Driving to work Part 2

Amazingly enough, today, exactly one week after my first trip to town where I met up with the cows, I saw more. Or rather, I suspect they were the same two cows as I saw last Friday, but....

It appears they found some funny weeds or something, when they crossed that fence. Perhaps, the grass REALLY is greener on the other side.... At any rate, boy, they were messed up!

This picture says it all.

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Actually, I was reading up on "freebie applications" on the internet, and there were comments that if you did not want to pay for the rather expensive Adobe Photoshop application to manipulate photographs, that the GIMP program does the job, for free.

I downloaded it, and was playing around with it. It's got a ton of options - more so than any other 'freebie' or "lite" graphics package I have played with - and to me, was a bit confusing in that respect. However, with a little playing around with it, I could begin to use some of the more advanced features.

And yes, they have documentation available for download - but documentation is for .. other people (grin). Actually, if I have time, I will download the documentation too, and see what I can learn. In the meantime, if anyone's interested in an interesting freebie graphics program, here's the link to this "open source" application.

http://www.gimp.org/windows/

There's a ton of other interesting freeware applications out there these days, including full anti-virus suites that do a bang up job (try AVG Free or Avast both free for home use, anti-spyware applications (including Microsoft's own new Windows Defender for XP), Microsoft-Office like packages such as OpenOffice.Org's OpenOffice.org package (yeah that was a play on words).

Another interesting program is "Google Earth". You can view satellite images (recorded in recent times - not real-time) of most of the world, and more heavily populated areas in fairly fine detail. Where I live, more rural, you can see the valley and the swaths of color where the cornfields and other crops and trees are grown, but in a city environ, like where my in-laws live in Baton Rouge, or my friend in Oklahoma City, you can see cars parked in the driveway of their house. Also, "famous regions" (i.e. Eiffel Tower in Paris, Grand Canyon in Arizona, etc) are shown in fairly good detail. The catch with Google Earth is that you really need to have a high-speed internet connection and fairly good graphics card to be able to get the benefit of the program.

Here's an "editor's pick" of 101 useful freeware applications: http://www.pcworld.com/52516

Many of these have corporate sponsorship, as it's deemed a way for companies to open doors to new customers. If you like the free product, maybe you'll tell your friends, and sooner or later someone will upgrade to a paid version. So, if you're interested in any of these products, Google them (or use yahoo search, or MSN search, etc) and enjoy.

That cow sure did.