Megabytes

I’ve been changing the photo at the top of my blog each month since May of this year. Today, I’ve installed the new image which will represent August. This sunset shot was captured on Saturday night at Gleneden Beach, on the Oregon Coast.
Beautiful weather surprised us; the forecast was mostly cloudy, high of 65. Instead we experienced mostly sunny, high 75!

There are so many chocolate-y good plug-ins for the Firefox browser. I have about a dozen that I use regularly. Let me tell you about a few.

1) Forecastfox
If you work in a windowless office, Forecastfox by Richard Klein and Jon Stritar, could be your window to the world. This plug-in lets you place weather icons in the status bar or the toolbar of Firefox. It’s inconspicuous, doesn’t take up much real estate, easily customizable and performs its service simply displaying understandable weather icons.

Hovering over an icon brings up a detailed and customizable weather report from AccuWeather.com.

2) Colorzilla
Here’s a quick and easy way to get RGB or HEX color codes. Alex Sirota’s Colorzilla plug-in places a small eyedropper icon in your status bar. Shift-escape enables the tool, hover over a color on a web page and color info as well as DIV ID displays below. A contextual menu provides easy copying of color codes as well as access to a color picker and a zoom tool. Nifty!

3) MeasureIt by Kevin A. Freitas
This was one of the first plug-ins I installed. When activated, you can measure in pixels the height and width of any element on a web page. This is useful for the web designer attempting to line up elements on a page or measure a logo or other image.

I’m back from a short week on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada; Parksville and Victoria to be precise. Sketched a street lamp in downtown Victoria on the first day.

Then, a sketch of Mt. Arrowsmith in the distance. sketched from Parksville beach. It was kind of odd to be sitting in shorts on the beach, people in the water and see snow-capped mountains in the near distance.

On our last day, we visited Craigdarroch Castle. This is a detail sketch of one of the balconies.