I recently got a copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4.

It would be a good idea not to ask where or how i got it.

Anyway, just having a copy of Photoshop isn't good enough.

You have to learn to navigate the maze that is photoshop's user interface.

I suppose for long time users, the interface comes as second nature, but to the beginner it is really really really intimidating.

Anyway, the best way to learn something new is to just jump in headlong and learn stuff as you go along, right?

That's a first effort, so yeah, it kinda fails in certain departments, creativity for one.

It's a poster I had to prepare for RCTV, an audio visual club in my hall, which I may go into more detail at a later date.

Right

Onto the tutorial!

For those of you who choose to stubbornly trudge on with the bloated, antiquated, sluggish beast that is Internet Explorer for your forays in cyberspace, let me first say that i pity you.

Truly, I do pity you.

However, for those of you stuck with it, for whatever reason, here's some news that you might want to hear.

There has been news of a security breach of Microsoft's vaunted IE, which could, I quote

"Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed.

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say."

You can tell I quoted it because it's in between those two squiggly lines.

Full article can be found here.

Fortunately (for you), there is a solution.

To prevent any further loss in market share, Microsoft had to be quick to release a security patch, which I recommend you download, post haste, lest you are a masochist, and enjoy living with the knowledge that sooner or later, someone will steal something from you.

Again I quote

"Security experts advised users to stay off Internet Explorer due to a serious security exploit in all versions of IE, and a third-party developer even pushed out an unofficial temporary fix, but you can now go grab the official patch straight from the source. The patches are available in several different downloads depending on what version of IE you're using and what OS you're running, and not all of the downloads are pointing to existing pages yet, but they should hopefully all be rolled out sometime today.

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-078 - Critical [Microsoft]"

via Lifehacker.com

Or, you could save yourself some hair-pulling, and switch to any number of popular free alternatives to IE, such as Firefox 3, Google Chrome, or even Opera 9 (soon to be 10).

It's really simple really, not only is IE inherently unstable, with many holes for hackers to slip through, there are also a lot, and I mean a lot, like literally 70% or more of all computers surfing the Internet use IE. It's just economics, by cracking IE once, hackers gain access to the secrets of a greater percentage of the web browsing community.

It's the same analogy why Mac users don't "have" virus problems, it's simply not worth it to write a virus that targets such a small subset of the community.

What are you waiting for. Go update now!

And also contemplate the switch to a free OS, such as Ubuntu, which means you pay less money on the OS, and more money to souping up your hardware.

That's all for now.