I’ve always liked Adobe Photoshop as an image editing program, but $600 is pretty expensive for personal use (I’ve used site-licensed educational versions in the past). I’ve tried using other (free) programs, but nothing really compares to Photoshop in terms of capabilities and interface. Yesterday, I downloaded the trial version of Photoshop Elements, a stripped-down version of Photoshop that you can find for $50.

It seems to have most of the features of Photoshop that I’ve used in the past, and almost the same interface. The only missing feature that I can think of having used recently is the ability to edit channels. Mac OS X uses alpha channels in TIFF files for masking. I think, though, that I can do everything I’d want just using transparent TIFFs (which Mac OS X can use instead of alpha channels, and Photoshop Elements does support), or using Preview to convert Photoshop documents to TIFFs. I’ve got 29 days left on the trial, so I’ll play with it for a while and see if I feel constrained.

Also, I don’t like the Photoshop Elements icon nearly as much as the real Photoshop icon, but that’s probably a pretty silly reason not to use a product.

I spend more time messing with Movable Type‘s configuration then I do actually posting in my weblog, I think. I guess that’s not a valid measure of how useful it is, though. I have fun, at any rate.

I made some more changes to the style sheets today. Also, I got rid of the comment popups (which I never liked); comment links now go directly to the entry archive pages. There’s a “Recent Comments” section of the sidebar now, and I took some ideas for RSS feeds for comments from Phil Ringnalda. There’s an RSS feed for each entry now that contains the entry and all comments. No direct links to it right now, but aggregators should be able to find if you give it the URL of an entry archive page. There’s also an RSS feed of all recent comments.

A while back, I complained about the need to write my own HTML tags for formatting and linking from my weblog entries, desiring a GUI editor that would let me not have to know HTML. I hadn’t really paid attention to HTML since about 1998, and the idea of learning it again (and all the new stuff they’ve added since) just so I could make my text green seemed a little counterintuitive.

But it turns out I learned HTML anyway. Movable Type, which I use to run this weblog thing, is very customizable, and I’ve been altering the look and feel of the pages it generates (as particularly attentive readers may have noticed). This involved reading a lot about things like XHTML and CSS, so I could alter the Web pages and stylesheets. I even wrote my own error page, that matches the style of the weblog, and am thinking about rewriting my other Web pages by hand — the current one was generated by Mozilla Composer, and I never had to even see the raw HTML

The end result is that I no longer feel awkward writing my own HTML tags for the weblog entries, and mostly just write directly into the HTML entry submission form. I do wish either Mozilla or Movable Type had a spell checker, though.

I visited my family in the Bay Area last week, after a week of some of the worst weather all year; it stopped raining an hour after my plane landed, and did not rain again for the six days I was there. But while I was away, it snowed here in St. Louis, ending a spell of (apparently) unusually warm December weather.

My conclusion is that I must bring the good weather with me where I travel. The weather report says that it’s going to be warmer again here for the next week, so that’s a good sign.

On the other hand, posting about this here is probably just asking for trouble.

I just read an article from last Monday’s Chronicle about a course being taught at San Francisco State University on The Lord of the Rings. I don’t find this particularly newsworthy (universities have been teaching classes on Tolkien for decades), but the article did quote one of the instructors on the recent movie versions: “The truth of the matter is — I don’t think Tolkien would be very happy with it.” Having just seen The Two Towers for the second time, I disagree.

Apparently the instructors of this course disapprove strongly of the changes the movie has made regarding plot details. My understanding, though, is that Tolkien’s goal was to write a modern myth, a legend for a society that was no longer interested in the old epic tales that Tolkien studed in his day job as a professor of Old English. Most legends do undergo change, though, as the story is passed from person to person, generation to generation and through different mediums. I think Tolkien would have approved of a good screen adaptation of his tale (which I think the recent movies are) that made his stories and its themes and morals more accessible to a large, modern audience, even if they did require some minor changes in the plot and characterization.

Tolkien scholars might point out that Tolkien wrote several letters in which he writes disapprovingly of the idea of movies based on his books. My take, though, is that he probably thought the result would be more “silly” than anything else; he probably never imagined that it would be possible to put a ‘realistic’ visualization of Middle Earth onto film. Also, I am given to understand that he was soured to the idea by some bad business deals involving the movie industry. I think, though, that he would have appreciated the movies, had he seen them.

P.S. This reminds me. If you’ve read the entire trilogy, you should definitely read this piece that Jim Cambias posted to Usenet a year ago. I read it every few months, and it gets better every time. Major spoilers for all three books (or movies, I suppose — check back again in a year).

I just did a Google search for official (I forget why). For some reason, I find the top results fascinating, probably because the word official has nothing to do with why these sites are popular. But I guess these are sites whose topics inspire a lot of unofficial content.

Top results include the official Web sites for the NBA, Star Wars, and the Vatican.

For the first time since high school, I have an email inbox whose message count can be measured in single digits. I finally figured out the secret to clearing out the 3000 messages that have been lurking around my mail client since before the turn of the millennium: turn up the keyboard repeat rate and hold down D.

It’s possible I deleted something I might want later on, but it’s unlikely. Most of the messages are either spam, mailing list traffic, emails I read and dealt with years ago and didn’t get around to deleting or saving, and emails that I needed to respond to that I didn’t, and the sender either contacted me again, or gave up hearing from me long ago (this happens far more often than I am proud of). Either way, I’m just in awe of how quickly my email client launches right now.

I’ve tried a few times recently to cook an omelet, but I can’t seem to get the hang of it. Either the egg doesn’t cook quickly enough to keep its shape, and I end up having to scramble it, or I have too much heat and the egg fries as soon as it hits the pan, resulting in something that looks a lot like an omelet, but doesn’t really taste like it, or stay folded well.

Maybe I should stick to easier breakfasts, like cereal and milk or leftover pizza.

I have a LiveJournal now, thanks to Laura. I still plan to keep writing here, but it will be nice to be able to comment in other people’s LiveJournals as someone other than anonymous.

Eric is using Movable Type for his weblog now, too. By my count, that means there’s at least
four
seperate
copies
of
Movable Type running on rescomp. I guess it’s a popular choice.

By the way, Eric, the lack of titles in your Radio RSS feed never bothered me that much. It was the lack of links. Now, if only you had comments enabled, I wouldn’t have to keep responding to you here :)

Dammit, Eric. You’ve got this song stuck in my head now.

Either that, or I’m getting dumber. I just got this email:

From: "Jennifer Hawkings" <meinlv@msn.com>
To: "" <akosut@Stanford.EDU>
Subject:
Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 21:51:55 +0000
 
Browsing through the CNN website I came across this CNN article which seems to
be about you:
 
http://www.cnn.com:USArticle1840@www.liquidshirts.com/
 
Yours,
Jennifer Hawkings

I fell for it, too. Opened the URL, at least. Sigh.

A few weeks ago, I was walking down the hall in our building, when I ran into a woman who (I hope) lives on our hall. She looked at me, said “happy little person” and walked through the door into (I hope) her apartment. I was a little confused, but proceeded into the elevator and forgot about it. The other day, I ran into the same woman in the elevator, who again looked at me and said “happy little person.” I wondered if perhaps this was just an expression she used, but when the elevator stopped and someone else got on, she just said “hello.” I guess she recognized me.

I guess it’s possible I have really bad hearing comprehension, and in fact she said something entirely different and less eccentric. Or maybe I just look like a happy little person to her. Even though I am a good foot taller than she was.

The Omni Group has a real nice-looking set of Cocoa frameworks that they make available under a relatively liberal license. In particular, OWF looks like it might be a perfect fit for some projects I’ve been thinking about. But the enormous complexity of the framework (there are 580 header files describing OWF and the other Omni frameworks it relies on) combined with a lack of documentation, means that it would probably take me longer to understand how to use the frameworks than it would to just write my own code to do the parts I need. This seems like a shame.

I’m not sure whether to be more impressed that there’s a thin layer of snow covering everything outside this morning, or that the weather report was actually right for once.