Biblical scholars have recently deciphered the most ancient text written by man. Turns out it was a list of most fuckable animals Adam wrote before God got around to creating Eve.
If you're a normal rational thinking person, you should think that's damn funny. If you're an IDer, that'll probably just piss you off. But it should get you thinking. If the Bible is LITERALLY true in its creation account, then just what did Adam do before Eve? And what happened to the people God created BEFORE Adam? You know, the ones he created male and female.
Just because science doesn't agree 100% with what's written in the Bible doesn't make it wrong. The Biblical creation account is clearly a composite of several very ancient creation myths and legends from a time before anyone had any idea how things really happened. Science has given us a much better idea how all of everything came about, and sane people will find that much more reasonable than clinging to ancient myths and legends. As an ordained minister, who's studied this thing pretty deeply, I have to tell you that there is plenty that cannot be taken literally, and must be read allegorically. Intelligent Design is not science, it's not even reasonably rational, and has no business in any school, even Sunday School at church. Science can't answer whether God did or did not do anything, it can only describe things as they appear to be right now, and suggest how it got to be that way without violating current rules of reality. Science doesn't have all the answers, and probably never will, but religion doesn't have all the answers either, otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them, or so many different sects within the largest religions.
This law is clearly retarded, and obviously violates the separation of Church and State principle, since it introduces sectarian opinion sponsored by the state.
And, by the way, surprisingly, dolphins were at the top of Adam's list.
If you're using the built-in Palm password feature for your security, you might want to have a look at this: No Security
Basically, the Palm security program has a tragically weak flaw which this handy little program exploits easily. All you have to do is load No Security into the palm install queue and hotsync. It immediately deletes the password, even if the device is locked, giving you full access to any private data hidden by the Palm security program.
I use a couple of different solutions to this problem: Cryptopad , which is essentially an encrypted replacement for the memopad (and has the added bonus of giving you >4k memos); and using the encryption option of Tejpwriter, which is the best free text editor I've tested for Palm.
And all these programs are free and/or open source and easily obtained with a quick google search.
But I still use the Palm security program to lock the handheld (despite its weakness) as a very basic means to keep casual snoopers from poking around and to prevent accidental button mashings from doing weird things to my data.
Good for you. You turned UAC off. You know what you can't do anymore? If you're not logged in as the admin (and you never log in as an admin unless you NEED admin rights, right?) then you have no access to other user folders anymore at all. Example: you're logged in under MyAccount working on some progect, and you need to grab a photo your wife has in the Pictures folder of HerAccount. No problem right? It's your computer and you know the admin PW, so you explore to the HerAccount user folder and when it pops up the prompt saying you don't have permission, you click OK expecting to put in the admin PW and keep going. Doesn't happen. You're not allowed at all. No PW prompt. Nothing. You're just not allowed in. So you log in to the admin account, turn UAC on again, switch back to MyAccount, and try it again. This time it says you don't have permission to access HerAccount, but it does give you an opportunity to use the admin PW to get in, so you finally grab the photo from her Pictures photo, stick it in your project, and you're good to go. A couple of months later (you naturally have UAC turned off again), you're in MyAccount, and again you need to grab a picture from HerAccount. By now you've forgotten the hassle you went through before, and you just explore straight into HerAccount, and then her Pictures folder and you get what you're looking for in a snap. And then you realize that Vista didn't deny you permission this time, didn't ask for a password or anything, it just let you straight in. UAC gave you PERMANENT access to HerAccount while you were logged into MyAccount. That access wasn't permitted on a session only basis as would be expected in any real multi-user system. And then you remember that you used the same UAC enabled trick to help her get a document from MyAccount. Now you know that she still has access to MyAccount while she's logged into HerAccount. And now you understand why she's been acting so weird lately - She found your AnimalFootFetishPr0n folder. You sick bastard.
Yeah. Just continue having your no problems with Vista. You can continue being happy with Vista as long as you ignore all the little braindead brokenness. I couldn't ignore Vista's performance-crippling, copyrights-restricting, user-rights-bungling, hardware-settings-losing, user unfriendliness anymore, and as soon as I can get Wine to run photoshop right, I can scrape that ungodly pile of crap off my laptop and stop having to dual-boot just to do a few tweaks in PS that I can't do in GIMP.
Yeah. Linux is definitely ready for my desktop. I've been using FOSS apps on Windows for years, now to the point of near exclusivity. Periodically over the last few years, I would try one distro or another to see if they would suit my needs and they weren't quite there yet. Always a handful of showstoppers for my particular needs. And now I have a new laptop with Windows Vista on it. My Vista experience has consistently been "What the fuck is this shit?" since day one, as compared to "Hey, this isn't that bad but it's better than it used to be" when I'd tried Linux. WinME worked better than this Vista crap. So a few months ago I tried Ubuntu 7.10 on the laptop (Live disc) and my experience was suddenly "Damn, this is just about there, if only the sound and my card reader worked..." Guess what? I've been running 8.04 from the live disc on my laptop for the last three weeks. Everything works, even the sound and card reader. Better and faster than Vista ever did. I have yet to have any need to reboot into Vista to get anything done that I can't do with what's included with this live disc. I guess it's time for me to ditch Windows altogether. Linux is ready for MY desktop, and I imagine it's ready for many desktops, even if not quite there yet for you or many other people.
Have to agree with the trackball option. Found myself a nice logitech trackman wireless to use with my laptop so I don't have to torture myself with the abomination that is the touchpad. Of course it's intended for desktop PC's, not laptops, so the the 4 feet of USB cable bundled to the oversized wireless receiver looks like a huge electronic tick sucking the life out of the back of the LCD. I don't mind that it's a full-sized trackball at all, since it's wireless I can set it anywhere I damn well please. Only problem that remains is Vista's bizarre inability to remember my mouse settings after logging out, switching to a different user, rebooting, or hibernating. Retarded. Win95 could remember my mouse settings after a reboot. (Just now confirmed this by firing up my ancient Compaq Contura 420cx laptop running Win95, and after 3 years of neglect, it STILL retains the settings for my mouseman marble which is now dead, but the built-in trackball uses the same settings just fine.) How in the Hell does MS screw up something so simple and basic as saving the user's mouse settings?
Anyway, if you don't mind your laptop looking a little less sexy, I highly recommend picking up the wireless trackman, they're only about 50 bucks from Best Buy so I'm sure you can find a better deal elsewhere, and if the track record of my first trackman marble is any indication, it should be good for about 10 years of continuous use.
It's like having my own personal nazi living inside my computer. At least Vista lets me do a little bit more than Bob did, but could anyone point me to where I might upgrade this thing to ME? That would be better than Vista. I wish I hadn't lost my Win2k sp4 disc. Makes me sad that the best OS MS has to offer is almost a decade old. At least I still have a modern OS on my desktop. Ubuntu has been a much better experience than Vista so far - I've been using Vista and Ubuntu for about the same amount of time, would've put Ubuntu on the laptop already if the drivers/software for all the new gizmos for it were easier to get and worked properly. Experience tells me that even if I'm not bright enough to roll my own, I can just wait a few more months and some smarter geek(s) will have come up with what I need.
Thanks, MS, for finally making me ditch you for Something Better.
And thank you, Geeks of the World for making Something Better free for everyone.
Scientists have calculated that there should be about 80% more mass in the universe than they're able to account for and have proposed a number of radical theories to resolve the discrepancy such as the existence of dark matter or the influence of parallel universes. The problem was finally solved when Chuck Norris admitted he kicked a hole in the universe and that's where all the missing matter went.
That reminds me of an interesting fact: The butterfly effect is named after the oft-misquoted observation that Chuck Norris kicking a single butterfly in Asia could cause a whirlwind of pain in North America.
Actually you're pretty close to the truth.
Sunspots are formed when Chuck Norris uses the Sun as a punching bag.
Apparently, he's been taking it easy lately.
NASA's JPL has announced that they've synthesized a Liquefied Chuck Norris Round-House Kick (LCNRHK). While they admit it's not quite as powerful as the real thing, three gallons of LCNRHK would be sufficient to launch the Space Shuttle into orbit.
My best alarm clock ever was along these lines. An old radio alarm clock, with a really friendly touch-sensitive bar across the entire top such that it was nearly impossible to NOT hit the snooze bar while still asleep. Would play my choice of whatever station it was tuned to or a cassette tape or an ungodly F# non-stop screech at about 80db. Never used the third option until something broke and I no longer had the choice. Since the thing was firmly installed in the headboard of my bead, it usually took less than a second to hit the snooze button, but that was plenty of time to be scared wide awake with no possibility of going back to sleep. Also reliably woke my upstairs, downstairs, next-door, and across-the-way neighbors. At least until my brain was trained to wake at least several seconds before the damned thing went off so that I could avoid the terror tone. You can't beat an alarm clock that wakes you up without even having to go off at all.
The question of what to call such very massive substellar object was raised years ago by a science type mag (Omni or Discover or somesuch, I don't recall specifically). Many votes were cast, many suggestions were made, and ALL of them were much better and more intelligible than "Planemo". My personal favorite remains SUMO, for SUbstellar Massive Object or SUper Massive Object. Seems to be just about right for these things.
I've cut off numerous people who've demanded tech support, family members who I regularly see and absolutely must maintain a good relationship with. Once their demands on the family geek became too omnipresent to tolerate, with the corresponding lack of personal responsibility for keeping their gear clean despite clear and simple instructions on what to do and what not to do (complete with friendly, convenient desktop shortcuts), I dialed down my 'expertise'. Suddenly the weirdness they were experiencing had gotten beyond what I was familiar with, but I would 'try to do something anyway'. I'd clean out some stuff, using the tools I gave them, intentionally neglecting to go to any extra steps to actually repair any damage. They'd find their systems only marginally better, but not quite fixed. A few iterations, reducing my performance level each time yielded the response I wanted: They left me alone.
As a bonus, I have inherited a few "unfixable" machines when they decided replacing their systems was a better solution than trying to fix them. They needed the upgrades to do what they wanted anyway.
Other strategies include "always busy" which can come in several varieties, some of which you've already mentioned, but one of my favorites is "Yeah, I'm having problems with my machines too, as soon as I get my stuff figured out I'll see what I can do for you." Or you can go with the "I'm upgrading to the new version of Xyzzy that just came out." Or anything along these lines. Then of course there's the no matching free time in the schedules (because you have to do the support on site - NEVER EVER LET THEM BRING YOU THE MACHINE TO FIX IT. Only let them bring you a machine if the intent is for you to KEEP IT. Eventually they either find someone else (win), just live with it (win), or upgrade (win-win).
Bottom line is, you've got to allow yourself to be just a teeny bit dishonest with them. It's a war against your sanity and your best defense is subterfuge.
Re:Whoa whoa...hold the phone here....
on
Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
Your apology is entirely unnecessary. I clicked ye olde "View this page in IE" and it looks like crap there too. Looks just fine in Lynx though (many websites are best viewed with Lynx).
Sounds like a great plan to me. I'll just go right out and get me a book on python or check out whatever web resources are available, spend hours or days grokking the material so I can spend more hours or days coming up with a plugin or tool for GIMP that already exists in Photoshop. Meanwhile my clients are waiting for their projects to be finished, and I'm not out working new shoots, or worse, cancelling them so I can say I have my own homebrew gizmo.
In the context of my statement, a professional photographer is one who makes a living exlusivly on photography. Make no mistake, anything that can be done in Photoshop can be accomplished in GIMP, but the vast array of tools Photoshop has that GIMP lacks means that one can get fantastic results much more quickly in Photoshop. The difference is significant enough that professional photographers routinely find the $800 price tag of of Photoshop to be a much better value than the $0 price tag of GIMP. When you have hundreds of photographs to work with per week, you don't have time to go through all the steps GIMP requires when Photoshop can let you do it in one. Time saved is money made.
That said, you can take my GIMP from my cold dead hands. I will actually fire up GIMP first if it's not a job that requires things that only Photoshop can do more easily. Doing things manually in GIMP has also helped me figure out how to duplicate effects Photoshop does automatically, which is really useful if I happen to be on a client's computer and the only graphics program available is MSPaint. A quick install of GIMP can let me get quality results on site that are more than adequate for their needs.
Bottom line is Photoshop and GIMP are made with two different users in mind, one for a pro who needs all the extra power to get things done quickly, and one for anyone at all who needs to just get it done.
GIMP in its current incarnation doesn't compare to Photoshop. I'd say that GIMP 1.2 is roughly equivalent to Photoshop 3.0 (though a little bit better in many ways), but later versions of Photoshop have left GIMP far behind. Comparing the most current versions to each other, Photoshop absolutely slays GIMP in most areas - it was made as a professional tool for professional photographers, not as a generic image manipulation program (Yes I know the G stands for GNU). I actually use GIMP extensively - see my free binary porn wallpaper as an example of things that can be done entirely within the GIMP using the tools it has available. And as insane as it may sound, I prefer GIMP's interface to Photoshop's.
But one more thing I do have to say in this GIMP vs. Photoshop debate is this: GIMP really is a powerful image manipulation program, probably the best one that is freely available. And for most of my imaging work GIMP is more than adequate. But if you need the big guns and professional power, you need Photoshop.
Interesting, however For The Win does not seem to parse naturally in the context of the OP. Fsck (sic) The World, noted below, seems a better fit, although it too does not parse.
Perhaps we should stop before one of us encounters EHS. Let's quit while we're ahead.
Gum Arabic: It is very important that you get only food-grade Gum Arabic. There is also an art-grade, which is readily available at art supply stores - never use art-grade Gum Arabic! Art-grade Gum Arabic is toxic. It will make you ill. You'll be sad. We'll be sad.
Maybe this (the art-grade Gum Arabic) is Coca-Cola's secret ingredient that makes the stuff so vile?
Not quite true - my treo 600 will easily last a little over 2 days on a single battery charge, but then it's a pda/phone (low power one at that), if I were to use it without the cell radio on, I could likely get 3 or more days using it exclusively as a PDA. And then there are newer PDA's out there that have as much horsepower as frikkin possible (Does it have a hemi?), and with the tiny battery, 2-3 hours can be about right if you're using it like you'd use a PC. Such as playing MP3's in background while connecting over wifi to the killallthebastards.com FPSMMORPG and yakking to your buds on a VOIP call. Yeah. That tiny LiIon battery's gonna die real quick.
The problem is, too many people desperately want a PDA to be a PC. But until we get the power issue figured out (ZPE would do it), a nice compact imput method (How 'bout a cranial jack?), and a solid graphical interface (Frikkin Laser beams on their hea^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H onto my retina, YEAH), we're just not gonna get the pocket-sized PC device we really want.
Yeah, my Firefox is kinda slow to start, say 30 seconds to about 1 minute to load, but of course that's because I'm using Portable Firefox on an USB drive. Occasionally I'll have issues with FF crashing on me when I've been running it for a while, but of course I've enabled caching on the USB drive (against recommendations) and only have 5 meg free on the drive. And Sometimes it drops the internet connection altogether when it's idle for about 3 minutes when I'm using it on my Treo via win-hand anywhere, but it comes right back up when I turn the treo back on (so weird - why does this happen?). So I guess you've convinced me, FIREFOX SUCKS!! I'm going back to IE.
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Biblical scholars have recently deciphered the most ancient text written by man. Turns out it was a list of most fuckable animals Adam wrote before God got around to creating Eve.
If you're a normal rational thinking person, you should think that's damn funny. If you're an IDer, that'll probably just piss you off. But it should get you thinking. If the Bible is LITERALLY true in its creation account, then just what did Adam do before Eve? And what happened to the people God created BEFORE Adam? You know, the ones he created male and female.
Just because science doesn't agree 100% with what's written in the Bible doesn't make it wrong. The Biblical creation account is clearly a composite of several very ancient creation myths and legends from a time before anyone had any idea how things really happened. Science has given us a much better idea how all of everything came about, and sane people will find that much more reasonable than clinging to ancient myths and legends. As an ordained minister, who's studied this thing pretty deeply, I have to tell you that there is plenty that cannot be taken literally, and must be read allegorically. Intelligent Design is not science, it's not even reasonably rational, and has no business in any school, even Sunday School at church. Science can't answer whether God did or did not do anything, it can only describe things as they appear to be right now, and suggest how it got to be that way without violating current rules of reality. Science doesn't have all the answers, and probably never will, but religion doesn't have all the answers either, otherwise there wouldn't be so many of them, or so many different sects within the largest religions.
This law is clearly retarded, and obviously violates the separation of Church and State principle, since it introduces sectarian opinion sponsored by the state.
And, by the way, surprisingly, dolphins were at the top of Adam's list.
If you're using the built-in Palm password feature for your security, you might want to have a look at this:
No Security
Basically, the Palm security program has a tragically weak flaw which this handy little program exploits easily. All you have to do is load No Security into the palm install queue and hotsync. It immediately deletes the password, even if the device is locked, giving you full access to any private data hidden by the Palm security program.
I use a couple of different solutions to this problem: Cryptopad , which is essentially an encrypted replacement for the memopad (and has the added bonus of giving you >4k memos); and using the encryption option of Tejpwriter, which is the best free text editor I've tested for Palm.
And all these programs are free and/or open source and easily obtained with a quick google search.
But I still use the Palm security program to lock the handheld (despite its weakness) as a very basic means to keep casual snoopers from poking around and to prevent accidental button mashings from doing weird things to my data.
Good for you. You turned UAC off. You know what you can't do anymore? If you're not logged in as the admin (and you never log in as an admin unless you NEED admin rights, right?) then you have no access to other user folders anymore at all. Example: you're logged in under MyAccount working on some progect, and you need to grab a photo your wife has in the Pictures folder of HerAccount. No problem right? It's your computer and you know the admin PW, so you explore to the HerAccount user folder and when it pops up the prompt saying you don't have permission, you click OK expecting to put in the admin PW and keep going. Doesn't happen. You're not allowed at all. No PW prompt. Nothing. You're just not allowed in. So you log in to the admin account, turn UAC on again, switch back to MyAccount, and try it again. This time it says you don't have permission to access HerAccount, but it does give you an opportunity to use the admin PW to get in, so you finally grab the photo from her Pictures photo, stick it in your project, and you're good to go. A couple of months later (you naturally have UAC turned off again), you're in MyAccount, and again you need to grab a picture from HerAccount. By now you've forgotten the hassle you went through before, and you just explore straight into HerAccount, and then her Pictures folder and you get what you're looking for in a snap. And then you realize that Vista didn't deny you permission this time, didn't ask for a password or anything, it just let you straight in. UAC gave you PERMANENT access to HerAccount while you were logged into MyAccount. That access wasn't permitted on a session only basis as would be expected in any real multi-user system. And then you remember that you used the same UAC enabled trick to help her get a document from MyAccount. Now you know that she still has access to MyAccount while she's logged into HerAccount. And now you understand why she's been acting so weird lately - She found your AnimalFootFetishPr0n folder. You sick bastard.
Yeah. Just continue having your no problems with Vista. You can continue being happy with Vista as long as you ignore all the little braindead brokenness. I couldn't ignore Vista's performance-crippling, copyrights-restricting, user-rights-bungling, hardware-settings-losing, user unfriendliness anymore, and as soon as I can get Wine to run photoshop right, I can scrape that ungodly pile of crap off my laptop and stop having to dual-boot just to do a few tweaks in PS that I can't do in GIMP.
Yeah. Linux is definitely ready for my desktop. I've been using FOSS apps on Windows for years, now to the point of near exclusivity. Periodically over the last few years, I would try one distro or another to see if they would suit my needs and they weren't quite there yet. Always a handful of showstoppers for my particular needs. And now I have a new laptop with Windows Vista on it. My Vista experience has consistently been "What the fuck is this shit?" since day one, as compared to "Hey, this isn't that bad but it's better than it used to be" when I'd tried Linux. WinME worked better than this Vista crap. So a few months ago I tried Ubuntu 7.10 on the laptop (Live disc) and my experience was suddenly "Damn, this is just about there, if only the sound and my card reader worked..." Guess what? I've been running 8.04 from the live disc on my laptop for the last three weeks. Everything works, even the sound and card reader. Better and faster than Vista ever did. I have yet to have any need to reboot into Vista to get anything done that I can't do with what's included with this live disc. I guess it's time for me to ditch Windows altogether. Linux is ready for MY desktop, and I imagine it's ready for many desktops, even if not quite there yet for you or many other people.
Have to agree with the trackball option. Found myself a nice logitech trackman wireless to use with my laptop so I don't have to torture myself with the abomination that is the touchpad. Of course it's intended for desktop PC's, not laptops, so the the 4 feet of USB cable bundled to the oversized wireless receiver looks like a huge electronic tick sucking the life out of the back of the LCD. I don't mind that it's a full-sized trackball at all, since it's wireless I can set it anywhere I damn well please. Only problem that remains is Vista's bizarre inability to remember my mouse settings after logging out, switching to a different user, rebooting, or hibernating. Retarded. Win95 could remember my mouse settings after a reboot. (Just now confirmed this by firing up my ancient Compaq Contura 420cx laptop running Win95, and after 3 years of neglect, it STILL retains the settings for my mouseman marble which is now dead, but the built-in trackball uses the same settings just fine.) How in the Hell does MS screw up something so simple and basic as saving the user's mouse settings? Anyway, if you don't mind your laptop looking a little less sexy, I highly recommend picking up the wireless trackman, they're only about 50 bucks from Best Buy so I'm sure you can find a better deal elsewhere, and if the track record of my first trackman marble is any indication, it should be good for about 10 years of continuous use.
It's like having my own personal nazi living inside my computer. At least Vista lets me do a little bit more than Bob did, but could anyone point me to where I might upgrade this thing to ME? That would be better than Vista. I wish I hadn't lost my Win2k sp4 disc. Makes me sad that the best OS MS has to offer is almost a decade old. At least I still have a modern OS on my desktop. Ubuntu has been a much better experience than Vista so far - I've been using Vista and Ubuntu for about the same amount of time, would've put Ubuntu on the laptop already if the drivers/software for all the new gizmos for it were easier to get and worked properly. Experience tells me that even if I'm not bright enough to roll my own, I can just wait a few more months and some smarter geek(s) will have come up with what I need.
Thanks, MS, for finally making me ditch you for Something Better.
And thank you, Geeks of the World for making Something Better free for everyone.
Scientists have calculated that there should be about 80% more mass in the universe than they're able to account for and have proposed a number of radical theories to resolve the discrepancy such as the existence of dark matter or the influence of parallel universes. The problem was finally solved when Chuck Norris admitted he kicked a hole in the universe and that's where all the missing matter went.
That reminds me of an interesting fact:
The butterfly effect is named after the oft-misquoted observation that Chuck Norris kicking a single butterfly in Asia could cause a whirlwind of pain in North America.
Actually you're pretty close to the truth.
Sunspots are formed when Chuck Norris uses the Sun as a punching bag.
Apparently, he's been taking it easy lately.
And that's a good thing too:
God originally wanted to send the sinners to Chuck Norris, but Jesus told Him that was too cruel, so God created Hell instead.
NASA's JPL has announced that they've synthesized a Liquefied Chuck Norris Round-House Kick (LCNRHK). While they admit it's not quite as powerful as the real thing, three gallons of LCNRHK would be sufficient to launch the Space Shuttle into orbit.
My best alarm clock ever was along these lines. An old radio alarm clock, with a really friendly touch-sensitive bar across the entire top such that it was nearly impossible to NOT hit the snooze bar while still asleep. Would play my choice of whatever station it was tuned to or a cassette tape or an ungodly F# non-stop screech at about 80db. Never used the third option until something broke and I no longer had the choice. Since the thing was firmly installed in the headboard of my bead, it usually took less than a second to hit the snooze button, but that was plenty of time to be scared wide awake with no possibility of going back to sleep. Also reliably woke my upstairs, downstairs, next-door, and across-the-way neighbors. At least until my brain was trained to wake at least several seconds before the damned thing went off so that I could avoid the terror tone. You can't beat an alarm clock that wakes you up without even having to go off at all.
Mary had a little lamb.
The ram was so proud he smoked a cigar.
Meanwhile, the midwife fainted.
Classic.
The question of what to call such very massive substellar object was raised years ago by a science type mag (Omni or Discover or somesuch, I don't recall specifically). Many votes were cast, many suggestions were made, and ALL of them were much better and more intelligible than "Planemo". My personal favorite remains SUMO, for SUbstellar Massive Object or SUper Massive Object. Seems to be just about right for these things.
I've cut off numerous people who've demanded tech support, family members who I regularly see and absolutely must maintain a good relationship with. Once their demands on the family geek became too omnipresent to tolerate, with the corresponding lack of personal responsibility for keeping their gear clean despite clear and simple instructions on what to do and what not to do (complete with friendly, convenient desktop shortcuts), I dialed down my 'expertise'. Suddenly the weirdness they were experiencing had gotten beyond what I was familiar with, but I would 'try to do something anyway'. I'd clean out some stuff, using the tools I gave them, intentionally neglecting to go to any extra steps to actually repair any damage. They'd find their systems only marginally better, but not quite fixed. A few iterations, reducing my performance level each time yielded the response I wanted: They left me alone.
As a bonus, I have inherited a few "unfixable" machines when they decided replacing their systems was a better solution than trying to fix them. They needed the upgrades to do what they wanted anyway.
Other strategies include "always busy" which can come in several varieties, some of which you've already mentioned, but one of my favorites is "Yeah, I'm having problems with my machines too, as soon as I get my stuff figured out I'll see what I can do for you." Or you can go with the "I'm upgrading to the new version of Xyzzy that just came out." Or anything along these lines. Then of course there's the no matching free time in the schedules (because you have to do the support on site - NEVER EVER LET THEM BRING YOU THE MACHINE TO FIX IT. Only let them bring you a machine if the intent is for you to KEEP IT. Eventually they either find someone else (win), just live with it (win), or upgrade (win-win).
Bottom line is, you've got to allow yourself to be just a teeny bit dishonest with them. It's a war against your sanity and your best defense is subterfuge.
Your apology is entirely unnecessary. I clicked ye olde "View this page in IE" and it looks like crap there too. Looks just fine in Lynx though (many websites are best viewed with Lynx).
Sounds like a great plan to me. I'll just go right out and get me a book on python or check out whatever web resources are available, spend hours or days grokking the material so I can spend more hours or days coming up with a plugin or tool for GIMP that already exists in Photoshop. Meanwhile my clients are waiting for their projects to be finished, and I'm not out working new shoots, or worse, cancelling them so I can say I have my own homebrew gizmo.
In the context of my statement, a professional photographer is one who makes a living exlusivly on photography. Make no mistake, anything that can be done in Photoshop can be accomplished in GIMP, but the vast array of tools Photoshop has that GIMP lacks means that one can get fantastic results much more quickly in Photoshop. The difference is significant enough that professional photographers routinely find the $800 price tag of of Photoshop to be a much better value than the $0 price tag of GIMP. When you have hundreds of photographs to work with per week, you don't have time to go through all the steps GIMP requires when Photoshop can let you do it in one. Time saved is money made.
That said, you can take my GIMP from my cold dead hands . I will actually fire up GIMP first if it's not a job that requires things that only Photoshop can do more easily. Doing things manually in GIMP has also helped me figure out how to duplicate effects Photoshop does automatically, which is really useful if I happen to be on a client's computer and the only graphics program available is MSPaint. A quick install of GIMP can let me get quality results on site that are more than adequate for their needs.
Bottom line is Photoshop and GIMP are made with two different users in mind, one for a pro who needs all the extra power to get things done quickly, and one for anyone at all who needs to just get it done.
GIMP in its current incarnation doesn't compare to Photoshop. I'd say that GIMP 1.2 is roughly equivalent to Photoshop 3.0 (though a little bit better in many ways), but later versions of Photoshop have left GIMP far behind. Comparing the most current versions to each other, Photoshop absolutely slays GIMP in most areas - it was made as a professional tool for professional photographers, not as a generic image manipulation program (Yes I know the G stands for GNU). I actually use GIMP extensively - see my free binary porn wallpaper as an example of things that can be done entirely within the GIMP using the tools it has available. And as insane as it may sound, I prefer GIMP's interface to Photoshop's.
But one more thing I do have to say in this GIMP vs. Photoshop debate is this: GIMP really is a powerful image manipulation program, probably the best one that is freely available. And for most of my imaging work GIMP is more than adequate. But if you need the big guns and professional power, you need Photoshop.
Like my daddy always told me, Prejudice Saves Time.
Interesting, however For The Win does not seem to parse naturally in the context of the OP. Fsck (sic) The World, noted below, seems a better fit, although it too does not parse.
Perhaps we should stop before one of us encounters EHS. Let's quit while we're ahead.
WTF is FTW?
Is that rot13 encoded or something?
Or have I been slacking on my TLAs?
FWIW the word is spelled 'lying'
From your link:
Maybe this (the art-grade Gum Arabic) is Coca-Cola's secret ingredient that makes the stuff so vile?
Not quite true - my treo 600 will easily last a little over 2 days on a single battery charge, but then it's a pda/phone (low power one at that), if I were to use it without the cell radio on, I could likely get 3 or more days using it exclusively as a PDA. And then there are newer PDA's out there that have as much horsepower as frikkin possible (Does it have a hemi?), and with the tiny battery, 2-3 hours can be about right if you're using it like you'd use a PC. Such as playing MP3's in background while connecting over wifi to the killallthebastards.com FPSMMORPG and yakking to your buds on a VOIP call. Yeah. That tiny LiIon battery's gonna die real quick.
The problem is, too many people desperately want a PDA to be a PC. But until we get the power issue figured out (ZPE would do it), a nice compact imput method (How 'bout a cranial jack?), and a solid graphical interface (Frikkin Laser beams on their hea^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H onto my retina, YEAH), we're just not gonna get the pocket-sized PC device we really want.
Yeah, my Firefox is kinda slow to start, say 30 seconds to about 1 minute to load, but of course that's because I'm using Portable Firefox on an USB drive. Occasionally I'll have issues with FF crashing on me when I've been running it for a while, but of course I've enabled caching on the USB drive (against recommendations) and only have 5 meg free on the drive. And Sometimes it drops the internet connection altogether when it's idle for about 3 minutes when I'm using it on my Treo via win-hand anywhere, but it comes right back up when I turn the treo back on (so weird - why does this happen?). So I guess you've convinced me, FIREFOX SUCKS!! I'm going back to IE.