Friday, June 19, 2009

What the heck is the matter with me?

I was totally beaten down in a battle of wits with my comptuer tonight and I don't like it. I'm trying to decide when I became so stupid. Seriously. Was it the car accident where I was knocked out for half an hour? Is it because of all the darn medications I take, which I hate becauase I still feel like a pile of dog poo? What???!!!

I bought a program last fall that was "so easy" and "so much fun" to use. Yeah. Whatever. Last fall it was frustrating but I figured I learned my lesson. Whatever. Consider it money spent and a lesson learned. Don't buy before you try.

Fast forward to this summer and I'm trying to get Mirisa's baby shower invitations to cut on my Cricut - because it will beat the heck out of handcutting tracing and cutting 35 invitations with arthritic hands! It sounds so easy.... Open your template in Inkscape and change the file type to .svg. Check. Open Sure Cuts A Lot, import your svg file and presto! It will cut on your Cricut! Wonderful! Except when I import my svg file and open it, there's nothing there. Nada. Okay, I sent the file to my friend in Arizona who also uses Sure Cuts A Lot - hereafter referred to as the damn program. She set up the file in svg cut it out herself on her Cricut, and sent it to me. It doesn't work on my Cricut. It cuts out 2 forms, one about 1/3 of an inch inside the other one, doesn't make the neck hole at all, and doesn't do the scoring line, but starts making about a hundred little cuts on the margin. What the heck? I thought maybe I needed to update my damn program, which did have an update when I checked. So I updated it. Guess what? Now the new file that Karen made comes up blank when I import it into the damn program.

I'm absolutely and completely baffled. I went to the SCAL forum and asked for help, but when I was looking at some of the answers to questions that others have asked, I'm not even sure that's going to help me!

See?
in InkscapeCheck the Outline View by selecting View>Display mode>Outlineto see if it looks like what you want to cut If the Outline View does not show as expected then...If you imported a bitmap (jpg, png, bmp, gif, etc.) did you autotrace it?If not, select it, then Path>Trace BitmapIf you autotraced, did you delete the bitmap version, and not the vector version. (You will see a red x in outline mode if you accidently deleted the vector copy)Did you convert text into objects?If not, select text then Path>Object to PathIf the Outline View does show as expectedthenHave you ungrouped everything?If not then select all then Object>Ungroup repeatedly until the message at bottom of screen says there are no objects to ungroup.(You can use Path>Combine but SCAL doesn't like Grouping)If the infobar indicates clipping, do object>clip>releaseIf none of that works then-Double check that the file you imported was really an SVG. Check this (and prevent future occurences) by not selecting "All Files" in the file type menu of the Import dialog box.-Make sure all objects are within the page boundaries. (Press 4 or View>Zoom>Drawing to check for stray objects or parts of the image that extend past the page boundaries.)-Make sure that all shapes are converted to paths (select each shape, then Path>Object to Path)-Make sure the image is made up of closed paths, Inkscape can not cut lines, per se.-Resave the document as Plain SVG (as opposed to Inkscape SVG)-Select all, then copy, then open a new document and paste.-Select all then change the colors (click the color bar at the bottom of the screen).


It's all greek to me! lol!

Sunday, June 14, 2009

the end of a perfect weekend










Posted by Picasa

We had a great weekend! Mom and Bob's subdivision had a garage sale this weekend so I sold some stuff, made some money, and bought some more baby stuff. I made more than anyone else at the sale, gotta love that! My best bargain when I was shopping myself was a nearly new play pen for 5 bucks! Woo hoo!

Last night Amber scared the crap out of me - calling at midnight to see if I could watch Vince today while she and Jason went to the North Carolina vs Arizona State CWS game. After I recovered from my heart attack I said, "Of course I will"... Can't lose that favorite aunt status... Not that it's particularly in jeopardy at this point in time. Steve was in Lincoln today shooting, so Vince and I had a good time. He didn't want to eat bologna for lunch until I told him it was a hot dog--really, what's the difference? Then he took a 3 hour nap! I kept checking on him and he kept sleeping, and sleeping, and sleeping. What a good kid. He got up just before Steve got home, so we all spent some time outside - see above pictures! He's so darn cute! While we were outside he had a snack of graham crackers and milk, and just after we went in Amber and Jason got home, so it was a good day! The rest of the afternoon we just didn't do much of anything, finished watching a movie and read a book, and that was about it.

Tomorrow I'm going to try to tackle the Sure Cuts A Lot - again and if I can't get it to work I'll have to find someone who can help me. Maybe in their forum online. Steve finally figured out what I was doing wrong - trying to get the file to transfer from Inkscape to SCAL, but when I opened the file there was nothing there. Rats. We'll get it. We are not cutting out 30-some baby shower invitations. We are NOT!

That's about it, I guess. The weather has been cool and not so rainy the past couple of day, only in the 70s... Nice. It rained all day Friday though, until early evening. Kind of drowned out the garage sale. I wonder how much more I would have made if the weather had been nice? Have a rheumatology appointment tomorrow with blood work and all the good stuff. Can't wait. We'll see how THAT goes! I hope she has some better ideas than Minocycline for this stuff. Wish me luck.

Dad had a cortisone shot in his knee a week ago Friday and on Tuesday this week he had an MRI, kind of anxious to see what they found out with that. I'll have to give him a call tomorrow and then his doc, if he hasn't heard yet. Hopefully they'll be able to decide if it's his back or his knee which is really causing the pain and we can find out how to take care of it. It seems like you're always waiting for something, doesn't it?