Sunday, January 10, 2010

No one man can tame a herd of art elephants.

After a vigorous workout at the gene-splicing table, we move on to cloning. My assistant eGor (all assistants have that name!), got accidentally locked in the cloning booth, there was a boom, a gawd awful smell and; "eGor, what's that clone you're wearing?" (Sorry, Mel Brooks meets the Muppets!)

Actually, I need a clone or two, plus a symbionic mind link to multiply my ability to explore all the Linux graphics applications. Today I have installed "FreeCad". It is an 3d Cad program the likes of SolidEdge. Now I have used AutoCad for years to do schematics and other 2D drawings. FreeCad and Blender both do 3D, what is the diff? FreeCad is precision optimized (engineering) and Blender is more fuzzy (scenes, games, animation). I hear there are scripts being developed to give Blender the precision for cad work. I think the math engines in the programming are diff so they can do what they each do best. I will have to read through the docs and learn the work flow before I'll be able to do anything useful with FreeCad and practice like crazy.

Wow, GIMP, Inkscape, Blender 3D, Krita, Synfig, My Paint, Xara Xtreme, KD3, FreeCAD,..............egads eGor!
In all, you can see my problem, too many drawing applications doing too many differing kinds of drawing, not enough time and too few of me. If I spent all my time exploring I'd never get good at anything.

The main problem in taming the herd of art elephants is us users. Who among us, born in the industrial revolution, has not been indoctrinated, trained, programmed, brain imprinted with the posture of the typewriter cult. It is an iconic image that endures without fanfare, persons hunched over a keyboard (I saw it in Egypt! (pyramid shaped office building, Pharoah Street, nth floor)). OK, you got the proper posture down......hmmmmmm! (ergo-nomics, egor-nomics, extremes of the same thing!?). You go to the office, sit at your machine, a voice in your head tells you to "assume the position" before you type. At the keyboard I always have flashbacks of high school typing class. I could never get it right. I guess I am more eGor than ergo. I see there are more typing/mousing casualties than there are football injuries. Bouncing fingers up and down on keys was bad enough, now figgiety mouse moving from side to side and back and forth.........

I got a Wacom Graphire 2 pen tablet years ago. I am back to playing with it. What a relaxing relief for my hand, wrist and forearm. And I can't believe how programmed I am. It is traumatic learning to use it, my body wants to say, "hey, I remember pencils but it's so not a mouse." So, if you do a lot of graphics and do not have a pen tablet, you will devolve from Ergo to........... eGor.

I am working on a hardware project which may require one of those tiny keyboards. How tiny can a keyboard get before it dawns on you that you can't "assume the position"? When will typewriter entrenched hardware critics stop judging tiny qwerty keyboards by the "touch typing" standard? "It's a qwerty but it's too small to actually touch type on it!". Double duh! Our logic defies logic at times. It is OK to hunt and peck on a small device. If you are typing a term paper, a business report or translating War and Peace using a tiny keyboard, perhaps your fingers are not the real problem. Please send $25,000 and I will send you my book "Typewriter Cult Deprogramming Guide" and tickets to attend my seminar "End Pain by Using A More Appropriate Computer Input Device". As a followup, if you act fast, I will send you a CD titled "When Body Language Cusses You Out, Know the Signs". Actually, I am trying to wake you up, you keep doing this to yourself!

So, to sum it all up, if you are suffering the casualties of making do on the computer input devices you got, it may be time to consider alternative means. The pen (digital pen) is mightier than the mouse, especially in drawing. That picture of the elephant in panic over a mouse under foot, guess who gets trampled?

No comments: