Just uploaded another tutorial to Inkscape Tutorials, “Creating Text with a Dropshadow.”

I could use a less bland name for the Inkscape Tutorials site. Any suggestions?

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They say that the opposite of hate is not love, but indifference. Well then, I have a love/indifference relationship with my garden.

There are days when I love puttering around out there, amongst the plants and flowers and mulch. And there are many more days when I see no point in it all. They’re just plants. Let ‘em live their own lives.

This is a particular problem now, as I’m in a ”love” upswing. I’ve been watering and weeding and trimming every evening for the past couple of days, happily envisioning a much bigger, tamer, more colorful garden.

But I know that will end. What will sustain my garden during the dull times? I’ve tried setting aside five minutes a day to maintain my garden, and like most things I do so enthusiastically for a week or two, then fall out of the habit. I have too many things that need five minutes a day (e-mail, snailmail, blogs, my tickler file, my library, meditation, scripture reading, Tai Chi…). I don’t get to all of that every day as it is.

The lamps bathe the soft beiges of the living room in soft, warm light. The cats lay on the couches, sleepily staring at me sideways. Freshly-baked muffins cool on a rack, while chocolate chip cookies patiently scent the house from their hiding places in the oven. My Bible lays open on my lap as I dive through Romans chapter four, which I’m now reading at full comprehension for the first time in my life.

It was a long, busy day at work, and the lingering sniffling nose and wheezing throat only made it feel longer. But this more than makes up for it.

It’s a good thing that, every so often, life’s perfect. Thank God.

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Nothing quite like a walk around town to make one feel a little more alive. Helps after spending the past four days locked up in the house.

Which is not exactly fair; on Friday my parents were kind enough to bring out some emergency rations (ginger ale and baked beans; what better for when you don’t want to cook? Except chicken noodle soup, which none of us thought of). And on Saturday, I went to Guy’s Night Out, though the featured attraction was a miss. Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (the original), a boring pseudo-morality tale that took two hours to get to the cool giant stuff, and was full of bland, evil characters. Pah.

We did get to see the pilot episode of the new Doctor Who, and wow is it fantastic! No, seriously, I loved every minute of it, and not in a cheesy retro way. They managed to update it without losing certain essential elements (like the TARDIS). And the new Doctor is perfect; quick on his feet, very intelligent, rather scattered, and morally a bit ambiguous.

Meanwhile, today was spent at home, mainly getting back on my feet after the Death Plague last week. Paid some bills online—and why doesn’t everyone else do this? I can pay all my bills in under ten minutes, every other week.

Anyvay. I discovered I had some cash left over, so I ordered six identical webcams online. I plan to also buy a bunch of USB headsets and give one of each to my various friends spread throughout the land, so we can use Skype to talk with each other using video. Now I just wish Skype allowed videoconferencing, so that myself, Saalon, and Brennen could be in the same videophone call together. Ah well, certainly someday.

Sorry for the silence; I came down with some sort of Death Plague that laid me in bed since Wednesday. I seem to be mostly over it by now, though.

Meanwhile, I’ve uploaded a few Inkscape tutorials (since removed) in the hopes that it will help others learn that wonderful tool. And there seems to be very few decent Inkscape tutorials out there.

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I’ve been playing around with Inkscape, a graphical editing program. That’s a clunky description, I realize, but there are about five hundred and twenty-three different applications that “manipulate images,” and it seems each does something slightly different than the rest. None can be described in three words.

Anyway, Inkscape lets you draw vector-based graphics, which means when you draw a line, the program remembers the beginning and endpoint of the line, and what you did with it, so after drawing twenty other lines, you can go back to the first one and make just that one a different color. Or shift its position slightly. Or whatever.

It’s also free and open-source. This attracted me, since I have a paranoid suspicion that the maker of any closed-source application I use will die out sooner rather than later, and open-source applications at least have a better chance of survival and continued support, improvements, bug fixes, etc.

Anyway, so I’ve been playing around with it. I have no pretty self-made graphics to share, sadly, as I appear to be a slow, detail-oriented artist. I like building up complex scenes rather than dashing off a quick logo. I’m working on an SF scene with mecha and futuristic buildings, which will probably look terrible but will at least teach me Inkscape.

I do have a before-and-after graphic to show, though, since one of the reasons I downloaded Inkscape was to try my hand at ”vectoring” an image into a wallpaper. What does “vectoring” mean? Well, a lot of images would make lovely desktop wallpapers, but are grainy or otherwise low in quality. One cleaning method involves tracing vector lines on top of the grainy lines, using a program like Inkscape.

I have an image like that, from Bokura ga Ita (Akitaroh Daichi‘s latest, a high school romantic comedy). I may never finish it, since it is quite a bit of work, but in any event I wanted to show you an example of the process, before and after.

Original

Inkscaped

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I’m back from Otakon 2006. It was exhausting but great fun; got to hang out with several friends. It’s always much better with friends than alone. Infinitely better.

I’ve gone to quite a few anime conventions alone. In fact, I think I spent Otakons 2001 through 2004 alone, as well as my visits to Katsucon. The only reason I wasn’t alone at last year’s Otakon was because I was with the Otherspace crew.

I’ve posted a report along with photos of some cosplayers.

I had a tiring day at work, though it’s a good kind of tiring. I realized that I have to change a viewpoint I wrote about earlier; I wrote that my job is half self-directed and half service of others. It’s actually all service of others. Even the self-directed bit is there to help other people.

See, I’ve been frustrated by the number of people who stop by my cube to ask me a question or ask me to do a build as soon as possible. But that’s my job, to answer questions and do builds as requested. (Though folks are supposed to give me some notice ahead of time for builds.)

…ugh. My apologies; I can’t write tonight. Though perhaps I feel that way because I’ve been reading my precious copy of unrequited poetry, a book of poetry containing some of Brennen‘s work (source). There’s a lot of fantastic poetry in here. One of my favorites, by CarolAnn Bearnes:

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