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For These Guys, “The Lost Egyptians” … Somewhere Between New York and Montana. Afterall, It’s a big country! Homeland Security needs all the help it can get. Pirate’s Cove has more.

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Question for the Ages

Why is my blog, “Kerfuffles”, listed front and center as a “Friend Of” on the opening page of The Alliance of Communist Blogs?

The Peace Maker

of Pennsylvania Avenue

“We Want PEACE and We Are Willing To Bear Its Burdens!” ~~ White House Grounds in Time of War, 2006.

It is a simple thing to pin a black ribbon onto one’s breast or to carry a “peace” placard on high or to paste “peace” logos on a blog, however, this man is an action figure of a peacemaker. No one could possibly long for peace more than he, as he is on the front line. Those who enjoy nights of blissful sleep upon feathery soft beds should say a prayer of gratitude for men and women like him who carry the weight and burdens of peacemaking. Wear ephemeral ribbons and chant “peace in our time, give us peace”, because this man is the guardian of the freedom to do such things.

The image, The Peacemaker, was originally uploaded by barneykin. It is posted here from Neddy’s favorites.

No More Windmill Tilting

But I Still Hate Photoshop!

I now have my “Kinderdijk Windmill Picture” all fixed. It is not perfect, as somehow when my “Knight in Shining Armor” rescued it, the resolution changed dramatically. However, the dreaded raindrop in the sky is now “out, out damn spot! It is no longer haunting me each time I gaze upon my beautiful memory.

And yes, yes, to commenter “bob”, aka as “The Lurking, Trolling Adobe Software Engineer”, I at first thought that “alt-click” probably meant “alt + mouse click”, as that seemed most logical. When that didn’t work, I tried everything else I could think of. I am not asking for the ability to create the “Moon and Star Islands” with my photo editing. All I want is to be able to do the basics. Picasa2 is perfect for me. However, I cannot write text with it, and I cannot do cloning. Anyway, thanks to the generosity of others (my husband) I have my windmills all fixed, and I no longer have to tilt at them. My husband even offered to add more willmills for me. Imagine that! And he doesn’t even own Adobe Photoshop. But I am a naturalist; I don’t want falsifications in my photography. Here are my windmills without the raindrop in the sky: Kinderdijk Windmills! Enjoy.

I Hate PhotoShop!

There! I’ve said it, finally releasing all that frustration built up over these past three years of my using that miserable excuse for computer software! I had always thought it was a “learning curve” thing, and that eventually I would “get it”. Today I have finally come to the realization that I will never round that “learning curve” and it is not my fault!

I hate using Adobe Photoshop 2.0. It is so difficult! The instruction window, which PhotoShop so cutely refers to as a “recipe”, will not stay open when I do what it tells me to do. Then I have to memorize all the recipe steps. When I finally get all that embedded into my brain well enough to start the execution of the many, many steps, it is then that I discover they don’t work anyway.

Now I may be a Granny, but I do know a thing or two about computers! However, I don’t know enough to use Adobe PhotoShop, apparently! Their recipe tells me that if I am using Windows, than I must “alt – click”. Well I would do that if I knew what it meant. I have been using Windows since it was first invented and all that time without ever knowing what “alt – click” means. It must have been a miracle that I got this far in the world! Well, I tried “alt – control”, “alt – enter”, “alt – shift”, and “alt – every key on the keyboard”, and nothing works. Where the heck is the “alt – click” key???????

All I was trying to do was a bit of cloning. I just wanted to remove the raindrop that you can see in the sky in the upper right of my beautiful picture of windmills. I followed all the steps to the letter, and I couldn’t get anything acceptable. It is always the case with Adobe Photo-Shop that every time I try to use it, I end up closing it and going over to MS Picture-It 7.0 or PaintShop Pro or Picassa or two or three other “FREE” photo softwares I have installed. All of those actually work. I cannot even add text to a picture in Adobe Photoshop without going through 100 steps, and then I end up with script too small for the human eye to read. Picture-It is very simple – I just type in a box on the picture, and “voila!”

All the free photo-editing software works as it should, and the only photo-editing software that I bought and paid for, Adobe PhotoShop Elements 2.0, is unusable. Go figure! If I weren’t so frustrated I would have gone over to my Nero software to see if I can clone with it, but instead I sent the picture to someone who has never used Adobe PhotoShop, and he is cloning it for me.

And don’t write and tell me to upgrade to Adobe® Photoshop® Elements 4.0, as I am not that dumb!