I'm working like mad to finish my use strict 'sql'; presentation for next Wednesday's Portland Perl Mongers presentation. For the most part, the text is finished and a straight run through lasts about half an hour. Assuming that I get some questions, that should fill my 45 minute timeslot just nicely.
I'm using KPresenter for the presentation software and am creating an HTML version, just in case. Unfortunately, KPresenter is saving each slide slide as an image rather than using img tags for just the image. As a result, the presentation is much larger than it should be (darn it!). Still, KPresenter is very easy to use and I can't complain too much. It's free after all.
Speaking of free tools, I'm teaching myself GIMP at the same time. Many of the images are close to what I need, but not quite. In my discussion of embedded SQL, I use an image of a bike embedded in a tree. The bike is impossible to see in the original picture, so I lightened the entire image and then hand-selected the bike and brought that out. I also tried to take an image of a monkey looking into a mirror and put my picture in the mirror, but I couldn't figure out how to get the layers working. Unfortunately, the reflection of the monkey in the mirror is so poor that I couldn't get it very clear, despite a fair amount of effort.
Regardless of my poor skill wit da GIMP, it's been ridiculously helpful in putting everything together and it's surprisingly easy to use. And it only crashed once!
And as for "patches" (referenced in the title), I'm wearing one right now. Day two of no cigarettes. Maybe it's a bad time to quit, but I always have an excuse not to quit, so I figured I would quit the excuses, first.
As a side note, relatively innocuous search terms take on disturbing new twists when Safe Search is off on Google Images.
