Salisbury — May 7th 2008

To quote Mssrs Barker and Corbet - "And in a packed programme tonight…" - it was very much a packed programme at Salisbury this month.

We kicked off with a demonstration of astronomy software from Simon. In fact, the software took a back seat as we all became enthralled by Simon's enthusiasm and knowledge of his subject. We were presented with some stunning photographs taken using the Hubble telescope as well as some more local and personal ones taken by Simon himself. One visitor who'd come along because of her interest in astronomy rather than Macs commented to me afterwards that it was more interesting than a lot of the speakers she'd heard at her astronomy club! So well done Simon, you may just have gained us a new member.

Next up was Christine with another demonstration of how a Mac can be used as a tool for your "other" hobby, this time lace making. You must have seen lace making at craft fairs - you know, a pillow with about a million pins stuck in it and hundreds and hundreds of bobbins of thread dangling in seemingly random fashion. Yep, that's it, that's what Christine does. Her demo was showing us how Photoshop Elements allows her to make patterns using parts of drawings found on-line which are then cut, resized, shaped, rotated, distorted, whatever effect is necessary to create the design she needs for her next pattern. Of course, I now know I could never be a lace maker but I should be more adept at manipulating photos etc.

Finally, Brian showed us some of the text manipulation that you can do within Pages, from kerning to make the words look better when particular adjacent letters have odd spacing, vertical alignment by raising or lowering the base line of individual letters (handy for logos etc.) and finally filling objects like circles or irregular shapes with text and making text flow around other objects.

By the time we'd finished, the caretaker and his two very large (but very friendly) German Shepherds was outside waiting to lock up so we had to make a hasty exit. This was a shame as I'd intended to follow the example of the Bournemouth meeting and adjourn to a (fairly) nearby Italian restaurant for coffee or food as appropriate but there was no time to organise this - maybe next time!

Mick Burrell

Comments

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Vera Jukes said…

But should I have dared to ask Simon how he sees the movement, interaction and interpretation of the positioning of the planets, in the Astrological sense? For over time they have proved to be uncannily accurate within the strange world of prediction.
Vera

Or is it a case of never the twain??
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