While there’s a lot of expensive toys and whistles, there’s two that I stick with for site work: Ultimate Paint for normal use and Gimp for layering needs.

Ultimate Paint’s (UP) great for resizing, cropping, and standard playing around with photos or web images and allows for png, jpg, and a handful of other formats I never use.  Jpg saving by default is at around 70%, decreasing the file size which can save on bandwidth for some sites…not to mention pageload for visitors.  Visually on the web, I haven’t seen a difference in clarity yet on monitors.

Gimp on the other hand is for those times I want to work on site themes and need some special effects like translucent layering.  I’ve had great results with it and learned on my own through Googling for online tutorials. 

Graphic tools like anything else require investment, but for serious bloggers looking to play with things and get under the hood of their blog’s graphic needs, these two fit the ticket…without having to shell out one cent!

Face it…you’re not in to the whole blogging gig to make someone else rich…are ya?

Being we were in public I opted for the lady at the changing room to assist with measurements.

I don’t remember clothing being as expensive when I went from youth to adult sizes. Then again I never did the shopping, as my daughter isn’t…well, she is but she doesn’t pay attention to price tags…kind of like what I did.

Funny, the more I look at her it makes me realize what things would have been like if I was born a female. That’s usually the time I realize she’s a dweeb and more like her mother every day.

Kids never grow up, nor do the parents that love them through thick and thin.

I installed Blogjet and was very carefully watching ‘any’ sign for problems.  It’s WYSIWYG editor “doesn’t” work well with right aligning images as I’m prone, but switching to “View->HTML” brings up the entry in it’s code…a few keystrokes and all’s well.

The software comes fully functional from the looks for a trial 30 days. After that, it’s a nickle short of being $40USD.  Not bad.  So far I’ve set up this and another blog, no muss or fuss.

The only issue is editting prior entries, since those were done in native WP which isn’t always Blogjet friendly.  Chances are if it keeps me from having to visit my site just to enter, I’ll drop the change and invest in it.

The only downside is there isn’t a “more” feature, something I enjoyed using in WordPress…might be a workaround through HTML.

Tron doesn’t play as expected with lightcycles, this version of the virtual lifestyle uses tanks controlled by virtual joysticks. It offers individual as well as multiplayer, for the most part I ripped apart whoever was on the other end…it’s hard to say if it was due to system lag or WiFi speed on the other person’s part…or maybe I’m just ‘that good’.

For a time waster, I’d recommend it over Angry Birds Lite…something I got tired of having on my iPod after beating it.