Plan for today

[gothick]

Right. Have had nice hot bath and followed my lemsip with an espresso chaser. Now feeling ready to do stuff. I'm not going to plan to do too much today, as I'm guessing my energy levels won't be high, so:

• Go through one of the GIMP tutorials from the Meet the Gimp podcast. I'm trying to get good with the GIMP because it's so handy for both web design and photography (and because I can't afford Photoshop.)


• Research HDTV for the last article in this second batch of ten I'm writing. This is an interesting one, because I've never seen an HDTV, as far as I know. I've still got a big ol' tube TV, and I'm not even planning on advancing to a flat screen unless this one dies.


• Design a nice menu for a WordPress theme I'm working on (both for my own use and also because it would be good to know how to customise WordPress themes.)


• Get all the laundry done.

That'll probably be enough goals for a day of illness.

Comments

[gothick-matt.livejournal.com]

Ta for the TV info. Mind you, it'll be a good long time before I look into getting into HD (I probably won't bother upgrading until this one breaks, and it seems failry indestructible so far.) I just don't watch that much telly.

As for t'Gimp, I get along okay with it, and I'm prepared to sacrifice a bit of usability for the "free" element. The only thing that I'm really still waiting for is tablet pressure sensitivity, and that seems like it might not be too far off being supported.

Later versions of Paint Shop Pro irritated me a great deal when I used to use them, and it's Windows-only anyway (and the free Paint.Net is a good alternative for quick image editing under Windows, so I don't tend to use it even at work these days.)

There was a reason I didn't try Elements; I think the last time I looked it was lagging behind a version on the Mac, and it was only a PowerPC binary. I'll pop it on my list to have another look at. There are similar and funkier cut-down image editors for the Mac (the promising new Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com/) uses the GPU for its processing, and is impressively fast at doing all sorts of thing.)

My other main reason for going for the GIMP is that there are vast amounts of tutorials out there for it which don't need any translation or hacking about to work through -- unlike the way you'd probably have to figure out what to do in Elements when a Photoshop tutorial used a feature it hadn't got.

Also, I think you're probably a fair bit further down the photography route than I am, too, which may make Photoshop seem cheaper in comparison. Bear in mind I've never bought a lens, and that Photoshop is more than twice the price of the most expensive camera I've ever bought!