Photoshop express?

Adobe launches free version of photoshop called Photoshop Express. My first impression?

Loading, saving, startup, etc... are all really slow.
Lacking any useful that any previous user of photoshop would want to use.

However, one good thing, it appears to save your edit history...forever. Well the reason it can save your edit history for ever, is that your edits are not really edits, rather they are filters. You can do a bunch of filtering stuff, cropping, color changing etc, but you never actually change the original file.

Firefox 3

I just installed Firefox 3 Beta 4 and I am certainly impressed.

When they released Firefox 2, I thought all my memory leak problems would be solved...but sadly, they were not. After installing F3B4 I noticed an immediate difference in several areas.

Overall memory usage is probably cut by 50%
Closing a tab, reduces memory usage (shocking, I know.)
Restarting Firefox is OMG fast.
General web surfing is a lot faster
Specialty programs that I use at work are a lot faster.

So congratulations Firefox team, you did well!

update on comment diggs

Update to my post from yesterday, my comment now has 376 diggs, vs 328 for the next most dugg comment.

Most Comment Diggs

While browsing Digg today, I noticed an upcoming story about where spam is coming from these days. The story focused on which botnets were responsible for the most spam. Interesting story, and I thought worthy of a digg, not that I really care which botnet sends the most spam. Since the story only had 40-50 digs at the time, it had only one comment, which wasn't very funny. I decided to comment with some dialogue from the Red vs. Blue video called "The Internet vs Real Life".

What do you know? The story was eventually promoted to the front page, and my comment rose to the top of the dugg comments! 162(and rising) comment diggs as of this posting. It hasn't gotten me any new digg followers or really anything at all. I guess this internet video is either through of very fondly by the digg community or nobody remembers it and thinks I am fucking hysterical! Either way, this makes my day....

Amazing how something so simple makes me happy these days...

T-shirts, t-shirts, t-shirts...

I have blogged before about the Messerschmitt t-shirt that I created on Zazzle. Well, I just sold another one! That nets me another $2.15!

Of course I am not getting rich of these...but I still think the concept is good. A little better than Cafepress, because the site is geared toward individual artists instead of "stores." It is also better than Threadless, because the designs you create are available forever, and you always get the comission on each sale. Zazzle is not as good as Threadless in the marketing respect, as Threadless has a huge customer base and really strong brand.

Great new game

Stumbled upon this great new game called Crayon Physics. The original version is pretty simple to understand and play, however after the first few levels, it becomes really difficult (at least it was for me.) He is apparently releasing a much more developed version sometime in the future...

Need help restoring *.QIC backups?

I have been trying to restore information from a backup CD made with the Windows 9x backup utility. Unfortunately Microsoft changed their software so you cannot use anything after Windows 98 to restore that backup. Since I don't have any old Windows 9x machines, I was stuck.

I eventually found Will Kranz and his MSBackup Restoration Utilitys. The QIC utility seems to have been written well and extensively debugged and updated. Will was also kind enough to take a look at my file when I couldn't seem to get anything out of it. Unfortunately, the file was both corrupt and contained zero usable data.

So this is a lesson to anyone who relies on backups to archive data.
1) Don't use proprietary Microsoft data formats.
2) Review your archives regularly to ensure that the data is still readable
3) If you keep things on physical media, ensure that media is kept in pristine condition.

Anyway - Thanks Will for your help.

I'll have $100 in September of 2011

A few months back I added Google Adsense to this blog. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about replacing the battery in my ipod mini. Apparently this post got some good google placement or something. About a week ago I was checking my adsense reports to see if anyone at all clicks on my ads. The ipod battery post seems to have triggered at least a small handful of people to click those ads.

If you are reading this, why don't you click an add right now!?

Anyway, over the last 3 months, I have built up a balance of about $10. At this rate I should be able to get that $100 check sent to me around September of 2011.

Of course I have no way to really monitor any of this, because I can't run analytics on blogger. I am really going to have to work on my web presence. Specifically I need to put all of my various websites (this blog, mattarata.com, and aratalighting.com) all on the same server and link them all together in a much more elagant way then they are right now. The first goal is probably to find a really good template to use for aratalighting.com and then completely overhaul that site. Making a new mainpage for mattarata.com shouldn't be all that hard. I will probably make a half assed attempt to mirror blogger Dannyman's or Leo Laporte's homepage, as I really appreciate the fashion in which they present themselves. Then I will need to dump this blog (or link it to a template or something) that I can host locally instead of on blogger.

Dreams really...all of this...I'll probably just go back to playing Call Of Duty 4.