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Showing posts from January, 2007

Start to stop, Install to uninstall...

An IT person's favorite joke about Windows is how you click "Start" to stop the computer. The Start button is perhaps the most joked about icon in Windows, but I suppose without some sort of text written on the screen, figuring out what to click in lengthy 2 hour technical support calls would only extend the painful experience. Of course, VerifyMyPC reduces technical support times from 2 hours to 5 minutes. And you have a more intelligent conversation with the person on the other end. And you don't end up having the user re-install Windows because you can't figure out what they did to mess up their computer. But that's not what I want to talk about. Instead, Add/Remove Programs finally drove me up the wall. I have a 3GHz PC. Even though it is about 3 years old, it is still a considerably high-end PC. How long does it take to figure out what is installed on my PC? About 1 minute. I've been on slower PCs where it takes several minutes before I can d

Photoshop Tip...

Amazingly no one has figured out how to make a hollow rectangle with Photoshop. I recently needed to be able to do this and came up with a method of accomplishing this with shapes. Here's how: 1) Create a new document (or use the workspace you want the shape to be added to. 2) Select the shape tool you wish to use. Most people want a hollow rectangle (i.e. rectangle tool), but this works with any of the shapes: Hollow rounded rectangle, hollow circle, hollow ellipse, etc. Even hollow lines (but those are effectively rotated rectangles). You get the idea. 3) Draw the shape on the canvas. A new shape object should be added to the layers palette. 4) Double-click the shape object in the layers palette to open the "Layer Style" window. 5) On the "Blending Options" page, change the "Advanced Blending"'s "Fill Opacity" to 0%. 6) Next, go to the "Stroke" page. If preview is enabled, you should see what I'm getting at b