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Monday, November 15, 2010

The Blue Elephant That Eats Gold Coins



I have a piggy bank, well actually an Elephant Bank, that's rather special.


You see, it only eats gold coins. Well, not real gold coins, but IDR 500 coins, which has a gold color.



Last weekend i was feeling rather curious, how much coins does it hold. So I put all the coins out



And I counted everything up


In total I have IDR 295,000.00 around USD 30.
I can use it to buy around 15 Big Macs in Jakarta.



But I don't want Big Macs, I want to collect gold coins so that one day I can pretend I'm Scrooge McDuck. So I put all the coins back, and try to find some more "gold" coins.

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

lo tech graphical adventures

Do you remember Microsoft Paintbrush? The name reminds me of primary school, when we used to computer classes. Back then, paintbrush was one of my fave programs. Any kid would love to draw right?

With the evolution of the Microsoft Windows OS, Paintbrush matured and become Microsoft. I don't really know the difference, it's just there along with the package. I haven't been using paint very much these past years. I've always been blessed with computers that has at least GIMP in it. Paint is so basic, even the drawing program on Microsoft Word is better in certain aspects.

Under certain circumstances, usually with no other choices left, I use Paint to make simple graphical edits, like cropping a screenshot. I'm bad at drawing so personally I prefer to draw using vector based programs like Illustrator or Freehand. Even if I had to draw using a pixel based program, I choose Photoshop, at least the layers and multiple undo will make the final product look prettier.

But a recent wave of retro drawing has infected several colleagues of mine. So out of curiosity I decided to jump into the time machine and try to make a decent drawing using Paint. Lemme tell you it's hard! There are only around two or three undo steps available, so I have to be VERY careful. I keep trying to drag the screen using space bar, keep trying to zoom in and out using CTRL - and +. It was frustrating.

But I finally managed to produce an acceptable drawing. Okay to be honest there's a possibility that I just pass it of as an acceptable drawing out of frustration. so here goes...


What do you think? Interested in taking a stroll down memory lane and draw your own lo-tech graphical adventure?