I’m Surrounded By Idiots

Conversation with a co-worker, who shall remain nameless:

Her: Is anybody any good at Fireworks?
Me: Yeh; you just light the blue touchpaper and run. But seriously, you ought’a be using Corel Photo-Paint.

(I wander over to her desk, and see that she’s working with a bitmapped image of our logo – she’s trying to remove some of the text from it… using the text tool… the text is jaggedy and quite obviously bitmapped)

Her: Why can’t I select this text?
Me: Umm… because it’s not text; it’s an image. The same reason that if I scanned in some of my handwriting and gave you that as a file, you couldn’t select it.
Her: But it is text: look…

(at this point, I collapse into a blubbering heap on the floor… this person has several years of an internet computer science degree tucked under her belt, but can’t understand the difference between vector-based and bitmap graphics [pretty fundamental year one web design stuff])

4 comments

  1. Raz Raz says:

    Corel photopaint, for the love of god why? I’m kinda amazed they still even make that actually.

  2. Dan Q Dan Q says:

    Nowt’ wrong with Photo-Paint. Hell of a lot better than Fireworks!

    And no, they don’t actually make it any more, but we haven’t upgraded since then. Apparently now they make an app called Painter, which I’m betting is much similar.

    I should’ve offered to install Gimp for her, then slipped on a nice Debian installation while she wasn’t looking. Mwhahahaha!

  3. Raz Raz says:

    I used to use Painter occasionally, Corel never did that much with it ever since they bought out the company that wrote it tho. Don’t tell me your a Linux fan now too?

  4. Dan Q Dan Q says:

    Linux fan? No more than ever. I currently triple-boot Fedora Core 2, Windows XP Pro, and a partition which I’ve been playing with writing operating system code in. I also run a couple of Debian Linux servers – great choice for LAMP boxen.

    What I’m booted into at home mostly depends on what I’m doing… that said, most of the applications I could boot into Linux to use I’ve acquired binaries for (or ported) to Windows now anyway.

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