From doodle to sidebar graphic to browser hell revisited

Started as a doodle. Ended up as a white outline graphic on the right side of my Recent Entries and Friends pages. And here's the story of how it got there.

Did a small sketch on a Canson pad and inked it with one of the many pens lying on the kitchen table. (Not very professional. Hah.)

Scanned it using the Microtek Scanmaker into Photoshop Elements 2. Now this has to be a wonder of modern-day consumer grade image processing software because it was a mere three-step process to turn a B/W scan into a white outline on a transparent layer, and I'm sure I wasn't even doing it the quickest way. The hardest part was figuring out what the second step should be. (non-contiguous magic eraser is my friend)

Okay, so I saved the image as PNG-24 with alpha channel (whee!), uploaded it, added a few lines of CSS to my custom style. And it looked fine in Phoenix. Great! A few minutes later, I checked with IE6/Win and ugh...

As I had just discovered, IE6/Win does not have full PNG support. Specifically, if it doesn't render alpha transparency but places the image in a solid-colored box instead. Actually, it does handle alpha transparency but only if the HTML is rewritten to use Microsoft-specific DirectX extensions to CSS! Blegh!

Oh well... so much for that plan. For now, I'm using a transparent GIF image that is not anti-aliased. Gee, thanks Microsoft. :/

GS 1300 and Friday Five

GS 1300 at Where's George!

This page was refreshed on Mar-07-03 09:24 AM
You have entered 58,734 Bills worth $108,319.
Bills with hits: 12,190
Total hits: 16,103
Hit rate: 20.75%.
George Score: 1,300.

It's actually 1300.055, according to the formula, so I know that's not from rounding up.

Gotta do a Friday Five sooner or later...

1. What was the last song you heard?
The Animal Song, Savage Garden.

2. What were the last two movies you saw?
Australia: Land Beyond Time and X-Men.

3. What were the last three things you purchased?
Dinner at Burger King. Gas at Express. Lunch at New China yesterday.

4. What four things do you need to do this weekend?
Geocaching. Oh, there are three other things? I guess I'll eat, sleep and do the laundry too.

5. Who are the last five people you talked to?
The cashier and another employee at Burger King, pump attendant at Express, Gayle, Kenn.