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You know how sometimes life is good and you can do no wrong?

Well I just had the opposite – NOTHING went right for me over the last 4 days!

I should have paid closer attention to a CD I received recently. If I had, maybe I would have missed this little groundswell of unpleasantness that I just experienced. Now to be truthful all the following can really be linked back to just one source – me – but being a guy, well, you just gotta find another reason…

So about that disk…

I was evaluating some software that a friend of mine had loaned me recently. Instead of the original, he gave me a copy (he obviously knew I was going to have a bad run and didn’t want to chance his original…)

He knows better, AND I certainly know better, but somehow “the obvious” escaped us both. He had stuck a little label on the CD to help identify what it was. Not a CD label mind you, but a small mailing label. So, I put it in my drive and spun it up,. The software installed perfectly but then the computer started making sounds, somewhere between a 747 trying to take off and a jackhammer outside your window…. not good….not good at all…

Needless to say, as soon as the racket started I knew what the problem was (isn’t hindsight wonderful…) and I popped out the CD. Sure enough, the label was gone…

I tried (with fingers crossed) putting the disk back in my drive in hopes of picking up the label and on the third try, was rewarded. It popped out with the label just hanging on to the back. After my victory dance I took a closer look at the label and found that I had recovered 99.5% of it. A very small piece in the middle was missing, very small… and everything was working find now, so I assumed (dangerous word that) that all would be well…

It took me about two weeks to catch on… Originally, in the morning when I checked my computer I found that it had rebooted over night (as everyone else I just blamed this on a flurry of power outages and Microsoft updates.) Then late last week I needed to copy some material on to a CD for a friend of mine. Every time I inserted a disk to burn, my computer rebooted…

So my previous reboots occurred when my backups tried to burn to disk over night and for the past week I had turned my backups off while working on something and only now did the burner try to run again and BOOM – my computer reset – again and again and again. Obviously that little 0.5% of a piece of paper had come to rest in all together the wrong area!

My only option was to replace the DVD burner, not a biggie by itself but it was the start of a miserable four days of having my brain out of gear…

What has happened since is that I have been trying to get my daughters blog personalized to her liking (i.e. pinks and fuscia’s versus greens and browns.) This should not have been a big deal but…

I had the tools to do the job, Corel Draw (which I still think is one of the best drawing packages out there), and Absolute Color Picker which would allow me to mix and match colors just the way she wanted it. This should not have been a major issue – but for some reason it was…

To add to my confusion AND again most of the problems here were ME. My computer is starting to show its age. It’s a Pentium 4, with only 1GB of computer memory and only 15GB of disk space left. Corel Draw (and it’s ancillary tools) LOVES memory, so much so that they don’t always give it back when they are done with it. It’s a great tool, but there is a cost…

The original challenge was changing the main picture in her blog. Instead of the tree, meadow and flowing clouds she wanted pictures of herself performing. The challenge came in that the header picture also contained a flowing ribbon and a bottom color that blended into the rest of the blog. Trust me, the effect looked great and she wanted the same thing but with her pictures and color scheme. This is definitely something that Corel can handle.

So after acquiring the right pictures, rearranging them and adding the right colors. The next thing I had to tackle was the ribbon but for the life of me I could not figure out how. One of the biggest problems I have found with Corel Draw is that with each new version, they change their button and tools layouts and no matter how hard I tried I could not find what I needed. Eventually a phone call to my daughter (who knows how to use Corel Draw much better than I thanks to all those school projects) put me on the right path.

Finally I insterted a colored area below the ribbon to let the image flow naturally into the blog background itself (and giving it a really nice effect). I took out my trusty Absolute Color Picker, found the color of the background and set the color in Corel and filled it in. Now all I had to do was save the drawing, open it up into Corel Photo Paint, crop the image and resize it to fit where the other picture was and I could then move on to minor color tweaks elsewhere… Yeah right.

That entire process above, takes on average about 30 minutes. In between of course I have to open and shut Corel to try and save as much available memory as possible, then upload the new image to her blog, open up a web browser to confirm and Voila – IT DOESN’T MATCH!!

So I take out my trusty Absolute Color Picker and check to make sure my eyes aren’t deceiving me and sure enough (as expected of course) it confirms that the two pieces are different colors. So I shut everything down and go back to Corel and try again… and again… and again… and… (I think you get the idea here… And yes of course I was ranting that I couldn’t believe Corel was screwing up!)

What really got hysterical was that late in the evening last night, when once again the colors didn’t match, I once again used Absolute Color Picker and it started saying that both obviosly different colors are indeed the same color – BLACK. Actually, at that point, no matter what I clicked on showed up as black. So I knew something was wrong rebooted (I suspect there was no memory left to run anything at this point), and went giddily to bed.

This morning I was at it again and I think (fingers crossed) that my fog has finally started to lift. Now for those who aren’t so inclined this is going to sound a little bit like “geek speak”and I do aplogize (if it hasn’t already) but for those who will understand the problem, here it is…

As I mentioned in my previous review about about Absolute Color Picker. It gives you the color codes in both Hexadecimal, RGB Decimal and HSB Decimal. I have usually used this great tool for Hexadecimal color codes within a web page and so naturally read the color off of the Hexadecimal window. Those in the know at this point can probably figure out the rest. The color code that I got was 222222 so I punched it into Corel 22 22 22.

The problem was that my Corel is set up to take only takes decimal input. It took me over two days to find the problem (ME) and when I read the decimal codes off of Absolute Color Picker 343434 and punched in 34 34 34 it matched beautifully. Nothing like taking over three days for a one hour job (good thing no one pays me to do this…)

The last thing I had to change on her blog site, were her borders. They were a grass green, and of course she wanted something with a little pink in it. Now these items are all GIF format files and I’m not sure if it was because of the memory hogging of Corel, the moon, or just “the mood” but no matter what color tool I used the only color that they would let me change those GIF files to, were gray… (it shouldn’t really have been this hard… really!)

Even after rebooting nothing wanted to play right. So in desperation I went searching for a GIF specific editor. And wouldn’t you know it, I found one, well sort of… It is a perfect tool for someone like me looking to change colors in a GIF without actually changing the GIF.

It’s called the “GIF Colour Mapper” and not only does it do a great job, it is freeware and can also change files “in bulk”. It’s very quick and the only complaint that I had with it was that the message window doesn’t clear or end with “finished” once it is completed.

This tool as well as several other free ones are available from Silverage Software what is kind of bizarre here though is that some of the tools that I have talked about over the past several weeks are also available in similar freeware versions from them. Like the file name re-namer and a color mapper along with several other freeware tools that would be handing for any webmaster/designer.

So with that positive find and hopefully a job well done with my daughters blog, I am hoping that the vestiges of whatever has been affecting my thought processes has been shaken off and that better things lay in the future…. I’m hoping anyways…