I got home today and found a nice package in the mailbox. I always get giddy when there is anything in there other than direct mail ads and bills. This time the giddyness was fully justified. It turned out to be my package of schwag from The SouthEast LinuxFest. W00T!

I helped out with some of the graphics for the conference and this was my reward. Honestly, I would have loved to attend but it was just too far for me. I am booking in for the Ohio Linux Fest this September though so hopefully I can meet some of the wonderful people in this community.

Congratulations to Dave Yates and the rest of his cohorts on what by all accounts sounded like a complete and utter success. Indeed the reviews have been so glowing that I would think they’re wondering what they have to do to meet expectations next year.

Anyways, with yet another thunderstorm fast approaching, I decided to get my daughter to pose with all the SELF schwag for a quick photo. Kudos to all the SELF guys and thanks so much for the stuff, and for allowing me to help out.

Now I’ll have a clean change of clothes to wear in Ohio!

You just gotta love a world in which you can add both Frogger and Asteroids to your website with a simple cut and paste of some html code.

Now if only there were faithful flash versions of Omega Race, Galaga, and maybe a Scott Adams adventure. Jeez, I’d never get anything done!

I got the code snippets for these games (there are others) from http://www.neave.com/games/

In a second attempt to make more use of my Wacom tablet, and learn a little bit more about using the Gimp in the process, I sat down tonight and decided to attempt a little more sketching. I always liked doodling cars in my youth, so I did a quick sketch in the Gimp and one thing led to another and I ended up with this about two hours later (click it to get a slightly larger version):

There are a lot of problems with it if you look too closely (doing anything remotely attractive with the wheels is still completely above me) but it’s a starting point anyhow.

I got all inspired today at lunch after checking out stuff like David Boyle’s awesome portfolio, that has wonderful things like this.

So tonight I finally got familiar with using Gimp layers but I realized one thing:  I really need to study up on Gimp shortcut keys. I’m quite comfortable with keyboarding in Inkscape, but in the Gimp I’m pretty much hunt and click at this point.

If anybody does sketching like this with the Gimp and can give me any pointers, please grace the comment section with your wisdom.