Friday, August 8, 2008

Education Bubble: A Graphic Illustration

The picture above shows West Kidding County High (WKCH, not a radio station) after its recent expansion. It was kinda squished down and then stretched out like taffy. I thought that would be a good way to handle the space problem presented by the top of the page. But then I was listening to Sen. Obama and heard him talking about inflation -- of tires -- as a solution to our energy problems. Which got me wondering, could inflation be a solution to the space problem? Is there such a thing as inflated graphics to go along with inflated rhetoric? So using hot air graciously provided by the Obama campaign (they passed through town recently), I tried to inflate WKCH (not the radio station). Here is what I got:



Obviously, there is a weak spot in the intertube. I know they don't use inner tubes in tires anymore but they do use intertubes in schools. So what you got here is a classic educational bubble.


Or is it. Because as I considered what might be going on, I remembered the Great Seal of Kiddington. And sure enough:

Now, the great Seal is also the Great Big Seal, but he ain't that big. So what it is, is, the use of false perspective -- same like we are suppose to use to select our President. Arf, arf.

Regular readers of this sight -- such as, for instance, myself -- know that I've been playing around with Open Office. org's software suite (I call it OOf or OOps, depending on what happens) . Then I started with the Open Office Draw feature (which I'll call OODLE's of doodles) and it is as frustrating as I thought it would be. Out of desperation I started reading the directions -- from the beginning, where they suggest you start. After about an hour I was still at, like, Opening a file -- the twelfth way of doing it. Heedless to say, it was saving files that was screwing me up. (You see, you got to export it from the Open Office Universe if you want to actually use it. How silly of me not to know). So I went back to pushing buttons more or less randomly.

There seems to be an extreme bias in the program towards working on the printed page. It will even save your little photo with a whole lot of white space for the rest of a printed page. So I actually did a final crop using my old Graphics Program that I got for twenty bucks 12 years ago. That's why there ain't like, six inches of blank space below the photo. (If there is, let me know). Now to compare the two programs: Open Office was free. (OK, and all the various parts work together, at least in theory).

1 comment:

hdgreene said...

My old graphics program is called Lview pro. It was put together by a guy in Miami and is actually quite powerful. It wasn't exactly super user friendly so I never really mastered it.

I was interested in Open Office because the documents are interchangeable. And it is free. I provided a link in the earlier post.