Creative Crayola Crapola

I’m having one of those “you’re not in preschool so why does everything you come up with look as though it’s been designed with extra-large crayons?” days. Bad times. The stupid thing is I am starting to become really well acquainted with the GIMP’s capabilities (beyond just making photos look less-bad) and now its interface is what feels limiting (especially the way it handles layers and masks versus the way Photoshop does). So now I’m up for a grand worth of software (that I so can’t afford) just to make myself feel better about the tools I’m using, etc. and hopefully get more productive accordingly.
Anyone wanna donate to the buy-Josh-Creative-Suite-2 (even though 3 is about to come out) fund? It’s my birthday tomorrow, if that helps! ;-) Hehe. (No, really, it’s my birthday tomorrow… I’m joking about the buying me CS2 bit though)
Frustratingly, there are free CS3 betas to be had on the Adobe site, but only if you’re an existing CS2 user. Sigh. I could use it at work, but lack of acceptable Internet connectivity and no dual monitors is pushing me to stay at home, instead.

Speaking of software, though, as soon as I buy that it’s time to finally get Premiere as well. So. Sick. Of. iMovie/WMM/Avid Free DV/whatever. The few times I’ve had opportunity to use Premiere for a while have been fairly pleasant experiences — obviously it’s a lot more powerful than free crap, but that doesn’t seem to have a massive usability trade-off. Which is, you know, kinda nice. Only, again, kinda expensive.

If I pay any tax this year after having claimed all this software I’ll be slightly horrified :P

TPG weirdness

So it’s fast. But it’s not so fast during the day. And not so fast when dealing with Australian servers. By way of example, when dealing with AARNet’s server, I was getting a measly 30KB/s download. So I go and start grabbing the same file off a US server and all of a sudden I’m cruising along at 500KB/s. Yeah, go figure.

Me, I blame the crappy web proxy they make everyone use. It’s so cheap, though, that I’m not too fussed about it.

Just in case you cared, I’m syncing at 16418/1021… it’s acceptably snappy. The performance isn’t amazing during the day (and you’ve really got to wonder why–it’s not like many businesses use TPG, is it?) but it tends to behave itself more (i.e. with Australian servers) at night. I haven’t had a chance to hit up a bit of CS/Q3/UT/UT2k4/other network game for “testing purposes” yet… maybe this evening. Maybe.

In other news, I’ve discovered I’m generally more productive working from home than in the city. Something to do with a little more sleep, a little less aircon (it’s oppressively warm compared to super-chilled offices, but I prefer it that way), a little more monitors (I’ve only got one at work), a little faster Internet (aforementioned speeds versus a 4Mbps link shared between about 150 people, 20+ servers and channelled through a craptacular proxy), and more natural light. Perhaps.

Now the only problem is juggling freelancing commitments with “employee” commitments… but I’m using a computer for one and textas for the other at the minute, so it’s fairly clearly delineated right now.

It all drives you slowly crazy, but I was never a huge fan of sanity, anyway.

Firefox memory usage

I love how Firefox can just sit there, chillin’ on a quarter of a GB of memory, even in version 2.

OpenOffice doesn’t use that much memory. The GIMP’s been a running and used process nearly as long and it’s still using less than 200MB of memory.

Where, o Firefox, is your clone tool for designing from various ‘inspirations’ online, hey?

Small consolation is that it crashed and didn’t close properly (hence my thinking to check how much memory the monster was using… 2GB is generally pretty roomy for me, so I’m not too stressed about resources), so obviously everything is not okay and they’ve got some work to do for the next release still.

Or I’ll go back to using Opera, I tells ya!

(Slightly tongue in cheek — I can’t go back to Opera, on account of having discovered the wondrous tool that is Firebug. Sigh. Damn extensions. They don’t even use much memory.)

Dashlite redux – now an accepted WordPress commit!

I was amused to notice the new dashboard in WordPress when I updated to 2.0.6 the other day (earlier 2.0.x releases were different). They’ve ditched the “Other WordPress News” section, generally filled with rather irrelevant crap that takes a decent spot of time for servers all over the planet to download sources of and display.

Dashlite, anyone? *walks out of room gloating*

BBQ photos, sans BBQ

Just a couple of photos from a BBQ at Tim’s house last night. There was a certain piratical flavour to photography that evening, methinks — observe my pointy implement wielding skills and Selo’s facial expressions x2. Vet gets award for poser of the evening, though at least one of those was completely unintentional on her part.
As is usual in these parts, more in the Flickr photo set (unedited).