Rocky
Here is a bit of schist or granite or whatnot – rockface – from Carl Schurz Park. The only interesting thing about the image is that I just learned how to resize it, using the latest version of PhotoShop Elements (an application that I have used for three generations), which I bought for my new-ish laptop. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to resize the pixels. The instructions at Help were totally counterintuitive; it was only when I did what they told me not to do that I was able to move forward.Â
Typical. Resizing images is just about all I use PhotoShop for.
Not so typical is a bit of what feels like bait-and-switch from Coffee Cup. I bought their HTML editor for the new-ish laptop for one reason only: Microsoft has discontinued FrontPage. I’ve used FrontPage for seven years, learning to live with and love its maddening limitations. Were it not for Microsoft’s greedy copy protection racket, I’d just go on using FrontPage for the rest of my life. Now, Coffee Cup isn’t as expensive as FrontPage, but perhaps there’s a reason for that. Whereas FrontPage reads my stylesheet without so much as a burp, just as every browser does, Coffee Cup requires an additional product to render stylesheets usable with their HTML editor. $34 additional, to be exact, and another $13 for hard copy. (Essential, because I’ve been unable to download software of any kind with our wi-fi connection.) I’ve written a blistering letter of outrage, but I haven’t sent it.
By and large, I’ve had it with innovation. Everything can just stay where it is for ten years. Then maybe I’ll have an appetite for a bit of change.
Three weeks ago, on the day after I came home from the hospital, I went to the barbershop for a trim. Working around the neck brace proved very difficult for the barber. In any case, short and scruffy as it was, the beard still needed trimming, so I went back today. It was my regular barber’s day off. One of his colleagues asked me if my beard had been shaved in the hospital, or, worse, by me. He was shocked by my answer. But he got me looking fairly normal.