Gassed

My colleague Gassed finally announced to the department that she had accepted a job elsewhere. Her group's job is being transitioned to Mumbai, so she might as well jump ship before they get to her.

I used Email Effects to create the ASCII art showing her face. In NeoOffice with Overwrite turned on, I replaced the background with names of Gassed's soon-to-be ex-colleagues and other reminders of her days with this company. To protect the innocent, I only used first names and initial of last names, in most cases anyway.

It's actually quite a process to get Email Effects' output into a picture format. Email Effects is supposed to be used to generate text pictures, i.e. pictures made up of characters. You would then paste the resulting text into an email and your recipient is supposed to see the picture using a fixed font like Courier or Monaco. I did the text editing in NeoOffice then exported the text to PDF. Next, I loaded the PDF into Photoshop and finally saved it out to GIF. The Mac's built-in ability to export to PDF is a major help.