I’m sort of a seasonal scrapbooker. I put projects away, then pull them out months later when I can focus on them. Now that I’m designing, knitting is more year round, but other projects are the same way: I write my reports to the superintendent’s office in August, and forget my shortcuts the rest of the year. Every 8 weeks or so I make our one sixth of the year goals and assignments. Even designing has its seasons, I only use Inkscape for making schematics and charts, KILE for putting final pdfs together, and I’m learning to use a crochet chart editor this next week. I forget so much about these programs in other seasons, the first day re-using them I have to re-read the manuals.
(My Dad was such an anti-manual man. I can’t believe that I’m actually not someone who likes to play with things to figure them out. A well written manual is my friend! Sometimes I pick tools based on their documentation. In fact, I’m beginning to get nervous when people praise programs for their “intuitive interface,” that seems to mean that I am going to be lost because I’m supposed to just KNOW how to use something. My intuition is missing. I have to substitute stubbornness (and Google) for it.)
I’m beginning to store text files in my folders of helpful processes and tips that I gain while I’m working intensively on a project. They stand out to me like neon sticky notes on a wall from my file lists because they have a different extension. I also open them in a text editor in a small window, so they look like a sticky, and I can keep them on top of my desktop while I refer to them.
But unlike sticky notes (who loose their stick and fall on the floor after a few months) these will still be kitted in my computer next year when I get back to whatever I’m doing. Assuming my hard drive is healthy and the sticky note makes it into the backup…
I just re-learned how to paste-into in GIMP, something you need to know if you are going to use psd templates: to paste into, you need to have a selection, not just a layer selected. So if you select the layer of the template you want your photo or paper to go in, select the special shape or whatever by color, then paste into. That way your photo is cropped to the special thing you bought the template for in the first place, not a rectangle as large as your special space.
I knew that last year, but it took me 30min of Google-ing and experiments to remember.
I’ve stickied that baby now. If I lose it on my hard drive, it’s now on my blog.
Come to think of it, my blog is my ultimate sticky note.
Oh, this is wise…