(no subject)

Long day, dude.

I have this nice package of stuff coming up, and of course, I didn't really have the time (or all of the stuff) until today to deal with it. So I stayed late, very late, wracking my brain for design ideas, trying them out in my head and rejecting them.

I hate Photoshop, for the record. It does everything it can to make things hard for you. I mean, I know it can do more, blah blah blah, but you need to take a damn class, or something, to use it. With most software, I can sit down, poke around a while and figure out whatever I need. With Photoshop, it's so not obvious where to find things or how to do things, and when you open up the Help and type a straightforward term, you get all of these complicated-sounding, jargony topics. I mean, how the hell should I know if something I need is under "stroking" or "masking" or whatever? All I wanted to do, in this instance, was put a border around an image. I gave up, 'cause I couldn't find it and got irritated. I mean, in Paint Shop, you look under Image and there's an option, "Add Border," right there, straightforward, clearly labeled, right off of a main dropdown menu. In PS, who the hell knows where it is? I didn't want to sit there all night trying to figure it out.

So I decided screw it, use what I know, I'll come up with something in Quark. And I came up with something, after some tinkering around. It's not quite as good as it was in my head, but few things are, really. It's passably decent, and I think the headline will pull it together and make it make sense. It's gonna have to do.

(no subject)

Had a neat dream last night.

I dreamed that I was in this store, sitting on the floor in the very front of a group of people sitting to watch Billie Joe Armstrong do some sort of speaking engagement. The whole time he was talking, I was looking directly up at him, getting a neck cramp, or looking behind him at Tré, who was sitting on a stool off to one side.

At the end, Billie Joe asked if anyone had questions, and I raised my hand, and he picked me out by name, and I asked a really good question (don't know what it was, just that it was a well-thought-out question) and he answered it. Then, the group broke up, everyone else milling around the store and me talking with Billie Joe, just sort of chatting and hanging around. At one point, we were leaning against a piano, and I noted that when I stood next to him, he was really, really short.

Then, everyone came back together and sat down, and Billie Joe went over to the left and sat behind a keyboard and started playing the bass line of "Hitchin' a Ride" on it. They launched into the song, Tré now behind a drum kit and Billie Joe playing the guitar part with his left hand, bass part with his right, all on a keyboard. I turned around to someone sitting behind me and said "Where's Mike?" She said, "he didn't show up to practice, so he couldn't play."

Completely random dream, but vivid and not bad.