I’m a little bit dorky…

And I’m a little bit rock-n-roll!   Tonight, I finally finally figured out a long-standing problem on my website.

I’ve had a transparent GIF for my website’s logo for the longest time, but just it looked oh so crappy.  It had a little pixelated edge around the lettering.  With no users, this really wasn’t a pressing problem.  It always looked OK with most light colored backgrounds, but once I put it on a darker background, the crappiness was apparent.

I’ve grappled with this for a while, but since I don’t have Photoshop and don’t have any software to play with these images, I just left this one for a later date.  Well, today was that later date.

I ran across a site that talked about Vector Images.  I’ve known about the SVG image formats, but I didn’t realize you could use them on the web.  I did, in fact, have some vector images of my logos.  But it never seemed like a good idea to use them because they are so large.  But on this particular site, touting the benefits of vector images, all the images on this particular site were saved as PNG files.  Bingo!

So now, how could I save my files as PNG?   Enter Quicksilver.  This is the kind of thing it does best (see the screenshot below).  I just selected the file in its original SVG format, chose Save Image in Format… in the action pane, and then typed PNG in the third pane.  Voilà!

I realize for those of you who don’t use Macs and Quicksilver, this means absolutely nothing to you.  But for me, it was a nice little epiphany to fix a long-standing problem on my website.  Now let’s see if my one user, Gary, who is my business partner, will notice the difference.  I doubt it…  But at least I know!

Been busy… but here’s what’s happenin’ in March

So I’ve been chuggin’ along with my little business and working hard on my data model.  What’s that?  Data model?  Yeah, yeah, so I’m a dork.  But it’s good stuff when you delve into it.  A bit scary when you don’t know if what you’re doing is the best way, especially given that there are tons of professionals out there who can whip this kind of work out in a couple of hours.  But so what?  I’m working on it, learning it, and fastly becoming a software designer in my own right!

Anyway, just thought I’d catch you up with work and life.  I’m still doing all my fitness stuff, 100 pushups a day, 50 crunches, 50 lunges.  It’s paying off.  All of these exercises are getting easier… so I’m having to increase the resistance and/or slow down the reps.  I don’t necessarily see the need to increase my reps at this point.

And I was a bit bummed that only one person responded to my pushup challenge.  You know what?  I guess I’m pretty psyched by that actually.  So big ups to you, Allice!  Meanwhile, another week passed by and I managed to do fifty this time!  From fourty-four to fifty.  Nice progress.  I’m sure it’ll slow down here soon.

Finally, I added one more thing to my list of daily chores.  Piano!  Gosh I miss my piano.   My whole first month back in Atlanta I didn’t even touch the thing.  But I’ve been playing regularly, and hopefully am practicing smarter than ever before.  My goal is to play Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini” within a year, the solo part, that is…  It’s 90 pages long, so I have my work cut out for me.  I basically get four days of practice for each page.

One last thing, I’m goin’ back to Cali tomorrow.  Right on!