I started using this program in November when I needed a free yet robust program for unzipping a lot of different file types at work. Not ONLY does this program do what I wanted it to - it far surpassed my expectations. You have the standard abilities to export files where you want and in seperate folders. You have the ability to recompress groups of files. There is just so much this FREE program offers that it’s pointless to waste time on the “big names” of compression like WinRAR or WinZip (do they even still exist!?).

Do yourself a favor … go and download. After all - it’s free!

http://www.zipgenius.it/

Weblob Tools Collection has a few links in Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done that give bloggers nice tools to get things rolling.

Right now I’m using Windows Live Writer. Trying it out. There are some nice features, but I’m not sure if I really .. LIKE it or not.

People area also talking up ScribeFire … which I may look into after this. We’ll see what works the best for me. Really, in the end, use what works the best for you.

For instance, I use a lot of WordPress Plugins. 28 to be exact. Not all are for functionality, but all are used.

PLUGINS

Admin Notes
Creates and manages a very simple notes system for maintaining a to-do list etc. By Paul Morley.

AdSense Manager
Control and arrange your AdSense & Referral blocks on your Wordpress blog. With Widget and inline post support, configurable colours. By Martin Fitzpatrick.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template. See also: WP Stats plugin. By Matt Mullenweg.

All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. By uberdose.

Better Comments Manager
Better Comments manager allows you to view your comments post wise, it also allows you to reply to your comments from within admin panel without you having to visit the site to respond to comments By Keith Dsouza.

Configurable Tag Cloud
A tag cloud plugin for Wordpress 2.3 to give you more flexibility with the styling of your tag cloud. By Keith Solomon.

Dagon Design Form Mailer
The WordPress plugin version of my secure php form mailer script By Dagon Design.

Delink Comment Author
Adds a link to comment e-mails for you to remove the URL the commentor left. Useful if you want to ditch the comment URL but keep the comment. By Alex King.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page By Arne Brachhold.

Highlight Author Comments
Automatically applies a distinctive style to comments by the post’s author. By Rob Marsh, SJ.

iBegin Share
Adds a “Share” button to your posts. By David Cramer.

Magic Keywords
Determines the best keywords for your individual blog posts and pages — works almost like magic! By Richard D. LeCour.

MaxBlogPress Favicon
Easily add favicon to your blog without editing any wordpress files. By MaxBlogPress.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin By MaxBlogPress.

NextGEN Gallery
A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the WEB2.0(beta). By NextGEN DEV-Team.

NextGEN Gallery Widget
Adds a sidebar widget support to your NextGEN Gallery By NextGEN DEV-Team.

NoFollow Free
Remove the nofollow tag from your blog’s comments with a lot of options customizable, per user type removal, per comments count removal etc… Supports multilingual and a Top Commenters sidebar Widget. By Michele Marcucci.

Ozh’ Absolute Comments
Reply instantly to comments, either from the email notification, or the usual Comments page, without loading the post first. For WordPress 2.5+ By Ozh.

Slashdigglicious
Add user-submission icons and links at the bottom of each post: Digg, del.icio.us, etc. By Robert Tsai.

StatPress
Real time stats for your blog By Daniele Lippi.

TabStat
Show Your Database Table Status(Rows, Data Length, Index Length, Size, and Overhead). You can optimize it too. By Abdul Ibad.

Viper’s Video Quicktags
Allows you to embed various video types, including those hosted at YouTube and Google Video as well as videos you host yourself, into WordPress. Credits: Owen Winkler for ButtonSnap and An-archos for help with WP 2.1+ button code. By Viper007Bond.

WordPress.com Stats
Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks. Requires a WordPress.com API key. By Andy Skelton.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade allows a user to automatically upgrade the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions. Go to Wordpress Automatic Upgrade to upgrade your installation Thanks to Ronald Huereca for making the plugin run in automatic mode. By Keith Dsouza.

Wordpress Download Monitor
Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts. Downloads page found at “Manage>Downloads”. By Mike Jolley.

wp-cache (Haven’t figured out if this really helps at all)
2.1.2

Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”. By Ricardo Galli Granada.

WP Auto Tagger
Automatically finds tags based on your post content. By iDope.

WP_MonsterID
This plugin generates email specific monster icons for each user based on code and images by Andreas Gohr and images by Lemm. By Scott Sherrill-Mix.

Of course this is what I like to use, not what is really necessary. This is just good stuff that I appreciate and use. As said, not sure what WP-Cache really does for me … but it’s there anyway.

This is the culmination of that release. While the band is no longer around, the art work can still be enjoyed.

Three Years Chasing - 1280×1024 (1.15 MB)
Three Years Chasing - 1680×1050 (1.58 MB)

So, here are the specs:

Heck .. yes .. it’s awesome.

Goodness Bill .. what are you thinking in your multi-million dollar breeches?! Obviously it is about how many billions you’re worth to the industry …

Here is a snippet from a good article:

It was the Dark Ages, around 2004 or so. The iTunes Store was new and booming. Microsoft, in its bid to be the center of everything without having to deal with pesky “end users”, decided that the way to fight Apple was to create a developer platform. This developer platform would handle all the technical details of ensuring that people could “purchase” music files from a variety of online vendors, and play these music files on their (Windows) PC or on a variety of handheld music players. This developer platform would also ensure that such “purchased” music files could not be copied. This involves a lot of fancy math (encryption) which Microsoft was happy to license to companies running online music stores and companies making handheld music players, as well as including by default in all modern versions of Windows.

READ IT ALL

I’m no stranger to building computers. I’ve done it for years and I’ve generally enjoyed it. However, this system is presenting me with continual problems.

Let’s start with the worst. it’s a Quad Core Q6600 processor with an nForce 650i Ultra main board. I installed it all nicely, threw on a new GeForce 9600GT 512mb video card - sounds like it should scream, right? Well, it would if the processor didn’t keep over heating and shutting down the system. Going out and shelling $20 for some heavy duty thermal paste HELPED but the only thing that successfully allowed the system to run was setting the voltage to the processor to 1.05 rather than letting it automatically chose (which was usually about 1.27). No problem, got that fixed. Now I can’t find my copy of Windows XP Pro (I have the product code!) so I downloaded it from a torrent (like I said, I have the product code) and naturally it won’t work.

So I installed Ubuntu 8.04. Got it running no problem - only thing is they don’t make Linux drivers for my main board or video card.

I’m quite disappointed on what should be an awesome computer. Luckily I didn’t thrash the old system totally so I can use this to do some things - but dang it … this should be cake!!!

So, my faithful readers … any ideas?

As you all know (well, probably not but I’ll pretend that I have regular readers) I’m in the middle of writing some stuff. One of which is for a graphic novel that I’m working on with a co-worker here. It takes place in the not to distant future where an unknown race appears from nowhere with nothing in mind but the total annihilation of humanity. JUST for the sake of destruction.

This is the logo I’m running with thus far.

The website is in the works. Really there isn’t much more to show at this point. We’re working on some character designs now (Todd - co-designer - is an amazing artist) and we’ll start getting things worked out.

The cool thing about this project is we’re going to attempt to use all open source. Blender, Gimp, Paint.net, Inkscape … all open source. That’s our goal. Our website is going to be run via WordPress - love it. Hopefully, using all open source, we’ll have more flexibility and be more unique in design. I may also use Ubuntu Studio as a dual boot with WinXP Pro (DOWN WITH VISTA!). But we’ll see how adventurous I am. Learning a slew of new programs may be hard enough - but jumping on a whole new OS may just kill me!

Ok … wish me luck!

Ok, I need some theme music. I’ll get right on that.

This weeks installment is an older design. It was originally called ‘TV is the Devil’ and was made just as an expression piece. But I resized and pushed it around and TADA! Here we are.

Enjoy.

The Lost - 1280×1024 (1.28 MB)
The Lost - 1680×1050 (1.58 MB)

The life of a simple family man named Farmer (Jason Statham) is changed forever when a horrifying army of animal-like warriors known as Krugs who are controlled by the evil Gallian (Ray Liotta) invade his village, murder his son and kidnap his wife. Farmer sets out on a momentous journey to get his wife back and along the way, encounters magic and adventure as the quest soon reveals his real destiny in the kingdom.

Ok, let me start of by saying I know nothing about ‘Dungeon Siege’. At all. I came into this movie not expecting anything, especially since its full of big names. Usually those are floppers.

With that said, I’ll talk about the positives of this movie. It was very entertaining with a lot of great ideas and very much a good watch.

While this felt like it was suppose to be much more epic I think it … failed. First of all, the acting in general just was not the best. Which was a surprise. It felt like the actors just … didn’t care. Like it was something they were doing in their backyard for fun. With the exception of Leelee Sobieski it felt like what it was. A B-Movie with A-listers. We’re talking about Jason Statham, Ron Perlman, John Rhys-Davies, Ray Liotta, Matthew Lillard, Burt Reynolds, Claire Forlani … all of these people have been in MASSIVE movies and are definitely not B-listers.

The effects felt like they were stock from Xena. The main baddies, Krugs, looked .. horrible. If it was a still shot it would be fine - but the masks they wore pretty much looked like cheesy Halloween masks. No emotion, no movement. Static. Not only that, but the sounds they made were completely lame and didn’t really make any sense to their animalistic ancestry (from what I gather in the movie). The end is a typical story end with a few things just hanging in midair.

The music … it’s generally goofy feeling. Just not what you’d expect to hear from a medieval fantasy.

I guess there is a petition to stop the director Uwe Boll from directing anymore. Kind of makes me feel bad for the guy.

However, as long as you don’t try to take this movie seriously it may be a nice diversion and a good two hour watch. Again, they feel like they’re just goofing off, but there is still some nice action here or there.

Now, since most of you won’t go read what was said there, let me recap.

They really are sending out stimulus checks. Yes, I know - it sounds amazing.

And we can use the money! Bills don’t pay themselves!

However, my largest concern was that it would come out of our next year’s tax refund - or just be taxed to crap. HOwever, according to CNN author David Goldman we won’t.

Will I have to pay it back?

No. And here’s why.

Your stimulus payment is a one-time tax cut - an advance on a credit you’ll receive on your 2008 return. You will not owe tax on your payment when you file your 2008 tax return, and it will not increase the amount you owe or reduce your 2008 refund.

They go on with some weird reasoning that I can’t wrap my non-numbers brain around:

“If you were supposed to receive a larger payment than you did, you will get the extra money,” said Treasury spokesman Andrew DeSouza. “If you received more than what you should have gotten, you will not be penalized.”

So there you have it folks. ‘Free’ money. Of course expect to hear people grip about how much they got or how the government is spending too much and so on. I doubt this will really make any real difference on the economy, but I’m happy to have it.

For instance, I spend about five years of my life trying to upgrade the image of something … when I left it was on the rise. People signing up to the mailing list because (they’ve literally said this) the design was nice and wanted to learn more. That made me feel good. Felt like I was really making some changes that was going to HELP.
I’ve been away less then six months and the changes I made for the better are being erased one at a time. In less than a year it will look like it did before I started my work. Old style, very plain and (in my opinion) badly designed.

And that makes me bitter. Bitter because I feel as if what I did was never good enough for the powers that be. Bitter because for nearly 5 years I worked like mad to upgrade the designs and feel only to be bashed down left and right. Bitter at the egos that told me I was doing it wrong because “twenty years ago when I worked in marketing …”
I know I’m not the best of the best. But I know my current design trends and I think that my knowledge of marketing is a little more up-to-date than two decades ago.

However, with all this bitterness (this is just one spot .. I have more .. oh so many more ..) I realize that I’m wrong. Yes, I’m wrong to be bitter and angry about this. This was 5 years of my life serving God in the only capacity I know how. Design. God called me away from that ministry and if He has something different planned for it - so be it. I should be happy. Honestly, I should stop paying attention.

But more importantly, God says it greives the Holy Spirit (aka - God) when I have bitterness.

In Ephesians 4: 30-31 it says: “And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice.”

You can’t get any more plain then that. Get rid of the bitterness and the anger. You know what else? It’s actually a HEALTHY thing to do! Studies show that when you’re bitter and angry you have more physical problems such as ulcers, acne, migraines .. it just isn’t worth it. Let’s not forget that people don’t want to be around someone who’s always mad!

The Word of God continues in Ephesians with “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” (Ephesians 4:32)

So, God as my witness (literally) - I’m going to try and get rid of my bitterness towards people and circumstances. I’m going to try and let it go. It’s not worth it.

Photoshop CS and a slew of textures and brushes. I’ll be turning this into a wallpaper later.

Now, I know that I’m not the smartest guy in the world. I’m also not the most humble. Yes, I admit that. But at least I have the common courtesy to allow people an opinion - especially if it doesn’t affect others.

Let me give you an example of some things that frustrate me to no end.

Say I’m talking to someone and I say “I like Falling Up” (Christian rock band). Now, realistically some should respond with “Yeah they’re awesome” or “Eh, not my cup of tea”. However, I’ve had so many people do things “Oh geez they suck!” indicated that it doesn’t matter if I like them or not, they just suck. It usually follows with an insult indicating that I have no taste or class.

Now, ok - so there are people who don’t like Falling Up. I personally can’t stand most classic rock (Doors, Beatles, Hendrix, etc). Not my style. But do I think they suck? Well, yes to me .. but I appreciate the fact that people like them. More power to them! But don’t say I’m stupid (or someone else) because I don’t agree with you.

Unless it’s a life issue - get over it. Don’t assume that your choices in music are the end all. Your views are not God’s views (unless they’re based on Scripture, then let’s talk).

Carolyn and I rented Cloverfield Tuesday (April 22nd). I was prepared for it to royally stink, due to many bad reviews and a lot of people just trashing the film. So, sitting down I was ready.

I was also ready for Blair Witch Project style camera movements. Basically, I was ready for it to be extremely low budget, never seeing any creature (except blurry Bigfoot style shots) and really being bored.

For the first twenty minutes it built characters. You saw who was going to be main characters, who was who and what people felt. My first down in this is that they didn’t make it very .. believable. I mean, if this was a MOVIE movie it would have been fine. The scripted lines and such would have been no big deal. However, some of the things said, reactions and so on where much less .. candid .. then it would be if it was something really happening. Particularly Lilly, who wasn’t a bad actress per say, I just had a hard time not seeing her as an actress.

Now, you DO get to see the monster. And it’s not a cheesy, blurry sasquatch looking photos. At first .. yes, all you see if quick shots of a tail, the back … nothing concrete. However, that changes as time goes and you do get a full view of the beast and the little critters that fall from it. You hear me right .. fall from it.

Another down was that nothing is ever explained. We don’t know WHAT it really is (government experiment, nuclear mishap, alien, natural, politician) and really we don’t know what happens in the end as the ‘tape’ ends before there is resolve. One can ASSUME that the monster is killed and all is well.

One highlight for me is the ‘camera man’ who’s name is Hudson ‘Hud’ Platt. The dude says some nutty things and I think (other than the fact that he does get slightly obnoxious) he would probably be someone I’d befriend.

Overall Cloverfield was a good movie. I really did enjoy it - and would even consider owning it if I saw it cheaply (like .. $5).

It was worth the $2.80 for the rental (and $.70 for the popcorn!). It’s not scary, though there is some gore to it and a few suspenseful moments (with some humor from Hud).

This new desktop wallpaper was actually a printed picture I made for my wife for Christmas. It was in a series of four, but is the only one I want to share with you because … well, it was a special gift you greed glubs!

Dark Days - 1280×1054 (816.87 KB)
Dark Days - 1680×1050 (1005.1 KB)

In 8 years we:
Had a son
Bought two cars
Bought a house
Got a cat
Have had 7 jobs
Moved 6 hours from family

And so many other things that are less than milestones in our life, but things that make us … us.

I’m so proud to be Carolyn’s husband .. and after 8 years she can still stand me! Her patience is astounding.

I love you Carolyn.

www.xanga.com/ophelia_crow - if you have a Xanga account, go and bug her say hello!

Smashing Magazine is probably a great place for me to find quality tutorials. Of course, you could always sift through Good Tutorials or Pixel2Life, but to be honest they’re more quantity than quality. You have a slew of tutorials - but well over half are rubbish.

So I’ll give you all a slew of tutorials .. and not a small slew .. but a SLEW SLEW!!

You can also look at these:

• Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Best Of features some of the best Adobe Photoshop tutorials out there,
• Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials - Best Of showcases 80 excellent Adobe Photoshop video tutorials which you can use as a starting point to improve your skills or observe how professionals do their job.

This post comes from Smashing Magazine’s article Adobe Photoshop Tutorials - Rainbows, Glows and Light Effects

Photoshop Light Effects Tutorials

• Lines Tutorial
  A super simple tutorial that makes rainbow colored lines. It shows you how to give them an appearance of brightness and depth.

  

• Expressive lighting effects
  This tutorial combines both vector and raster based techniques to achieve a glowing floral design. The glows are applied in Photoshop.

  

• Vector Polishing Techniques
  This tutorial covers numerous ways to transform your vector illustrations into masterpieces by using Photoshop lighting techniques, glows, and filters.

  

• How to Make the “Flare” Effect As Seen On WPCustomization.com
  In this tutorial, the Lens Flare filter is used on the background. Then the lighting is created with brushes and different blending modes.

  

• Sparkling Hot Girl in Photoshop
  Utilize an assortment of techniques to achieve a sparkling design. Masks, blurs, brushes, layers styles and other effects are used in this tutorial.

  

• Amazing Photoshop light effect in 10 Steps
  “If you know a bit of Layer Styles and the Brush engine in Photoshop you will be able to create amazing effects. It will depend exclusively on your imagination and playing with the tool. Sometimes just changing some settings and you get a totally different effect.” This tutorial applies lighting effects to a coffee cup icon.

  

• Creating A Fantastic Fantasy Night Sky In Photoshop
  Create cartoon style clouds with rainbows, stars, and glowing effects. Based on a Nik Ainley design.

  

• Neon lights with Photoshop
  Tutorial on how to make glowing lights effects out of vector shapes and brushes.

  

• Electrifying Energy Beams
  In this tutorial you start with the pen tool by drawing a line. Then you transform that line into an energy beam with layer effects. This makes it glow white and purple around a microphone.

  

• Add Another Dimension
  Use glows and blending modes to “add another dimension” to your Photoshop artwork

  

• Magic lighting effect in Photoshop
  Learn to magically make text wave and glow out of a magician’s hat.

  

• Extreme sports branding
  This tutorial first covers creating a logo then it gets into the main snowboard illustration. Vector shapes are applied with layer effects and brushes to make the illustration stand out. This is part one in a series.

  

• How to Create Intense Light Streaks in Photoshop
  This tutorial shows you how to create light streaks that appear to flow around an object.

  

• Chroma Wallpapers
  This tutorial explains how to create an energetic design with lines. Utilize blurs, warps, and other effects. Add glowing and vibrating colors to give this image a dynamic feeling.

  

• Advanced Glow Effects
  This tutorial teaches how to create glow effects using layer styles, the pen tool, and some color blending effects.

  

• Lighting Effects - Beam Wave
  Learn to transform a one pixel lines into a glowing beam. Then add radial balls of light to emulate a pulse explosion.

  

• Add A Sparkle Trail To A Photo
  Learn how to add a sparkling trail of stars to your photos using brushes, layer styles, and effects.

  

• Creating light motion trails & glowing sparks
  This tutorial covers creating light motion trails by using the pen tool with layer styles. It also covers creating sparkling stars in Illustrator and then importing them into the Photoshop design.

  

• Blue Glow Layout
  This tutorial reviews the process for creating a simple layout in Photoshop, while revealing techniques for creating an abstract glowing centerpiece design.

  

• Fantasy Art Photoshop tutorial
  Learn to create a fantasy image with glowing halos of lights and stars. Notice how you can apply glow directly to a cropped image. The tutorial creates the halos with the Elliptical Marquee tool. It applies a stroke and then a glow to the selection, on its own layer.

  

• Photoshop: Light Beam
  This tutorial reviews the basic process of creating a light beam in Photoshop; however, it does refer to other tutorials for some effects. The techniques in this tutorial involve using different brushes to paint the light, and then they are smeared with the Smudge Tool. There are a few filters used as well.

  

• Even fairies have to rest - glow and lightning tutorial
  First, the photograph is treated to make it a little darker so that the points of light in the design will stand out. Both a linear wrapping beam and points of radiating light are covered in this tutorial.

  

• Beautiful lighting FX effect in Photoshop
  This tutorial will show you how to make a beautiful lighting effect with the scatter brush. This tutorial covers the basics.

  

• High-Tech Swirling Aurora
  This tutorial covers how to apply the Wind Filter to a waving light beam to create an aurora effect.

  

• Slow shutter text effect - Photoshop
  Layers of blurred elements are used in this tutorial. This blurring technique is worked into glowing linear text and circle shapes.

  

• Seriously Cool Photoshop Explosion Effect
  Use layer masks and light effects to creatively break apart an image. Points of bright lights, swirly brushes, and warped lines help bring this design together.