Summer

I can't believe tomorrow is August 1st! I have been waiting for summer weather and I don't know what to think. My sister told me that she saw geese coming back to Creamer's Field. Here she told me how warm Fairbanks is in the summer and I was so excited! I missed the hot days of summer. At least we had a few.

A plus is that I discovered a new book. This one is called "The Spellman Files" and is by Lisa Lutz. It is a pretty good book. I make myself leave my books upstairs, otherwise I never put them down. Lisa is compared to Carl Hiassen (another fav of mine) and I've even heard someone say Janet Evanovich (she is the best).

Now...off to Fireworks! How many others had to try out buttons--I did. I couldn't just couldn't skip that chapter....

Cuil

Cuil is a new search engine that was developed by former Google employees. It is easy to use and is providing okay search results. I'm taking away my recommendation to try it out and am now saying the search results aren't excellent. I'm bad, I know.

My Reason:
I do like the wide variety of search results and many of them seem relevant to my search. However, it does seem to have a few issues.

Some of the pages are dated (which isn't always a bad thing), I got a page of repeated words (since this engine does content based search and not just meta tags) and I pulled up a nasty site that must have had embedded text or meta tags that made it seem relevant. So, I wouldn't let your kids use this search engine (or demonstrate this engine in front of a group of people!) until the kinks are worked out. Argh! Gross!

Important note: you may think that the site is safe to go to based on the picture that is displayed by the link--it is not!!! Yuck! Double gross!! I can't believe I saw that stuff and good thing my kids weren't watching.

mootools

Something I want to look into. http://mootools.net/

Redskins Football

Michael and Darrin played their first football game today. Here are the shots that we managed to get. Did you know football games last TWO hours each?

Scott's New Bike

Scott won a bike yesterday at the Goldpanner's game! He is still very excited. It was Kid's Day and my brother gave us tickets to go to the ballgame. At first I said, "No!" but then I thought it would be nice for the kids to experience a game. And why did I say no so quickly? I used to watch the Cincinnati Reds play and those games lasted a long time and that sun was hot!

Goldpanner games are much cheaper too--$2 for adults and $1 a kid =) We are definitely going to keep going to the ballpark!

Blog: Bitmap vs Vector Tools

1) Have you worked with other graphics tools? If so, what were they? Were you working with bitmap or vector tools (or both?).

I have only played around with PSE 4.0 and that was only to modify my pictures for scrapbooking.

2) Point us to three images on the web that have caught your attention or that you feel are noteworthy. Since they are being displayed on the web, you are seeing a bitmap version, but what kind of tools do you think were used to create each image (bitmap or vector or both?) and why?

I did a google on vector images, since I wanted to see what could be done. Here is one that does look very cool and is by "Cris Vector". http://www.vectorvault.com/2008/07/20/incredible-vector-art-portfolio-cristiano-siqueira/

If I was guessing if it was vector or not...the amounts of different textures that he is using and colors.

Here is a cool picture from flickr. I know it is a bitmap, otherwise known as raster image, since it is most likely a digital picture. http://www.flickr.com/photos/97968921@N00/2677899048/

Just because I think these would make cool rubber stamps. I wonder...are rubber stamps made from vector images? Hmmm....http://www.vecteezy.com/vf/453-Ornaments-Vector-pack

She Rides!

Jill finally started riding her bike. She knew how to balance, but just didn't have the courage to take off. Yay Jill!