So last week I thought I’d just get a copy of Photoshop Elements and see how I like it, and if it will be sufficient for everything I do on the web. I rarely ever bother with print capability, so really don’t need all of the feature bloat related to print. I found a 2-in-1 box with both Photoshop and Premiere Elements 10 and decided to go with that package. I’d used Premiere a million years ago at school for a project and thought it might be neat to play with at some point, especially since I’d like to add some video to my sites in the future.

I did some things with Photoshop Elements last night and came to realize that it is missing the warp tool. What? No warp tool?? What the heck kind of imaging software doesn’t have a basic warp tool? That’s…that’s just preposterous! I was going through a little Photoshop lens flare tutorial just to get a feel for everything. Since it was a regular Photoshop tutorial, I had to figure out where things were in Elements, but then got stuck on the warp tool. I then mangled the tutorial image a bit with Distort and Liquefy, and it turned into this…uh whatever it is:

I suppose what I’ll have to do for now if I need warp (who doesn’t need warp?) is import that layer into Paint Shop Pro and warp it there, and then export the layer back into Photoshop Elements. It’s pretty sad that software that I got years ago…and for probably less cost than Elements…still seems to have more features. Or maybe it’s just warp and I’m just being snarky about it. Or about it’s loss in this case. Maybe there’s a bunch of other features in Elements that makes it ultimately superior despite the lack of warp. Fireworks might be a good future possibility too.

Yes, I could stick with Paint Shop Pro, but since Corel took it over from Jasc, the quality of the software has really decreased, so I’ll be experimenting with Elements for a while, and then some other things such as Fireworks or maybe Xara. Might even try pulling out GIMP again since it’s free open source. Assuming that I keep up with blog posts, you might see a few more Elements rants coming your way…and maybe even a rave! We shall see! In the meantime, I’m still continuing to work on formatting for the blog as there is still a good ways to go.

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The class last night was primarily introductory, but I LOVED it. I’m excited at the idea of being able to actually get involved somehow other than being glued to the TV or radio whenever there is a weather event, chemical explosion, or whatnot. I’m also a big contingency planner, so being able to actively do something with emergency management seems almost perfect. We were informed that next week, we would be practicing putting out fires.

A little over a month ago, I had no idea that CERT existed. I just happened to be looking at the FEMA website (probably for fun since I really don’t remember having a reason) and saw some links that looked interesting and led me to Citizens Corp and CERT. I couldn’t help but wonder to myself if they had a CERT group in my area and I found out very shortly that they did! I made contact nearly right away and got signed right up for the training.

One fun exercise we did in the class was a brief team building exercise. We divided up into small groups, were given 40 pieces of construction paper, a roll of tape, and two small squares of cardboard and were told we had to use it to build a tower that was at least 5 feet. We would have 5 minutes to plan and then 10 minutes of actually building the tower. In the end, only one group got a 5 feet tower, but it collapsed before the judging was over. Our tower was 37″ and was relatively stable considering the construction materials. The idea behind this exercise was that we would be using the same type of organization skills when working on an actual CERT team.

I’m already looking forward to next week!

You might have noticed I have been making more changes on the blog (about time, right?) I still have a bunch of formatting left to do. In fact, I often think that this blog is actually more of a test environment for me to try out different things, so there is always something a bit odd going on, and then before I end up fixing all of the oddness, there I go changing it all up again. Well, outside of the weeks, months that it may lay dormant. I’m okay with it though since I know it’s always here waiting and lurking for me to mess with whenever I want. At least it hasn’t been neglected quite as much as my gaming blog lately, possibly because I haven’t really been spending much time playing games more than maybe a few moments a day, and then I didn’t really feel like blogging about it.

I actually have a lot of formatting to do over on that blog too, not to mention a logo/header graphic. And then there’s all the character bios that I’ve planned write down for months now. Well it will get there eventually!

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The more I read about this fracking process, the more horrified I became that our state is even considering allowing it to occur here. Currently, it is illegal, and seemingly for very good reason. Other states, such as Pennsylvania, who have allowed fracking, have found themselves with huge environmental and economic problems. Thousands of wells have been contaminated to the point where the “fix” from the gas companies is to truck in gallons of fresh water for the population to drink. People have gotten sick and died, and yet the gas companies have exempted themselves from all government and environmental regulations to the point where they don’t even have to reveal the chemicals they are putting into the water under the guise of keeping their patent secrets.

A segment from a documentary called GasLand shows a resident starting a fire by holding a match to the water coming out of the kitchen sink faucet. I added this documentary to the number 1 spot on my Netflix queue, so should be able to watch the entire thing for myself soon.

When the gas boom is over, the companies move out of the area leaving a destroyed environment, contaminated water, worthless property, and severe unemployment. I’ve even heard some talk that some of the recent earthquakes in Ohio could have been caused by fracking.

And now they want to do those very same things here. Wow, wonder what’s going to happen to our nearby nuclear plant if the earth upon where it sits becomes less and less stable due to fracking? I don’t think a lot of people here know about fracking. I’d never heard of it before this week, and people aren’t really talking about it. My fear is that the politicians are so much in the pockets of these large corporations that it may not even matter what the people who are going to be most affected, harmed, and even killed by this devastation want or do to try to stop it. We have such a huge history of political and corporate shortsightedness.

Sure, I realize that we are dependent on oil and fossil fuels and that it would be a very good thing to limit our dependency on other countries for energy, but are we going to sacrifice the health and lives of hundreds of thousands to millions of U.S. citizens’ lives for a short-term solution that could last for only about 40 years and then our problems are worse than they’ve ever been?

When the dollar is completely devalued and we have a complete economic crash, are we really wanting to be totally dependent on the goodwill of a gas company or a corrupt government to continue to send in the water trucks because our wells and groundwater are so contaminated that we have no other source of fresh water?

We’ve lived without fossil fuels for hundreds of years. We can’t live past three days without clean water. We are already losing rights and freedoms every day by the bucket load, and something like this would create yet a new dependency for the very water we drink.

Am I anti-business for thinking this way? I don’t think so. I am very much in support of business. If you work hard at a business, are rewarded with great wealth, and are generous with the people who helped you get there, then great! Capitalism at it’s finest. Boo yah! I’m all for that. There are businesses and corporations that I support, albeit some more willingly than others.

However, I also believe that good ethics is imperative in any business practice, and what is happening with these fracking deals isn’t ethical…at all. Yes, it can create jobs and cause a boom in the localized economy for the very short term, but the longer term  harm and the cost of lives is far too great, and would create even more dependency on government agencies when we really need to be weaning ourselves away from those dependencies. We need to become a healthier and more self-sufficient society and not be so dependent on other countries, global corporations, or even our own government for everything.

Special thanks to ProgressOhio for the use of No Fracking Way under the Creative Commons license.

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1. Go ahead, gab somewhere else. I dare you.

Yet again I’ve decided to do a revamp of this blog to better reflect me, and so if one day I want to write about web stuff and the next I want to do a complete 180 and put up a post about how I sanded down my bathroom (soon!), then that’s what’s going to happen. The niche focus is working out very well for my gaming blog, but not so good for me. I refuse to be pigeon-holed!

Today was kind of a crap day. I couldn’t seem to do anything right and just felt downright cranky. Yet, I couldn’t easily explain my mood outside of overall dissonance. There is so much meaninglessness in our society. So many of us prostitute ourselves as corporate drones day after day for money, and for what? What meaningful purpose does it really serve outside of making someone else rich? And that someone else may not even be the type of person who shares our values and who we’d want to support financially or in any way whatsoever. Outside of the money, I often wonder if anyone *really* cares in these corporations. People aren’t going to be honest about it though because they don’t want to lose their jobs, if being a corporate slave is what enables them to feed their families. I’ve seen statistics spouted in various places that at least 70% of the employed population are ready to bolt from their current jobs as soon as the economy improves. That’s a lot of people if it’s true. I wish we lived in a society where the majority of the population spent most of their days in meaningful work (and play!) rather than in the one we have now where people cling desperately to jobs they hate on one side, and are scrounging just to find a job they’ll come to hate on the other. Still, considering the state of our current economy, I don’t know if anyone’s jobs are ultimately going to matter.

Unfortunately, I don’t see the economy improving any time soon. I see politicians (republican and democrat) caring only enough for the next election. I see the overall population vehemently dividing themselves between left and right, liberal and conservative, instead of working together for the overall good. (And no, I don’t mean socialism. I just view  cooperation and community as good things.)  I see stupid economic “solutions” that boil down to spending ourselves out of debt. It’s insanity! If you have a fiercely divided population, corrupt politicians on all sides, bribery and greed from our major corporations and financial institutions, and an economy based on debt, consumerism, and unlimited, cancerous growth, then I have to wonder how the economy is going to improve with all of the above working stringently against it. It seems much more likely that we are heading down a shorter and shorter road to complete economic collapse. What’s going to happen to all of the jobs that do remain when there is *no* energy to support them, when food and supply distribution is completely disrupted?

We’ve already reached peak oil and have reached or are very close to reaching the peak for other energy resources. We have no viable energy alternatives, and yet no one seems to be talking about it in Washington. (Drill baby drill doesn’t count when there is nothing to drill past the short term.) It’s not something far, far in our future that our descendants might have to figure out; it’s in our present, happening right now. Unpopular subjects when it comes to elections though.

So many want to believe that everything’s going to be okay, and once we get over this bump in the economy, that everything will go back to the way it was before. Now I’m optimistic enough to think that yes, we’ll come through okay and we certainly have the potential for a very good future, but everything is most certainly *not* going to go back to the way it was, and thank goodness for that! It seems a major time of transition is upon us. A change could be a great and exciting thing for the long-term, but are we prepared for a possible, or even probable, economic apocalypse?

Special thanks to Bethesda Softworks for Fallout 3. I’ve been a big fan of the Fallout series for many years and have finally gotten back to playing Fallout 3. Seems kind of fitting that it came out in 2008.

WordPress started out as a very customizable blogging tool, but it has developed into a pretty powerful content management package. You don’t even have to choose to add a blog to your site at all. Once everything is set up, it’s relatively easy to make content changes so that someone who’s not fully versed in web development jargon such as HTML, CSS, and PHP can still make changes on their own without too much fear of breaking something.

There’s a lot to be said for content management websites that are fully developed from scratch, but then web users often tend to get locked into using a particular web developer whenever they need to make changes to the site. (Not an issue if you’re developing your own site of course!)

As I’ve been wanting to start doing more with web and social media on a professional level, I’ve started up another website and have been messing around with logo design and basic layout. Again I decided on WordPress for overall content management, though I don’t plan to make it blog-based like this site. Mind you, it will still have a blog but just not themed around a blog as the main content.

I got sidetracked when I came to make my post here as there were new available for Headway, plugins, and WordPress itself…and two of my plugins stopped working correctly when the updates were completed. Smooth slider that use for my “featured posts” slider was somehow displaying all three featured posts at once and was HUGE. It was skewing up everything on the page. Also, the plugin I use for my tweets wasn’t displaying any tweets.

I fixed the Smooth Slider issue, but the tweets are still a mystery. It could be my fault though since the Headway theme I’m using was having an issue with Twitter plugins and I’d modified one of the core files to get it to work. Since the update, that’s probably been overwritten. Also, the update notes stated that Headway should now work with all plugins, so maybe there isn’t a Twitter issue anymore. I’ll need to investigate it a bit more. It’s possible it could even be a Twitter problem since my a.girl.IRL gaming blog has been unable to display tweets periodically throughout the day.

Special thanks to Felipe Lavin for the use of I Love WordPress under the Creative Commons license.

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