Software

Yea, that's right, Photoshop has a price of $649.99. Ok, I exaggerated by a cent. GIMP's new features include more integrated looks for mac and windows, more friendly object selection, perspective cloning, and red-eye removal. Yea, version 2.4 and red eye removal is finally made into it's own tool. I love it when open source tools reach a maturity comparable to the big guy's products. Photoshpping is getting into mainstream culture now. I wonder when people will stop paying for and stealing Photoshop and just switch to GIMP. As for the new features, there's obviously a little bit more depth to them:

Isn't it great digging out the old NES every once and a while? These new games just aren't the same as the good ol' Super Techno Bowl, Kirby's Dreamland, and Ivan Ironman's Off Road (yea, possibly the greatest arcade game ever). Today I was sifting through some embarrasingly poorly organized files and I found a game that a friend of mine, Mike, and I worked on together a few years ago over the summer in a programming class. A classic Tank Battle game!

Considering both Microsoft and Apple have their own web browsers, it's amazing that Firefox has a whole 13-15% of the market. When I got Vista, I thought I'd try out Internet Explorer 7 just for the heck of it, but it quickly lost favor when it "forgot" how to use Google as it's search engine (thanks to my iGoogle home page). It wasn't very long before I found the Add-Ons that gave it the power I love about open source tools.

I've talked quite a bit here about how I like open source so much, and I get the feeling that my friends are getting sick of me talking about it. You see, I've gotten my friends hooked on lan parties. It started off playing Armagetron AD, and turned into a series of parties as big as 10 people all playing over one wireless router. This one game started the ball rolling.

Almost everybody uses an instant messenger, but I was surprised how many people put up with 2 or more. Most commonly the combination seems to be AIM and MSN. In an effort to be able to chat with all of my friends and get into different bug-tracking chatrooms, I now have screen names for AIM, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, and my university's own XMPP (Jabber).

So the recent craze among my friends has been messing around with pictures using Adobe Photoshop. Go ahead, check it out just make sure you check out the price tag too. Lucky for me, I've always been into the open source/free software.