Photoshop Join-the-Dots

Dotty Photoshop

A problem I have off and on with Photoshop is that the brush corrupts mid-session. I could be drawing or painting with a nice flowing line, then suddenly all I get when I pull the brush along the page is nothing, followed by a single dot. When I check the brush settings, they don’t appear to have changed; I should still get a flowing line.

To combat this, I changed brushes and brush settings, but it makes no difference… I only get my flowing line back when I quit Photoshop and start it up again. I don’t have to trash the Preferences file, so it doesn’t appear to be a permanent corruption.

When it happens too often in a day, it’s exasperating!

It’s possible I accidentally hit or click on something that causes that to happen… here are some things I could try.

(1) Changing the tablet pen’s settings so that the button on the side of the pen is disabled. I never use that button anyway; it just adds anxiety to the painting process!

(2) I could hit the ESC key and see if that brings my brush back.

(3) I could set my brushes to default, then reload the one I want.

(4) I could renew the Photoshop Preferences file anyway, in case it’s essentially faulty.

Well, now my pen’s button is disabled, and my plan of action is mapped out for today…. bring on the dots!

Downtime

We were unlucky with our connection recently. First of all I thought our broadband connection was down for some reason, and it was two days before we discovered the phone line itself was down! While I was stamping around moving furniture to get at the cables freely, jiggling plugs and swapping lines and splitters, my mother was playing cards on her laptop, thinking “ah, peace! Nobody phoning me asking me for things….”

If I’d known no calls were coming in, I would have put two and two together, but I assumed it was business as usual.

Anyway, when my sister complained about an engaged tone and an automated male voice telling her to hang up, BT got on the act very quickly, and sorted it out… you keep hearing horror stories about how such issues get dragged out and fought over, but BT were here and sorting out the fault almost before we could say ‘Jack Robinson’. The engineer said the fault lay with something in the junction box, and was ‘comparatively rare’.

It was lovely to be able to get back online again, and all the things I was desperate to do ON THE INTERNET suddenly became of less importance, and I put them all on the back burner again, and just relaxed and played in Photoshop! It was like my cat’s attitude to my cheese… it was nice just to know I had the option.

Till the next morning, when I checked my email, and nothing happened….. we were offline again!!

I picked up my mobile phone (rusting through lack of use) meaning to send a text message to my sister, and found one already waiting for me… she said her phone and internet were both down. It was a relief to know it was something more general, and probably nothing to do with our original fault. We were offline most of the day… we would get in for a few minutes, and then ‘boom!’ it was gone again.

It’s holding steady now, but for a while I didn’t trust it at all! I had no intention of buying anything, for instance, till I knew it wasn’t going to suddenly duck out from under me mid-payment. Anyway, it reminds me not to take these things for granted.

Mellowing

The older I get, the mellower! It’s strange. Either that, or living with Mum is making me civilized again. There’s nothing like a little light banter every day to make you feel nothing’s that serious or annoying.

Well, I read some WordPress posts saying we should blog often, even if busy or tired, so I’m trying. I got busy doing five pictures at once (one for a small informal contest… nothing special or grand) and when I started posting them, it all turned into a bit of an anti-climax. I’m still working on Pictures 4 and 5, and have even added a Picture 6, but the pace has slackened noticeably.

Maybe it’s time to socialize a bit… all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!

Mum caught me looking abstracted the other day. I explained I was thinking how naive I was as a 20 year-old. My friend Honey and I didn’t know that the slang word ‘barf’ wasn’t a cute word for ‘bath’! But another 20 year-old… a boy… knew perfectly well what it meant.

I was wondering how both Honey and I got to the age of 20 not knowing that, and she said little boys always collect rude words to impress each other!

Perhaps. But I’m glad it was not just me! Possibly Honey and I realized we had exactly the same depth of ignorance, and so we were in the same boat… hence our friendship, which still goes on, though on different sides of the Pond.

In those days we didn’t have the internet. I’ve learned a lot from it since I got online, and I can’t imagine doing without it. I probably wouldn’t even be using software like Bryce… might not have heard of it. Might not know as much as I do about Photoshop etc. Won’t have heard of certain bloggers, and be wondering how they’re doing…

Thinking how nice it will be to get some sleep, though… that’s something that comes with age. I remember telling my favourite primary teacher that I never wanted to go to bed, but in the morning I never wanted to get up, and it seemed rather odd. She said when I got older, I’d be very glad to get to my bed, though not wanting to get up in the mornings remains about the same. Some things we can always count on.

Would I Ever Throw Food at Anyone?

I doubt it very much. Seems like a waste of food. I suppose it’s always possible, if I was angry enough (or had some other reason).

That was the latest WordPress ‘post a week 2011′ prompt, if you were wondering.

It makes me wonder though… there are so many things I wouldn’t normally dream of doing, that other people have done or do regularly! Impulsively, as children, or without even thinking. I’m a goody two-shoes, maybe, but I don’t know why that’s such a bad thing…

I haven’t been on the computer a lot lately; it seemed so dark and cold at the back of this room. For several days I didn’t even turn the computers on.

Suddenly thought of science fiction shows… Star Trek, Stargate or Babylon 5. People sitting in dark shadows with glowing computer screens. Communicating with each other, or doing painstaking research. A lot of the light on my face and hands is from this screen… spooky, strange. Anything could happen… somebody invisible could be swooping around the room! Maybe my messages are being intercepted by some starship full of aliens. And with a whoosh, a portal will open in the wall, and when I look through, there’s a raging snow storm in another world.

Instead, it’s just shadowy and gloomy, and I type in the glow of

AARGH!

Excuse me, I’m not kidding. I got that far, and there was a ‘boing’ and a thud, and cold air… somebody standing behind my chair. I twisted round, and it was Mum, scowling crossly and holding a notepad. (I didn’t hear her come in because, no hearing aids!) I felt stupid about this message I was typing, so I chivvied her out into the hall saying I didn’t have a pen (I didn’t. They disappear). But I found a pen in my bedroom, the one I write my personal journal with at night.

The ‘alien’ wrote down: “Fancy having a gigantic desk and no pencil! If you are up early tomorrow we can go to Morrisons.”

I can’t wait.

Magic Mouse Syndrome

I’ve been having pain in my hands for a while… every so often when I lift something mildly heavy (like a kettle) or crumple my hand, I get a nagging twinge in my palm that makes me regret it! Maybe I have been using my computer mouse too much lately (this creative spark I mentioned… lots of erasing; scrolling through Photoshop filters; creating new layers. Painting here (dab dab dab). Cloning there (more dabbing)). I haven’t had that particular pain before, so the next thing that crossed my mind is that it’s the Magic Mouse in particular.

Other people online have complained about pain in the wrist and palm after using this rather flat, sensitive and twiddly gadget… you can’t rest your hand on it, as you would scroll and zoom without meaning to!

I don’t like the new, flat Apple Mac keyboards either… I’m a reasonably fast typist, but these boards make my hands feel strained, and I make a lot of mistakes.

I guess there are three things I should do:

(1) take a break from the computer!

(2) cut my talons (these flat keyboards were not made with long-nailed ladies in mind, and I end up stabbing the keys with the tips of my claws)

(3) dig out my graphics tablet again, and do all that Photoshop dab-dabbing with a pen instead of a mouse.

Tomorrow….

Surfing on a Mac

Have to admit it’s more fun blogging and blog-reading on the big Mac. If I look at the browser history in Safari, it shows me all the pages I have visited, and I can scroll back through them.

Also when I’m actually reading, there is a lot of space on either side, but I don’t have to scroll down as much as I do on the smaller Mac. As I couldn’t have a more recent browser on the old Mac (cheese cheese), it wasn’t working very well, and scrolling could be a sticky business. I wonder why I waited so long?

They are Just Books

Time for bed… just wondered if there was anything to blog about.

I seem to have recovered my creative spark (touch wood) and have been making more desktop wallpapers… few of which ever get posted! I always find a reason to hold back, and I made three versions of the same one today. Haven’t decided which I like best, yet.

Have finished reading Snobs by Julian Fellowes, which I enjoyed. Before that, I read Watching the English by Kate Fox, which was also enjoyable. Part of the reason I wanted to read it is that sometimes I wonder how British I am! There are things that have thrown me about other Brits (or folk in general?), and I wondered if the book would help. I recognized myself in some of the descriptions, but not others… (the pub culture, for instance. Any kind of pronounced drinking has always seemed to me bizarre, whether of tea, coffee or beer… but Kate Fox offers an explanation for it).

Both of those books have something in common — a wry look at the English class system.

Because of all the recent faffing about out-of-date browsers, I had to switch my blogging from my small old Mac to my big new one. I didn’t want to, but I suppose it will be easier to post pictures to my blog… this is my picture-making machine.

I have been buying our Patrick O’Brian novels all over again… we invited a bookseller to our house to look through our books, and he took a lot that weren’t actually for sale. I’m still upset about the strangest books… like my small collection of Asterix comics, including one in French. (‘Ils sont fous, ces Romains!’) I bought most of them as a student, as a kind of ‘end of the day’ treat; a break from studying.

My mother said she misses books too… she had some in her possession longer than she’s had me! Her mother lent out a book she bought with her pocket money when she was a girl… Scottish Chiefs by Janet Porter. All these years later, and she’s still upset that it was never given back.

I guess I knew that books were important to us; worlds such as The Wind in the Willows are almost homes on their own… and you get used to having those particular books sitting there, lining the walls like bulwarks against the world. I still have my Wind in the Willows paperback copy. Printed 1973, quite battered, and with my name written inside along with ‘Primary 7′! But I feel that it’s MY copy, and not a replacement bought recently. This is the very copy that made me cry when Moley sensed his home nearby.

Still, it was a shock that I felt so strongly about losing the other books… you think “did they really matter so much to me?” Simply replacing them (possible in some cases) isn’t enough… you want your original ones back, like my grandfather’s copy of poems by George Mackay Brown. (I got my other GMBs back, but he had already sold that one after having it for just one day).

You would imagine this would label me as a die-hard ‘printed book’ reader, someone who would never use an eBook reader. It has had the opposite effect, though… the thought of having books that can’t be passed from my possession to someone else’s is suddenly very attractive. I can see an e-reader lurking in my very near future.

They are just books… so I tell myself! But I’m tightening my defences.

Google Troll

I’ve been not too happy with Google search recently… on fast computers with fast broadband it’s probably pleasant enough to use, but if you have anything less than that, (like I appear to have) it’s annoying wrestling with the ‘instant on’ search. It’s slow and jumpy… and if you switch between on and off, you instantly lose whatever you’ve typed in the search field, and have to type it out again.

I also seem to have more issues than previously with Google assuming I’m looking for X instead of Y, even when it has plenty of sensible results for Y. For instance, I’ve been trying to replace my old ‘cool-bag’ trolley with something sturdy that has good strong wheels (it’s strangely hard to find quality these days). So I called up Google search and typed in ‘picnic trolley’. See picture for the result…

Click image to view more clearly.

(It gave me results for picnic troll, and said I could have results for picnic trolley if I really wanted them, but why would I want those??)

PS Had a horrid migraine today — suspect related to too many peanuts yesterday. I feel it with its teeth in my neck like a vampire, threatening to return, so I wouldn’t be up here at all (would be downstairs half-dozing in front of the TV) if Mum’s cat Meg hadn’t bounced me out of my chair. We nicknamed her the Godfather… you can try to make her leave, but you won’t succeed. She’s too big, old, and determined.

Ten Questions Meme

Found this meme on Geo’s blog, and couldn’t resist!

1.If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing this? if you aren’t anonymous, do you wish you started out anonymously so that you could be anonymous now?

I guess so, though my blog isn’t hidden from close friends and family. They are told where it is, which gives me extra incentive to behave! I don’t pester them to read it; I will send them a copy of any post that might interest them (about once in a blue moon), but apart from that it’s just as though I’m chatting over the hedge to neighbours. Family and friends can listen in or not, as they please.

2. Describe an incident that shows your inner stubborn side.

Only one?? Hum. OK… like when my laptop’s hard drive corrupted, with data I hadn’t backed up!

I wanted to retrieve my data and was sure there had to be a way, but when I asked around, people either didn’t know, or were too cautious to interfere. I kept searching online, and it actually took quite a lot of searching before I even heard about Linux emergency disks.

I don’t know anything at all about Linux, and my old Mac doesn’t burn DVDs, but I dug out a rarely-used CD writer and burned one of these Linux thingies to CD. It’s all a while ago now, so I can’t even remember the terminology.

There weren’t exactly step-by-step instructions on how to boot up a malfunctioning Windows laptop to retrieve your data, and it must have taken a few days and nights of cramming, trial and error, during which I was fully aware that if you boot up your corrupt hard drive too much, the data could get worse and worse… if your data is important to you, it isn’t really recommended unless you know what you are doing. Which I didn’t.

Somehow, however, I got my files off onto an external drive (very slow process as sometimes it dropped out… pretty corrupted, I guess. I was saving files and folders one by one, and each one took a long time). After which I sent off the laptop for repair.

It well illustrates my stubborn side, as I felt the entire time as though I was pushing a boulder uphill. Nobody would help me do what I wanted to do; I couldn’t find clear instructions… just hints and tips in discussion forums, some more useful than others. Worse, I found that friends disagreed with my efforts, which made me feel silly and a nuisance. One suggested I put out a call on the internet for Linux-related help, and meet whoever might come forward… advice I didn’t consider sound!
“It doesn’t matter!! You don’t have anything important on that laptop, just send it off and get it fixed!”

That made me angry, I admit; it’s one thing for me to say “well, it won’t be the end of the world if I lose all this stuff, or if someone else sees it,” but it’s quite another thing for someone else to call MY data rubbish.

There were pictures I would have missed… but I was stubborn, and I got them back.

3. What do you really see when you look at yourself in the mirror?

I see someone who questions herself a lot, and worries she doesn’t have all the answers. Who wonders why even the experts don’t seem to have all the answers. And then wonders why she expects any, and what she would do with the answers if she had them!

4. What is your favourite summer cold drink?

Sweetheart Stout with ice (as a treat).
On an everyday basis it used to be Coca-Cola, but recently I have been going more for iced orange juice or water.

5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?

Disappear into Photoshop, Bryce or Vue.
Or organize possessions and files (databases, spreadsheets, lists, Smart Folders, various external back-up drives!)

6. Is there something you still want to accomplish in your life?

Lots of things… but it feels like bad karma to talk too loudly about what.

7. When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person, or always ditching?

Probably all of them. I would sheer away from situations if I could. Very shy and rather lost, as I never knew what was going on. Useless at P.E. but a fast runner; top of my university-rated class in English; very poor in Latin and had to drop it… then I went back a year or two later and got a Higher A in it. I either do very well or very badly… my life is a patchwork of drab awfulness and flying colours.

8. If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment in your life, what would you see?

Long silence while I tried this…

Eventually what came swimming out of the blackness was a very small thing. My parents and sister went to Africa when I was six, leaving me at home with my grandparents. One day my grandmother showed me our globe. She pointed at a squiggly splotch, and said “that is where they are.” Quite often I would look at the globe, and study the place where my family was, then would look at where I was (a much smaller splotch), and the route as the crow flies between… it was comforting. Globes are much nicer than maps.

9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog, or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people or events?

I’m not all that comfortable talking about others, or about outside events… I might get something wrong, or the ‘others’ might take issue, or I might betray some of my awful drab ignorance. At least when I talk about myself, I know my subject, though I consider more and more of what’s fair to me as well. It’s all too easy to be unfair to oneself.

10. If you had the choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?

Definitely read a book. I wouldn’t hear whoever was on the other end of the phone, so that would be time wasted…

Sssnowing

I wrote the following post on Tuesday, then got icy feet.

Been snowing for a few days now. Gets thicker and thicker, but I’m not rushing out to photograph it! Looks kind of dull in the immediate vicinity. Me, I like bright colours and skies with visible clouds…

Funny how a whole load of unknown works by a certain artist has arrived in the news. I was scratching around for a good title for my ‘Not a Picasso’ wallpaper, but decided against it. Went for a more boring title instead, mostly because the only link between my wallpaper and the other title is that I put Paloma Picasso perfume on, and the wallpaper promptly went bad. That’s my private joke, anyway, and I couldn’t expect the rest of the world to understand it without knowing the story.

My keyboard is breaking down… the backspace key is particularly unresponsive! But I have a spare keyboard; I should attach it. I’ll probably do it the next time I have to hammer the backspace key into the desk…