You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch.

This one is a childhood favorite of, I believe, just about everyone. For a project that involves reading favorite kids books as a Christmas present, how could I NOT read “How the Grinch Stole Christmas?”

In case you are, by some miracle of complete cultural isolation, unfamiliar with the story, here’s how it goes:

Somewhere in the mountains above a little town, wherein live hundreds of tiny, cute, and annoyingly happy people, rages a big green monster-like thing with a heart condition, hypersensitive hearing, and a history of mental illness and physical abuse. One day the noise from the town is too much to bear, and this Grinch snaps. Rather than taking his revenge on the town by hacking them all to bits with an axe, he instead embarks on a long night of home invasion, grand theft, destruction of property, and terrorizing small children. Having been thus deprived of peace and property, the townsfolk get together and send a carefully constructed series of psycho-acoustic signals up into the mountains, intent on either exploding the Grinch’s heart, or driving him off a cliff. Because of the peculiar reflections and refractions of the sound waves through the snow-covered mountain hollows to the Grinch, the wave instead cures his heart condition and his mental illness, upon which point he returns their property, and joins them in a rousing chorus of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, 99 Bottles of Beer, or some such nonsense. He also offers to pay for Cindy-lou Who’s extensive psychotherapy.

But seriously, it’s a great little story, and was lots of fun to read. Hope you enjoy listening to it, as much as I enjoyed recording it.

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Of all my Photoshop pet peeves, a PSD packed with poorly named layers may be the biggest one.

Designers make lots of layers and lots of layer copies during the course of a design, and they often “forget” to name the layers appropriately. We understand though, they’re busy people, right? In the coding world we deal with similar issues. When programmers don’t effectively comment their code, anyone coming in after them has no way of knowing why certain choices were made, or perhaps even what a particular block of code should be doing. Likewise, a single designer may know—as the creator of the file—that Layer 12 copy is the little red left-pointing arrow after the link text in the second-row third-column of the page layout, but if anyone else picks up this file, they won’t know what that layer is without taking several annoyingly time-consuming steps to figure it out.

It is crucial that designers name their layers appropriately, so they are understandable at a glance.
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For those already familiar with unix-like operating systems, cron may be old news, while new users with limited command-line experience may never have heard of it. Cron is one of those system-level services that can be indispensable when you figure out what it does and how to use it.

In my typical mode somewhere between casual- and power-user, I have put cron to great use in running parts of my system beyond the stock configuration. For me, cron’s most critical role has been that of backup-scheduler.
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In evaluating my life, especially in the context of all the buddhist dharma talks I listen to every week, it seemed it might be fitting to take a look at how the 2nd Noble Truth plays out in my life.

To that end, I’ve compiled a short list of some of the cravings and desires that are currently causing me suffering.
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For web developers, especially in this almost-but-not-quite-post-IE6 age of universal 24-bit PNG acceptance, the one thing you’re likely to do more than any other, at least in regards to Photoshop, is to extract and save images with transparent backgrounds (AKA alpha channels). Whether you’re using GIF or PNG, there are several ways to do it, and several common issues you might have to deal with.
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