me2
11-26-2006, 12:10 PM
Many years ago I downloaded, tried out for a few days, and then bought Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 3. It was a few hundred k to a couple meg -- I don't remember. Within minutes of trying the thing out I was drawing pictures. Within hours I had the program pretty much down and was familiar with the options I had available.
The other day, finding this web site, I downloaded PSP3. But this time I have no way to buy it. Hence, I have thirty days to have PSP's power at my fingertips, and then it's gone. I called up Corel (who bought Jasc) to buy the program and, surprise, surprise, surprise, they don't support it, and, even "if they wanted to" (what I was told -- so the assistant doesn't want to help me???), they no longer have the codes to unlock the program -- translated: THEIR SOFTWARE! Then, as expected, they proceeded to ask me about why I'd want such an old and less powerful program, when I could easily download Paint Shop Pro XI, try it out, and then buy it for (as it turns out) roughly the same cost as PSP3 back when. So, I stifled my usual "I don't want to change something that works" mindset and decided to give it a try. It made much more sense, and it's high time I updated to this century.
Well, I'm on a dialup connection, as high speed probably won't see my area for another five to ten years. However, I had other things to do, so I thought I'd (gulp) download 190 or so megabytes. To make this story short, it failed after 120Mb. Why? I have no idea. Even though I was having no trouble, I just got dropped off line with only a couple hours (max) left. Obviously I did something wrong, should've used GetRight, for everyone knows perfectly good working connections, for five+ hours!!, just go away on their own. You see it's an electronics thing. Anything electronic will cease to function on its own, unexpectedly, and that's why nothing electronics-based has ever been built.
I went out with some friends last night and my misadventures were discussed briefly. It was suggested that I use their computer (they live a ways away and have high speed) to download PSPXI. Great! And that's what I did.
Stupid me, I never realized that it was necessary to be online while installing previously downloaded programs. When I downloaded PSP3 way back when, I must have known what I was doing much more than I do now, because somehow I was able to trick the installer into thinking I was online; otherwise, I'd never have been able to experience such a wonderful program. So, following the bouncing ball, I went online, and it's a good thing too. As it turns out, I needed to check my email so that I could retrieve the code so that I could, once installed, run the program. Hence, I retrieved the code, and, finally, now I could install this "easily downloaded" bridge to the current century.
The installation went ok and was pretty straight forward. I agreed to surrender my firstborn to the god Corel and to forever never hold Corel responsible should my computer burp or burn due to their programming skills, the usual. (You do read the license agreement, right?) So now I finally get to see where things had gone, without me, the old fogey, over the years, since the unpowerful PSP3's demise.
I clicked the new shortcut icon on my desktop and nothing happened. Then, a brief time later, suddenly my screen turned into a bunch of blocks of broken graphics images. I got scared. What have I done?! Then, presto, the PSPXI magically appeared from the broken blocks. Before my eyes was...
I don't know really, had to examine it, figure out what was there. To the right I saw my familiar color pallete. Great! That's how I get colors now. Then, below this, was a orderly group of boxes and cirles, some filled some not. This was something new. But then I saw my old familiar foreground/background color switchbox. Aha! The salesman was correct. I did need to check out something new, as this really was just like PSP3 but with more firepower.
Off to the left I had a myriad of options running down the screen, taking up not even a tenth of the graphics space. That's good being is the right color and squares pallette/controls/new stuff took up about a twelth of the graphics space. But that's ok, because all one need do is close these valuable tools or constantly move them out of the way to see anything that one is doing. Across the top, once agan, appeared a myriad of options, kind of like a long line of vertically challenged mailboxes, where many had drop-down/expansion options.
Passing my pointer over the various tools to the left, I finally found at the bottom my old friend: the pen tool. With this tool and this tool alone I have produced countless amounts of original artwork on the computer, and now here it was again. That salesman was dead-on. This was indeed PSP3 but in this century. I clicked the tool and began to draw. I moved the pointer near the center. (I forgot to mention that I opened a new blank page after bypassing all the options for how to take out a blank piece of paper. Transparent paper?? Preset blank pieces of paper??) Once there I clicked and held and started to draw a curve. It was odd that, instead of points appearing on the paper under my pen, like they did in the old days, when pens left ink wherever they touched the paper, the first point remained fixed while a line was drawn between that anchor and my current pointer/pen/actually a black triangle that resembled Asteroids' player ship position. So, startled at this, I released the hold and walla!, just what I wanted, a wonderfully drawn perfectly straight line. Well, actually, I'd drawn a wide freeform "s," but a perfect, positive-sloped, straight line was close enough to what I'd wanted. This program is much smarter than I am. After all, I'd not realized that pens didn't work like they did years and years ago in the century prior.
So, after some (actually several minutes) hunting all over the screen, I finally found the problem. Sure enough, this century, I forgot, draws pictures in vectors from an anchoring vertex. (I wonder if there's some manual now maybe called "Life for Dummies," so that I can learn how things are done now. Then I'll know how a pen and paper work. The older I get the more stupid I become, and I'm realizing it by the day.)
So I fixed the problem and clicked that I wanted freehand mode. Shazam! Now I was drawing extremely thin shapes on my paper, much too thin but at least I was drawing.
How do I change the pen size?
To make a long story short, I still don't know. After spending a half an hour and even searching the valuable War and Peace help pages and using the find-anything "search", I still do not have a %!#$%%^ing clue how to change the pen size.
But I did find out how to do something that is very powerful, powers well beyond that pitiful PSP3 of the century prior, if I could only figure out how it happened or even how to describe it to the "help" to turn it off??! Yeah, it seems that, as best as I can tell, I clicked something that auto fills between any two points I draw. Now, after I draw my extremely thin freehand "s," it suddenly looks like what I saw when I was learning about integrals in Calculus II. Giving up, as I have just become way too stupid for this century, I drew a makeshift freehand sine wave, just to see the areas get filled, and sat back exhausted, and my brain now mush.
So I typed the above to ask you will you please please please have some compassion on this feeble soul and give me a hand, for I have become stupid and I can't even figure out how to write on a piece of paper with a pen any more.
This software is just way too smart, much much smarter than I. Hence, I don't think I should buy this. My only hope is to re-engage my long time shelved machine language programming skills and remove the 30 day cutoff from PSP3. I can't buy it, so I'm just going to have to break it, that is if I ever want to put pen to paper again.
The other day, finding this web site, I downloaded PSP3. But this time I have no way to buy it. Hence, I have thirty days to have PSP's power at my fingertips, and then it's gone. I called up Corel (who bought Jasc) to buy the program and, surprise, surprise, surprise, they don't support it, and, even "if they wanted to" (what I was told -- so the assistant doesn't want to help me???), they no longer have the codes to unlock the program -- translated: THEIR SOFTWARE! Then, as expected, they proceeded to ask me about why I'd want such an old and less powerful program, when I could easily download Paint Shop Pro XI, try it out, and then buy it for (as it turns out) roughly the same cost as PSP3 back when. So, I stifled my usual "I don't want to change something that works" mindset and decided to give it a try. It made much more sense, and it's high time I updated to this century.
Well, I'm on a dialup connection, as high speed probably won't see my area for another five to ten years. However, I had other things to do, so I thought I'd (gulp) download 190 or so megabytes. To make this story short, it failed after 120Mb. Why? I have no idea. Even though I was having no trouble, I just got dropped off line with only a couple hours (max) left. Obviously I did something wrong, should've used GetRight, for everyone knows perfectly good working connections, for five+ hours!!, just go away on their own. You see it's an electronics thing. Anything electronic will cease to function on its own, unexpectedly, and that's why nothing electronics-based has ever been built.
I went out with some friends last night and my misadventures were discussed briefly. It was suggested that I use their computer (they live a ways away and have high speed) to download PSPXI. Great! And that's what I did.
Stupid me, I never realized that it was necessary to be online while installing previously downloaded programs. When I downloaded PSP3 way back when, I must have known what I was doing much more than I do now, because somehow I was able to trick the installer into thinking I was online; otherwise, I'd never have been able to experience such a wonderful program. So, following the bouncing ball, I went online, and it's a good thing too. As it turns out, I needed to check my email so that I could retrieve the code so that I could, once installed, run the program. Hence, I retrieved the code, and, finally, now I could install this "easily downloaded" bridge to the current century.
The installation went ok and was pretty straight forward. I agreed to surrender my firstborn to the god Corel and to forever never hold Corel responsible should my computer burp or burn due to their programming skills, the usual. (You do read the license agreement, right?) So now I finally get to see where things had gone, without me, the old fogey, over the years, since the unpowerful PSP3's demise.
I clicked the new shortcut icon on my desktop and nothing happened. Then, a brief time later, suddenly my screen turned into a bunch of blocks of broken graphics images. I got scared. What have I done?! Then, presto, the PSPXI magically appeared from the broken blocks. Before my eyes was...
I don't know really, had to examine it, figure out what was there. To the right I saw my familiar color pallete. Great! That's how I get colors now. Then, below this, was a orderly group of boxes and cirles, some filled some not. This was something new. But then I saw my old familiar foreground/background color switchbox. Aha! The salesman was correct. I did need to check out something new, as this really was just like PSP3 but with more firepower.
Off to the left I had a myriad of options running down the screen, taking up not even a tenth of the graphics space. That's good being is the right color and squares pallette/controls/new stuff took up about a twelth of the graphics space. But that's ok, because all one need do is close these valuable tools or constantly move them out of the way to see anything that one is doing. Across the top, once agan, appeared a myriad of options, kind of like a long line of vertically challenged mailboxes, where many had drop-down/expansion options.
Passing my pointer over the various tools to the left, I finally found at the bottom my old friend: the pen tool. With this tool and this tool alone I have produced countless amounts of original artwork on the computer, and now here it was again. That salesman was dead-on. This was indeed PSP3 but in this century. I clicked the tool and began to draw. I moved the pointer near the center. (I forgot to mention that I opened a new blank page after bypassing all the options for how to take out a blank piece of paper. Transparent paper?? Preset blank pieces of paper??) Once there I clicked and held and started to draw a curve. It was odd that, instead of points appearing on the paper under my pen, like they did in the old days, when pens left ink wherever they touched the paper, the first point remained fixed while a line was drawn between that anchor and my current pointer/pen/actually a black triangle that resembled Asteroids' player ship position. So, startled at this, I released the hold and walla!, just what I wanted, a wonderfully drawn perfectly straight line. Well, actually, I'd drawn a wide freeform "s," but a perfect, positive-sloped, straight line was close enough to what I'd wanted. This program is much smarter than I am. After all, I'd not realized that pens didn't work like they did years and years ago in the century prior.
So, after some (actually several minutes) hunting all over the screen, I finally found the problem. Sure enough, this century, I forgot, draws pictures in vectors from an anchoring vertex. (I wonder if there's some manual now maybe called "Life for Dummies," so that I can learn how things are done now. Then I'll know how a pen and paper work. The older I get the more stupid I become, and I'm realizing it by the day.)
So I fixed the problem and clicked that I wanted freehand mode. Shazam! Now I was drawing extremely thin shapes on my paper, much too thin but at least I was drawing.
How do I change the pen size?
To make a long story short, I still don't know. After spending a half an hour and even searching the valuable War and Peace help pages and using the find-anything "search", I still do not have a %!#$%%^ing clue how to change the pen size.
But I did find out how to do something that is very powerful, powers well beyond that pitiful PSP3 of the century prior, if I could only figure out how it happened or even how to describe it to the "help" to turn it off??! Yeah, it seems that, as best as I can tell, I clicked something that auto fills between any two points I draw. Now, after I draw my extremely thin freehand "s," it suddenly looks like what I saw when I was learning about integrals in Calculus II. Giving up, as I have just become way too stupid for this century, I drew a makeshift freehand sine wave, just to see the areas get filled, and sat back exhausted, and my brain now mush.
So I typed the above to ask you will you please please please have some compassion on this feeble soul and give me a hand, for I have become stupid and I can't even figure out how to write on a piece of paper with a pen any more.
This software is just way too smart, much much smarter than I. Hence, I don't think I should buy this. My only hope is to re-engage my long time shelved machine language programming skills and remove the 30 day cutoff from PSP3. I can't buy it, so I'm just going to have to break it, that is if I ever want to put pen to paper again.