iamrockandroll13

wow, microsoft is pusing the look of the new Xbox more towards the desktop computer tower look huh...it reminds me of those dell desktops...surprises me, I would have thought that microsoft would want to differentiate the new x-box from pc's as much as possible as far as the look goes.

I started on photoshop and had been working with it for about 2 years before I found out PSP existed...I tryed using PSP but it was kind of like the times I've tryed using mac's, I was confused and never really gave it a proper chance...I started on photoshop 5.0 in high school, now I use CS.

Ok so this my first attempt at creating anything seriously in Illustrator, so if it looks like I'm a little heavy handed and clumsy, I am right now...let me know what you all think though... the original photograph I worked with was similar to this one, just a different crop and no filters. Also, if anyone knows of any good Illustrator tutorials that they'd like to share, I would appreciate it...I've already found that a pen and a tablet are two of my best friends when it comes to Illustrator...

actually, you're spot on with that call, I actually didn't display the version that was a poster that I made for a friend containing lyrics to the song "Rockin' the Suburbs" by Ben Folds. This is the 'clean' version...

personally, if had done those photos that way I would have made the edges a lot smoother, but I do like both of those pics.

nice pictures! I know a guy spins fire and lights, so that's pretty impressive to me, I tryed it with lights and it was mad hard.

I'm learning regular photography, haha, it's just, well, new to me. maybe someday I'll be good enough with a camera to effects like that without a computer!

oh I have no illusions on the life of someone who seriously does that sort of thing :-D...but as a comp sci major, I think it could be a fun way to practice problem solving in the environment I expect to work in...I don't want to find out how to break into nasa's computers or anything, I just would like to know some basic things. I went to that Learn to Hack website someone linked to and while it was cool, I found that the challenges seemed like they required me to know a lot more than I did, and I was only on level 4!

in more polite and helpful terms, what he's trying to say is that SP2 has a history of REALLY messing up pc's in some situations. if your computer still works with it installed, thats great, but just know that you gambled and won. I have quite a few friends who just installed it with out thinking or reading about it and it caused them to have to reformat their harddrives and do a new windows install.

I had a vx2 infection on my computer and it didn't really do what you are saying this is doing, I'd say say check for vx2 using the adaware plug in and if doesn't work, get HijackThis! and google the results it gives you. hopefully someone else has already had and fixed this problem themselves and left a step by step set of instructions on how to remove it. Just a warning on HijackThis!, it can be sort of confusing at first and it doesn't remove or fix anything, at least I'm pretty sure of that. It just tells you what your computer is doing so you can figure out what exactly is wrong. when you actually remove it, you'll be most likely editing your registry along with deleting files and killing processes so make sure you know what you are doing.

Ok, so I'm ready to read, anyone have any good suggestions of what exactly to read? websites, books, anything? I really find this stuff interesting and potentially very useful to me.

I bet they would be too...I think I'm going to go get my free copy, ebay it, and get some of that money back haha.

if you wanted the player interface to disappear, and not be all ugly and up in the viewer's grill, you just need to set height and width to 0. the downside is that they can't stop it...

wow, thats pretty cool, for your fourth try I'd say it's at least 1000 kinds of awesome.I'm interested now, was that really time consuming to make?

probably not smaller than 12pt...it just seems like all my fonts don't like being small in Photoshop CS, they seem to work fine in illustrator...I was thinking maybe it was a setting or something I needed to play with. it's alright though, I'm just being lazy, it's not that hard to do it in illustrator and bring it into photoshop.I have another question though...anyone know where to get some good ps brushes that are cigarette/smoking related? I'm having a rough time finding any...

does anyone here know how to get photoshop to make small text that isn't really blurry? I'm really hoping I can find a way to do it photoshop rather than having to do all my text in illustrator...

I'm gonna tell you truth on the first thing I thought when I saw it, I thought "are my glasses on? *checks face*" if we are talking logos here, I think its a little too big for the text and the blurriness is definately not making my eyes happy. The text, however is a little more promising, the text looks like it could look really good if it wasn't so blurry looking. My suggestion would be to cut the width of it down a little and try a different style for the background, if not just a solid color. I can see that looking really cool on just a plain black background. Simpler can be better sometimes...

Well if by "over-whored' you mean what I think you mean, I agree with you. The phone pics are the only recent ones, I've gotten a little more tasteful since the beginning, haha. and yes I do have the original of hanging phone one...and I'm learning how to use illustrator now so I should be getting into a little more vector oriented stuff soon...I'll keep your suggestion in mind, it sounds like it has some serious potential.

once again, thank you for the complements and the critiques. As for the mention of my knowledge colr theory, I was actually told by one of my art major friends that those collors shouldn't work..but i think they do, and she's only a freshman haha. As for the empty space...I put it there for a reason...I originally had those white lines extending into that area too but I found that with the empty space, my eyes seemed a little happier...it probably has something to do with the balance of the elements...I'm no genious when it comes to art theory though, I just know what my eyes like i guess!

I got bored at school one day so I opened up ie and just clicked on the pop-ups until the computer froze and died...yeah...all I can say is that was before I realized that turning the proxy server off would turn off the filter they used.

ebaums world is one of the best boredom killers I've found so far on the internet. It's righ up there with myspace, this place, and my local town's music board.

Eclipse 3.0-http://www.eclipse.org/: An extremely powerful open source code editor for all of you programmers out there. It can be used with almost any language provided you get the right plugins and what not for it. IMO much better than any microsoft product of its kind Firefox - duh. DVD Decryptor - A great way to back up DVD's onto your computer It breaks pretty much encryption and can rewrite region codes so you can play burned copies of your foriegn DVDs on your regular DVD player DVD Shrink - can turn DVD9 sized DVD's into a DVD5 sized file and burn it onto a DVD-R. go to http://www.doom9.org/ for any more on any of the DVD software I've mentioned Daemon Tools - creates virtual drives...very useful for image files from DVD's or CD's

A lot of 'free' software is crap. If it is, that's the reason that it's free. I'm not saying this is all true, but many programs are just too buggy, inadequate, and hard to use to charge money for. This isn't true for everything of course, look at firefox, linux, and the eclipse project. All I'm saying is that sometimes, it's just not useful enough to chagre money for.oh yeah, and to the guy who posted above me. Most universities in the US that I know people from and the one I'm currently attending give Windows XP Home Edition away.

well...maybe I was exaggerating a bit, but none the less...it's important. AdAware and Spybot S&D only remove spyware and adware, firefox actually prevents them from being on your system.

I find it interesting that though the topic of conversation is making one's computer secure for internet use, not one person bothered to mention firefox, IMO more important than anything listed so far.