To start, if you already use GIMP, here’s a interesting link to “1000+ FREE High Resolution GIMP Brushes“. I haven’t checked ‘em all, but some of them look great. If you’re not already familiar with GIMP, read on…

So, Digial Scrapbooking is cool, and apparently pretty big. I don’t do scrapbooking, but my wife does, and I’m so excited that she asks all kinds of great questions about Photoshop now, etc.

Before you go looking, the industry standard Photoshop product is $699. For casual, even “advanced” (sorry, I’m not sure what word your culture uses!) scrapbookers, that price can be extremely steep – especially considering that the full featured product is overkill, with many features that (I imagine) most scrapbook projects will never use.

Adobe does have a related product, Photoshop Elements, which is scaled down, and probably a closer-to-perfect fit for most scrapbookers. I believe they even sell this edition at Walmart, etc, for around $139.99.

However great those products are, I’m mostly here to point out some competition: GIMP (Wikipedia).

GIMP is a freely available alternative to other “graphics manipulation software”. For those on a tight budget, or that just like to be thrifty, GIMP is a very capable choice.

I’m no professional GIMP user (rather, I’m often in Photoshop) but I’m interested in helping others jump in on the free (and open-source) software options. If you’re interested in using GIMP, or you know of any interesting uses already, related to scrapbooking or otherwise, I’m interested to hear about it.

If you know the address, send me an email. Otherwise, find someone that knows how to get in contact with me. We’ll see if the whole six degrees thing really works.

I would rather ask my clients to spend their money wisely on things that will improve their business, than to waste it on hours of unnecessary development.

From Andy Clarke at Stuff and Nonsense.

I completely agree. The rest of the article is cool, too, by the way.

Being a programmer sometimes has interesting side-effects on every-day situations.

Today, for instance, I was doing a lot of automation related programming, and some basic shell scripting. Only the shell scripting was really out of the ordinary. I arrived home after work, and found a nice frozen treat to hold me over until the movies tonite. It’s instructions called for defrosting before cooking. My first instinct was to somehow script the microwave to defrost for a time, then immediately begin cooking.

It was almost reactionary to the thought of having to come back to the kitchen to interact with the microwave a second time.

Perhaps I’ve been working too hard?

http://simonwillison.net/2008/May/22/debugging/

Includes:

• Making the most of the error page
• Logging to the development server console
• Using the debugger (pdb)
• Handling errors in production

How many feeds can a speed reader read if the speed reader does read feeds?
Not as many feeds as my Feed Reader feeds, so I’m deleting a bunch of subscriptions.
That last line didn’t rhyme, sorry.