Sometimes I love Photoshop Elements. Sometimes it annoys me (like when it decides it wants to undo with Ctrl-z, and then changes its mind and wants to use another key combination). Sometimes it destroys my work. Tonight is such a night.

I am working on a logo design. I try to save the file and I get a "Could not complete your request because there is not enough memory (RAM)." error. Okay, well, I have a total of two gigs of memory, and about 1.2 gigs of that are free. I REALLY don't think that is the problem. The image only had three layers, one with a text block on them each. Save As... got me the same error. My work was lost. Nothing I could do to save it. Switching to Expression Design for the evening. Maybe I can get something done.

Frankly, I was a little more impressed with the quality of Photoshop Elements 2 than I am of 5. 

So I took the day off. Since I have Monday off as well, this is going to make for a long weekend. Yay!

One of the many things I want to accomplish is to get some reading done. One of those items is to finish Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I just finished. What a strange but interestings story that ended up being. If you've got the time, it's a nice little piece of fiction. 

Along with the redesign comes a few new resources.

First, there is now an articles section. That's where I'll be putting article-type stuff.

Second, there are a couple new or improved resources there. My silverlight/inline xaml/firefox article has been updated for beta 1. There is also a little thing on the ASP.NET Ajax fade animation and editing Visual Studio 2005 templates.

Third, added a few reviews to the book reviews page. I think I had them referenced in my blog, but I forgot to put links to them on that page. 

Hello. Long time no blog. But I won't dwell on this...

So I've been busy lately. As faithful readers, you know I've been in a fight to the death with my fence. Well, along with my fence I've pretty much worked over my back yard. The key benefits of this are that my children have a better place to play, I have privacy again now that I have a fence, and I have a sunburn. I'm sure there's something positive about that last one.

Anyway, I have done practically nothing related to tech at home for several weeks. I have had a reskinning/redesign mostly done ready since before then, so I decided to go ahead and finish it up. Now it is here. I would LOVE to get your input on it. Still probably needs some tweaking. It has been pretty thoroughly tested in FireFox 2.0.0.3 and someone in IE 6. If you are using another browser and see something odd, I'd like to hear about it. Like the new look?

So I had a nice solution to the problem caused by the mix of Silverlight, Firefox, Xhtml doctype, and inline xaml. But they changed the API, so that no longer works. I'll have a new workaround soon. Ah, the fun of working with a CTP...

Last night was the monthly meeting of NDDNUG. It's always fun to see and chat with my geek friends. It also doesn't hurt to get free pizza and t-shirts. Woohoo! The meeting topic was OOP 101. The presentation was pretty good...but I think I've covered that stuff before :)

A terrible storm made its way through during the meeting. This storm was just the excuse my fence needed to defeat me once again...

So several months ago the bases on a couple of posts to my 10'-ish high privacy fence decided to rot out. As a temporary measure I put in some stakes and tied some ropes. In an attempt to more permenantly fix this, I put in a big metal pole and put it in cement. Aha! I've got that fence now. Nope. It pulled the metal pole and cement out of the ground. My fence was beating me. Me vs my fence...0 and 1.

Last night the wind blew down my fence. My fence had beaten me again. My feeble attempts could not keep it standing. 0 and 2.

So last night, around 9:45, in the rain, I had to clean up a 30ft stretch of fallen fence. One end had broken into two smaller pieces and were moveable. The largest piece, though, was about 20 ft of wood.

My initial plan did not succeed. I happened to be wearing my Transformers shirt, so I attempted to transform into a construction vehicle of some kind to help me move this fence. It didn't work, but that's no surprise. I had an Autobot symbol on my shirt, and we ALL know that it was the Decepticons that had the nice construction vehicles, the Constructicons. They were awesome, especially when combined together. I hope they show up in the meeting this summer. That would be great. But I digress.

Option two was to move this with my intensely manly muscles. The solution, as it turns out, was to attempt to fold the fence. It sounds strange, but it actually worked. As I tried to fold the fence the wood would give way and it would break. So I broke the fence up and moved it all back in to my yard. I don't think my neighbor would have enjoyed keeping it in hers.

So, in the end, I was not able to keep my fence standing. I lost. A sad day.