if there was some group of ignorant little twit college kids or something who wanted to show that if a person smokes pot for most of 15 years that when denied this mostly healthy substance that they will indeed turn to alcohol or those other things that are on the other side of the 'gate'. Perhaps those children should be drafted to help fight this war instead of hanging around trying to prove things that are just not true.

Who ever put that stuff into my food that made my heart race like mad for an hour or so; good luck when stuff starts to be put into your food without you knowing it! When I wanted to see what stuff would do to or for people, I told them and I took it myself. They had the option to partake or not and they knew the depth of my knowlege and experience on the substances. We also occupied the same environment for between 8 to 40 hours per week -- they knew me that well and I knew them that well. I don't get to know any of that about you. You suck.