The Coding Humanist

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. 

Every time you create a new item in a Visual Studio project you get some default text. For some it is exactly what you want. For others you find yourself consistently making the same additions/deletions. Thankfully, changing the default content in the templates is easy to do.

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.