More Phun With Photoshop

The SaveOurSail flyer
I've mostly been working on graphics for the SSBN-658 Memorial Site Fund while waiting for the team to make some decisions about The Plan -- and snagging related images from the intarweb. The flier here is based on the keel laying artwork generated for public consumption back in the day.

I'm not real happy with the image of the sail in this, but it works better in this context than the rendering seen on the earlier flier. In my opinion, of course. Changes will be made when or if the SOS Group makes the decisions.

Fun With Free Software

I've been dabbling with Google SketchUp for a little bit lately. In a fit of frustration while trying to draw a fairly simple part, I decided to see if I could do something a little more useful, like a rendering of the SSBN658 Sail in Alden Park in time for the presentation to the board.

I didn't make that deadline, or if I did nobody said so... so yesterday I decided to fiddle with the drawing a little more, and so I did. Some of the results are here.

From SOS Graphics

Obviously it needs more work, but considering that the only part I had to construct was the cannon stand, I'm mightily impressed. That's right, all the objects in that drawing are available from within the software!

If you follow the link to the gallery, there's a short AVI video, also made in SketchUp. Also mighty impressive from free software.

What a whirl!"

We're moving ahead!

http://www.saveoursail.com is ours, and is up and running. Not much content to see there yet, so I'm leaving the link out for the gluttons among you to copy and paste all on your own.

Today was a computer day here, not the first and not the last but they better damn well be simpler in the future or they're all going out the window!

What I did: three computers running two OSs and four different browsers. Adding captions, tags, and geotags to  a slew of pictures, some related to the museum, some to the sail, and some to my virtual CV. Joined Flickr because their community looks a lot more organized than Google's. Added albums in both places, to be linked here later... because with the four accounts I have I got confused and spent an hour or so tagging images for an album that I had to delete because it was in the savoursail album on Picassa. If you're still a GFP and want to find them, search for ssbn 658 when you're at the Picassa albums search bar...

And then I decided, because I'm feeling a little manic today and short of way too many things to do, to call PG&E to see if we could figure out why my bill went up recently, even though I'm out of the house a lot more since I started with the Foundation. I didn't get a definitive answer, but it appears that there's been an increase in electric use at my house between the hours of 8 and ten AM. Curious, that, since I'm often not here during those hours.

Anyway, my fingers have taken all the punishment they can stand for the day... at least I got a little more organized in the tool room, the horn on the Falcon fixed again, my new bench vise lubed up and ready to install, and a bunch of website stuff moved slightly forward.

Time, now, to eat, pet the kitties, watch today's episode of "Have Gun, Will Travel" and then take a bath and get ready for tomorrow up at the farm. (If you really, really want to see some of what I did today, check out my Flickr album And no, I don't know if it works for you... it's my first attempt to work with Yahoo anything in about a decade.