making things pretty…

hey, guess what…

Wanna know (TWEE) what the most (WEEEEEEE) irritating sound in the  (TWEEEE) world is? Can  you (FWEEE) guess? come on, give it one (TWEEE) good (TUHWEE) shot (TWEETWEETWEEEE)…  ok, it’s the sound of a child who has *just* learned how to whistle by blowing across a bottle (WHEEWEEWEEEE).

Now, in the olden days (hee, I’m old enough and uncool enough to say “olden days”), this most likely would’ve been done with a glass Coke bottle. Or, for the drunkard families out there, a glass beer bottle. Whatever the liquid, the container would’ve been glass, giving you that nice, low glassbottlesound (whooooooo).  

As it is, she learned on one of those disgusting blue syrup drink bottles, made of impossibly thin, melty plastic with an even more impossibly small hole. Which makes the most impossibly god-awful shriek (TWEEEEETWEETWEEEEETWEEWEEE) you’ve ever heard.   

Fan(FWEEEEEE)tastic.

2 comments January 15th, 2008

And the Idiot of the Day Award goes to…

Me. Yes, me. Let me tell you how much I *hate* my new computer monitor. I cannot begin to describe my current loathing. Up until this weekend, I had a trusty old CRT (yes, it was mammoth, but it worked and it had good color). But my trusty old monitor finally gave up its will to live and I had a replacement all ready — a shiny, new LCD. So sleek! So shiny! So BIG! Look at my desktop — it doesn’t look nearly as crowded now that my files can unpile themselves!

So shiny new monitor was doing good. Until I actually had to do some, uh, work tonight. I opened my file and it was all… funky. I mean, butt-ugly colors that I would never in a million years have specified. What’s up? I tinkled around in Photoshop — was the file in the wrong color mode? No. Futzed with the color settings, the preferences, the profiles… nothing helped. So I’m thinking, “aw F$#@, I’m going to have to rebuild this entire file!” So I open the low-res version I’d sent off as a proof (it looks fine) and try to sample colors from it. Won’t work.

It takes me 45 MINUTES to figure out the problem. The problem being that the colors look different relative to where they are on the screen — if I would’ve moved my image mere inches across the screen, I would’ve seen the right colors. What?! Oh, no… I CANNOT HAVE THIS!

Listen here, Mr. SlickShinyLCD — I’ve had quarrels with monitors before, and the only thing that’s stopped me from heaving them across the room was their sheer size. You don’t have that advantage. I could fling you like a 6-year-old boy with a little sister and a snot ball.

You’ve been warned.

2 comments January 15th, 2008