As I mentioned on my “About” page…

I [used to spend] most of my time “playing on the computer” creating ANSI and ASCII art for local Baltimore bulletin board systems. I was pretty successful and belonged to “underground art scene” groups such as Remorse (a division of ACiD), CiA, Mimic, Unit and my own group, Aspire.

For fun, I decided to dig around and gather up a bunch of my old-school artwork. Oh how I miss the days of WWiV, Telix, and ACiD Draw.

Please take a look through my ANSI / ASCII gallery. If you were a fan of BBSes and sixteen-color artwork, you’ll enjoy the stroll down memory lane.

For the past few days, I have been trying to set aside a little bit of time to work on the-new-and-improved Blendetta.com. I’ve been migrating it from Blogger to WordPress, adding some new features, cleaning up the code, and making a few overall improvements. Now that most of the labor-intensive tasks are complete, I’m just working on small visual tweaks; like creating a favicon. Nice and simple – it should only take me a minute… or so I thought.

I opened Photoshop, went to File > Open, selected the Blendetta layout PSD file, and got an error message that I had never experienced before:

While I was working on the Blendetta layout in Photoshop the night before, I accidentally allowed my laptop’s battery to die. I was fearful that my new-and-improved layout PSD might have been corrupted.

I tried opening different images and discovered that the error message only appeared when trying to open PSD files. I exited Photoshop, started it again, and tried opening a PSD – same error. I saved everything that I was working on, rebooted, started Photoshop, and tried to open a PSD – same error! I was getting frustrated. What good is Photoshop if you can’t even open a PSD?! That’s when I decided to Google search the web to see what I could find…

After refining my search, I finally found some recommended fixes for my problem pertaining to Vista. Here are a few of them:

• Delete the PS CS3 preference file(s) and reboot. I decided to keep looking for a different solution; I didn’t try this.
• Press “ESC” after attempting to open a file, and then “CTRL-SHIFT-S” (save as…). Sounded a little too simple (and silly), but I tried it – it didn’t work.
• Create a new Vista user account and then run Photoshop. Really? I wasn’t about to even consider creating a separate user account just to run Photoshop.

There were tons of other forum and blog posts about this problem. One said that this error message only appears if you have a “cracked” version of Photoshop – which I don’t. Others claimed that you need to over-write .dll files, edit your registry, or download “cleaning” software to “fix” Photoshop. After a little more hunting I finally found the solution that worked for me – and it was nice and simple:

Go to Control Panel > Printers and set Microsoft XPS Document Printer as your default printer.

After changing my default printer I went into Photoshop and successfully opened a PSD file. If you are experiencing this error, I hope this solution helps!

It seems ironic. It was only two days ago when I posted Recent Stuff, where I explained that raising those orphaned kittens took up a lot of my time. What’s ironic about that? I found their mother yesterday… and all of her new kittens.

I made three decisions after my under expected discovery:

1. Catch the feral “momma” cat and have her spayed.
2. Either find loving homes or a good no-kill shelter for the kittens.
3. Volunteer my graphic and / or web design services to reputable animal rescues and shelters.

I spent half of the day today on looking at websites with for crowded shelters… the other half on the phone being told “we aren’t accepting new kittens”. I’m certainly willing and able to take care of my own cat situation (on my own if I have to), but after looking at all of those websites, it really made me think. I don’t necessarily have the time to volunteer in the shelters. I also don’t have enough extra money laying around to help all them financially. I figured that offering my web design service free of charge seemed to be the right thing to do.

If you are associated with an animal rescue or shelter that is looking for graphic design, logo design, a new website or a website “face lift”, please contact me - I’d really love to help.