gabbin

[jb]

Nutmeg
I think that little girl petting the dog cutout came out good. It amazes me 
you have such good luck with that lasso tool. Then again that is what siox 
for gimp uses for cutting although they just use it to quickly outline what 
you want. Then you take a brush and quickly scribble on the cutout that you 
want to keep. Then it figures out what part of the image you want and cuts it 
out. Then you can add or subtract little adjustments. Check out that video I 
think you'll want to get gimp ver 2.4 when it comes out for windows which 
will probably be in a couple months at the most.
I checked my xp comp folder for graphics related programs and I have 22 
programs in that folder but there are still a few I didn't get a shortcut 
icon for, from the program list. I probably have about 25. My Linux computer 
I have 11. I have 2 new ones for windows which I took a quick look at, and 
they look like they will come in handy. One is wood workshop which looks like 
it will be really useful. I can make parquet wood tiles with my own wood 
samples and there are quite a few adjustments for the parquet patterns and 
look of the wood. I also downloaded paint.net which looks like an arcsoft 
equivalent but it also is capable of using gif, tga and has a native format 
too. I think college kids are putting that program together and it seems like 
a very well coded program although I haven't had much of a chance to check it 
out. You might want to look into that program, it's free too.
Glad to hear the PF masks are working in FM, I guess I was wrong with my 
conversion guess. Irfanview does do an excellent conversion job. It is the 
only program that will convert a bmp to gif properly so the black bg can be 
used as a transparent color without ghosting so I'm not surprised you had 
luck converting those gif masks to jpg.
Having so many graphic programs isn't all that difficult to use them from time 
to time, they all work basically the same but they also usually do at least 
one thing really good that the others don't. All you have to do is learn how 
to use what they do best, no need to become an expert in each program, save 
that for the program you like to use the most. That should be a full featured 
program like PSP or GIMP. Then you can do most of your work with just the one 
program and then utilize those special little goodies the other programs can 
do when the need arises.
Thats funny about the crap cleaner, windows does tend to build up a lot of 
crap after a while. The only crap linux builds up are the nice big picture 
thumbnails which isn't much of a problem since when you open a folder you can 
view the contents almost instantly. All the other linux crap like temp files 
are automatically cleaned at midnight or whenever you want it to clean.
Audrey is here today, we traded her usual Thursday for Friday since I had my 
dr. appointment yesterday. They are still having me stay with the same patch 
strength even though it doesn't quite work good enough. They gave me a muscle 
relaxer to use with it and also gave me a perscription for Ultracet to handle 
the overflow pain. I guess there is just the 7.5 mg patch left so if they 
increased my dosage, eventually the patch isn't as effective and I would need 
a higher dose and if I'm already using the max that could be a problem. So we 
will see how it goes adding the new muscle relaxer with the patch. This 
should work out ok for now, just when I want to do something more than a 
short casual walk I'll have to take a pill before hand and keep a few 
emergency pills with me. I think this is quite a bit better of an alternative 
than to have a big hockey puck sergically implanted ( morphine pump).
It must be kind of a treat to have some rain there in NM. We get rain about 
once a week on average which is nice, it cools everything off and it keeps 
everything green. I like the smell of air after it rains too, kind of a clean 
fresh smell, ahhhh!
jb
-- 
idiot box, n.:
	The part of the envelope that tells a person where to place the
	stamp when they can't quite figure it out for themselves.
		-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"