Dave has changed the banner on Scripting.com with a picture he took in Venice when he visited us. We took a water taxi from Piazza San Marco to the train station. It's an expensive thing to do, even if I live one hour from Venice I had never done it. It was really beautiful.

I also like this new thing on Scripting.com about changing the banner picture. My friend Cesare has been doing something similar for a while (and his cool CSS template scales the image with the window size).

I guess I'll join the party soon.

Update on Star Wars and Photoshop. At least a hundred (well, OK, 30) of you wrote to say that the MacWorld story about Photoshop's relationship to Star Wars is bogus. Here's a link, decide for yourself.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

The original story didn't sound right to me as well. This one sounds better. Back then the BarneyScan scanner (the first product to use the application which later become PhotoShop) was distributed in Italy by my parents' company. The scanner was okay, one of the very first scanners for 35mm slides, but the software was great (I'm not even sure it was called PhotoShop back then). The option to manage multiple 8 bit channels and to be able to create selections from these channels was revolutionary and allowed to achieve amazing results long before Adobe introduced layers.

The only problem was that the software did not start up if the scanner board was not plugged in the NU-bus of the Mac II. I clearly remember that back then I was always travelling with a suitcase containing a 20Mb hard disk and the BarneyScan card.

Reading the linked article I also found out that I'm one of the first 200 PhotoShop users. Cool. Do I win something?