Rain in the valley

And quite a bit of it, at least it appears that way. We'll have to see what the "official" inches tally is tomorrow.

But now to gripe about how some people drive in this type of weather. For one thing, no one in this city seems to know how to drive worth a damn when it rains. Or, more precisely, when it rains enough to leave about four to five inches of standing water on parts of the freeway. I was driving home from meeting my fiancee for dinner, and at one of the underpasses everyone was slowing down to drive through several inches of standing water. Except a large white truck, in the HOV lane. This dickhead blew through that water like it wasn't there, and of course, driving through it as fast as he was created a huge wave of water that poured onto the cars in the next lane. I was in one of those cars. It's hard enough to see whether I'm still in my own lane when it's under that much water without having some schmuck splashing my window with more water!

Anyway, I snagged a screenshot from intellicast.com of the cell than rolled through town.. this is pretty much smack in the middle of Phoenix:

(the larger screenshot is quite large, approx 180kb)


Another snapshot of the state:

(the larger screenshot for this is not as large as the previous in file size, but the width/height is similar)


Hopefully this will bring cooler weather tomorrow like the rain from the other night did. I don't think it got more than 100 that day. :o)

software woes & art

So I have this Wacom Intuos2 tablet. I decide on a whim I want to draw some things, so I install it with no problems. Included with the tablet is a "Power Suite" of software that includes Painter Classic. This is supposedly a program that mimics the effects of pencil, watercolors, etc., the different kinds of mediums that an artist might use. I worked in pencil and watercolors in high school so I figure I'll install this program and give it a whirl.

I install it, and try to run it. I get an error. "Not enough free memory". What?! I have 1.25GB of RAM for pete's sake! I go to Corel's website and do some digging. They don't have any FAQs for Painter Classic, so I look through a FAQ for Painter 5.5 (they are now on Painter 8), figuring that Classic is probably a toned down version of the old software. I find a "fix" because Painter 5.5 had the same issue. I apply said fix (lower virtual memory to lower than 1023), and bring my virtual memory from 1900ish to 1000. Still won't work. WTF?

I had written to Wacom since they packaged the software with their hardware, and also because I couldn't get support from Corel since I didn't own a full version (and I sure as hell wasn't going to pay a 'per incident' charge to call their support line). I was written back with the suggestion to put it below 900MB, or if that doesn't work, my last option would be to buy Painter 8.

Granted Corel has an offer for users of Painter Classic to purchase the upgrade instead of the full version, for $150, but that's really a bit too expensive for me right now. So I try lowering my virtual memory to 800.

Yay! Painter now works, although I wonder how this low VM is going to affect my other programs, since WindowsXP recommends over 1900...

So I just spent the last couple of hours sketching. I was going to draw something to add to my banner here, but I'm not quite sure if it'll fit, or if it will look good if I shrink it to 200px high. I don't think it will be too bad if I do that, the image itself is only 400px high. I just clipped off the extra white space and made it 350x350, I'll show it below, tell me what you think:

Company layoffs

The company I work for has been in bankruptcy since January 2002. I will refrain from naming it specifically, but will hint that it is a telecom and it is not WorldCom/MCI...

The personalities of cats..

I have two cats, supposedly litter mates. They're about two years old now, and weigh around 13lbs each. And their personalities are as different as night and day...

Feh…

I think I understand now why MT's time stamp is acting like it does.. Probably because "majority rules", and in this case, the majority of the world moves its clocks forward & back for DST. So rather than piss off the majority of MT users, the minority who don't typically change their clocks must find alternate ways of getting the time stamp to mesh with their zone. I was going to tinker around with some plugins, but I don't feel like trying to grasp the concept of perl and trying to make them work, so I'll change the timezone to UTC -8 until I feel like noodling with the plugins again.

Time zone faux pas

Ok, since when does GMT spring forward for DST? GMT is a standard, and remains static. Arizona also remains static for DST, so we never have to change our clocks (just our internal math when dealing with people in other states). So why in the world is MT saying I'm posting after 10PM when it's really 9:15 here, and I've got it set to GMT -7? AZ is *always* GMT -7. I really don't want to have to re-set my time zone when DST is overwith. Sheesh..

Time zone?

Checking the time zone MT thinks I'm on...

Much better..

Looking much better, at least I think so. I want to create my own banner though. I think that text is just way too... well, too blah. Maybe I'll work on it this weekend.. I get a four day weekend this week! Whee! (normal weekend for me is 3 days).

Anyway. That is all.

Eww..

<style="text-decoration: line-through">Ok, so this is looking pretty nasty at the moment, but it will look better before the end of the day, I promise!

(edited to add: It really did look awful. I think it looks much better now.)

First Entry

Ok, I think have this thing down now. Made some silly mistakes upon installation (misplaced files, etc), but hopefully most of the rough edges have been smoothed out. I have more tweaking to do with the colors here so it matches my main page... What a way to spend my workday. 😉

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