I forgot to mention that Monday was my birthday. I don't focus too much on birthdays, never really have. It seems a bit egotistical to have a day to celebrate when someone was born. Anyway, my best gal bought me 4 new MetallicA shirts. So good times for me. Now I have 22 total. Also, I got my computer chair as an early gift, which we have already covered. The chair is still working out perfectly. I got a few other things as well, which I won't detail.

I have always hated Adobe products. Photoshop, Premier, Audition, Illustrator, After Effects, etc.. I have tried to get into them several times over the years and they just all seem to suck really bad. They are all "Mac-y" if you don't mind my making up a word. They also all seem to take a degree in fucking brain surgery to be able to use them effectively. And don't even get me started on Flash, ColdFusion, Acrobat, and all their other shit I have to put up with at work. Additionally, they are ungodly expensive for some reason. The average end user is not going to give anyone 650 bucks for software. Plenty of reasons to hate and avoid them at all costs.

I have always used Paint Shop Pro (PSP) for editing pictures. Paint Shop Pro will easily do everything Adobe Photoshop will do, and at around 75 dollars, it is nearly 1/10th the price. It was a fantastic product until Jasc got greedy and sold out to Corel. Now the thing sucks ass. At the heart of it, it is still the old school really good Jasc version, but its coated with a bunch of overhead crap that people just don't need, thus clouding the product and taxing your system resources. I can understand them wanting to appeal to the lowest common denominator, thus making their program geared toward stupid people, but it has gotten ridiculous lately to the point that I decided to go looking for an alternative.

I inadvertently came across a product called Paint.Net. It seems to be pretty wicked so far. It appears to be a really pumped up version of Paint that has been packaged into Windows operating systems for some time now. the best part about it is that it is FREE!

So far, I seem to be able to do the same things I could in PSP, and I have not run into any issues at all. In a lot of respects, it appears to be better than PSP. Granted, I have not spent a lot of time with it, or attempted to do anything really extravagant, but I am going to try really hard to not use PSP anymore and I am going to avoid the temptation to try Adobe's latest Photoshop offering.

You can get it from http://www.getpaint.net/index2.html.