I take it Bea is rather like my Efanor. Twenty pounds of fuzzy love. Can’t beat it. :D

Poor little guy! How frustrating! Sometimes, not even layers are proof against that (witness my public humiliation on the Faery cover! :D) So glad the Bamboo worked out. I have to admit, I’ve never used Paint. I do believe that Sketcher supports layers, though I haven’t used them. It’s kind of a funky interface, though. Not a bad thing to learn, as it’s a lot like Corel Painter and is designed to be used with the boards, but if he’s used to the standard menu style, he might be happier with another program.

If I were getting him one, I think I’d get Paint Shop Pro. The new CS4 just has too many options. Paint Shop Pro is much cheaper (under $100) and darned near as powerful. Maybe even PSP7, if I could find it. PSP 7 (or 8) supports layers and textures and transformations, but is just a bit simpler in some of the options. The newest version is, like CS4, a bit funky about the settings on the brushes. I’m not sure about some of those in between. I’ve usually got PSP 5 available as well. I love the program.

Of course, with typical corporate shortsightedness, they got me a total of five of the highest quality laptops and five of the highest desktops from Dell 18 months ago, but can’t seem to come up with some of the middleware (messaging software) and graphics packages that I need for the demo these were purchased to produce :(.

BTW, younger son loved the Bamboo and made a Mother’s day card using it. Lesson there – Paint is definitely a tool for frustration. Since it only has the single layer, any text is immediately applied to the bitmapped image and can’t be edited. Poor kid had to go back and add in a couple missing letters by hand. We’ll be trying one of the programs you recommended pretty soon, Jane. Thanks again for the advice.

- S

I know what you mean. I didn’t know it would be so simple! just don’t have time to play with it right now. Darn it. :D But it’s really a nice set of basic computing elements. I’m probably going to have to wait until fall, but it was certainly useful for this problem.

I still want to try that German program. We’re trying to get some things done before we go to MisCon this weekend, but I might commandeer Carolyn to do some translation for me when we get back…just because. :D

I never seriously consider the hammer option. :D Though there are a few programs I’d happily fry! :D Nero worked fine. I’m going to try Felicia when I find where the download went! That was very strange. I’m sure I downloaded it…I have the manual right where I thought the file was…oh, well. If that’s the only thing I’ve lost, I’m doing pretty good! :D

Whoops! Phone rang. OSGuy had come to pick up our bridge span planks to cut them with his father’s band saw. Better scoot!

I hope you took a break, regained an even keel, and resisted the urge to ‘troubleshoot with a hammer’.

Sorry, have limited access to inter-webs @ work and couldn’t reply. Lots of freeware, a lot of it decent -Roxio as Jcrow9 mentioned, and there’s Nero, which I’ve used before successfully, though I’ve run into occasional issues. I know the PC-madness is super painful. I hope you get up, walk away, and do some relaxing when you need to. It makes a huge difference, when you hit that tech-induced headache wall.

Not as good or easy as my Mac, but great on an older system, and both of them beat the heck out of Windows in every way.

Jeff

I wasn’t sure what you meant by an ISO burning software. Went out (briefly) and looked and…found lots of freeware available. Do you have a suggestion for which to use?

I say again…thanks.

Glad ou got so much help earlier already. But I second the notion of a Linux live disk. It can make a huge difference in determining the source of a problem – hardware or soft, and tends to make itself known as a tool in the pocket of most desktop and IT support personnel.
If you run into problems with it, don’t hesitate to shout out to the community either. Ubuntu’s forums, as well as tons of others, are pretty heavily populated with helpfuls. Not to mention all those helpfuls already in your circle!

One thing to note with burning a live CD from a disk is you do need an ISO-burning program, and you really want to burn at a lower speed to reduce the chance of a ‘bad’ live CD – an experience I endured the hard way, unfortunately.

Once you get a Linux up and running, you’ll want to head for command line, unless you immediately see responses/activity from your USB devices.
Favorite commands are: lsusb
It’ll dump out a bunch of listings like these, hopefully:
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 003: ID 046d:c526 Logitech, Inc.

Alternate methods to finding USB’s active/inactive will be found someplace like: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=107650 though it is mainly about ‘path’ to a USB, there are some alternate tricks to it.

But most importantly, enjoy Hell’s Kitchen and well deserved sleep!