New Header

Today I thought I would zest up my blog with a fancy header. I know that the cheesy pulp sci-fi babe against a starry background looks like it took me 5 minutes to throw together, but I assure you it did not. A while ago (a few years?), I was beta-testing a mmorpg called Secret Society Wars and asked a friend to draw me a picture of Meg as a space bombshell. He sent me a perfect line drawing in response. Today I took the black and white, well nearly black and white, jpeg and colored it in using Adobe Photoshop. Then I tried to layer it over a picture of some amazing looking real-life stars only to find that Paint can see imperfections that Adobe cannot. So I went through the hassle of shopping out all of the obvious edges. There are still edges if you look closely, so please, don't look closely. Cropping and layout took more time. I'm new at this. Sure, I can photoshop out zits and red eye but I am not a graphic designer. And here is the end product!

Did I mention that my artisty friend lives in New Zealand? I know that most people have gotten used to the internet but I am still blown away that my friend, who lives in the future*, can draw a picture, scan it and send it to me while I am thousands of miles away. I think I was even living in England at the time. So his picture travelled approximately 11, 682 miles or 18,800 kilometers or 10, 152 nautical miles so that years in the future, after I physically carried the little electron digibits to Long Beach, California and then to Chicago, IL. Two years after that, I wasted the better part of 3 hours playing crayons the adult way. Viola.

*New Zealand is very far east on the globe so it is several hours ahead of England, and even more hours ahead of Chicago or Long Beach. As I am writing this at Tuesday August 3rd at 2PM in Chicago, it is Wednesday August 4th at 7AM in Wellington, NZ. Crazy, huh? The first time I went to visit New Zealand, I got up midflight, somewhere approximately over the international date line and did the Time Warp in the bathroom.