The days after

Sleep didn't come easy the night before leaving. It was all so exciting, meeting up with people you don't know face to face. "What if they don't like me?" So you're a bit shy and silent at first, not really knowing what to say, scared to make mistakes when talking the dreaded language. Wine changes everything. You had a great couple of hours and much fun. Talk was about everything, from French food, red or white wine, to tsunamis and teaching. Buffy or Spike didn't come up that much -- there was a non-convert in your midst, but he liked it as well. Thankfully that non-convert has a better knowledge of the language than you and could fill in whenever you were at a loss to say something. Maybe the evening was too short, but some had to work the day after.

So Chani, ARN, I had the best of time and I'm really looking forward to you visiting Brussels one day.

dvd captures

So I was thinking about making me a new icon. Daan still looks his handsomely self and he can still come and read me the telephone book anytime, but I simply thought it was time for something else -- being the new year and all. And this being a different computer since I last made me some icons, I thought I could grab some screen captures from my dvd's. Mac OS X has this lovely tool called grab that you can use to make screenshots, quick, easy, and not usuable when you're running the dvd-player. This is grabbing for my own use! I do not infringe on any kind of copyright here* and still Apple feels it should make it impossible for me to make screen captures of dvd's I bought and paid for.
So I figured I'd grab from the internet instead. It wouldn't be the screen caps I wanted, but at least they would be from the film I wanted. So I typed "Les Triplettes de Belleville" into my google box and came upon the homepage of the film. Lo and behold! When looking in the photo-section they didn't offer me one or two or three photographs, but 21 images, all downloadable in three different sizes. Bless the filmmakers.

Only thing I need now is a decent resizing and cropping tool. I think I'll have to scratch some money together and eventually get Adobe Photoshop Elements. (Although I must admit this software does a lot of things I don't need it to do, because that kind of stuff is already embedded in Mac OS X and I don't use it there either.)

* I do admit that's not really true. If I decide to grab a screen cap and use it as an icon I am infringing copyright, but I'm not as long as I use it as a desktop or print the screen cap to stick it in one of my numerous sketch books.