Since this is a blog, you can just leave a message, and unless it involves casinos or \/|46R4, there’s a pretty good chance that I’ll get back to pretty quickly.

But there is another communication channel by which people reach out to this site for wisdom. So this week let’s open up the search term log and respond to some of the actual searches that, sadly, turned up nothing on the Chrome Cow.

The names, and questions are made up to protect the innocent, the search terms are underlined.

Q. Dear Chromey, some of my friends and I were talking the other night about some of the deep philosophical questions, what is the sound of one hand clapping, that sort of thing. Then Travis dropped this bomb: what are the RGB values of Chrome? We went through almost two pans of brownies, and no one could come up with an answer. Then Steve asked if we’d ever really looked at our hands, I mean really looked…wow..the creases look just like little roads. Ok…gotta go man. Mind Blown in Madison

Dear Blown,

These questions are commonly called Zen Koans. They are designed to clear the mind of preconceived notions and habits of thinking. If a scoop of ice cream falls on the pavement and there is no one there to lick it, does it have a taste? That is an ice cream koan.

But to the heart of your question. What are the RGB values of chrome? Well, let’s think about this. Chrome is a mirror-like surface. And asking what the RGB values for a mirror are is essentially asking what color is a mirror?

Try this thought experiment. You are in a room, painted completely red. You are dressed from head to foot in a red jumpsuit, wearing red shoes, socks and gloves. Your head is completely covered in a red ski mask. Now look in the mirror. What color is the mirror?

That’s right. The mirror is reflecting its environment, and the mirror is red.

So there’s your answer. The RGB value of a mirror, and by extension chrome, is 255/0/0.

Thanks for searching the Chrome Cow! See you next week!

Head on over and grab the new set here.

There was a mismatch with some (all?) CAD?CAM software that was causing the files to come in strangely flipped, at least on Intel boxes.

There is now an option to fix this, and a test object to see how LW coordinates work in your CAD/CAM environment.

Back in the early Late Nineties, what I think of as the Internet’s Big Hair period, an earlier incarnation of the Chrome Cow made use of a countdown composed of the titular old school red LED numerals.

I happened across these the other day as I was digging around for something else on an old drive, and was immediately charmed by their naivety, their insouciance.

So I dusted them off and cleaned them up, for back in the day bandwidth was delivered twice a week, dropped off by the milkman as he set new bottles of fresh, wholesome dairy products on the front porch, and as a result, they had be jpeged most savagely.

You can download them here , in pristine PNG format, with the PSD file from which you can construct other characters, should you feel the need, or tweak the hue to create the exotic Green LED.

Please follow all appropriate safeguards when working around high concentrations of kitsch.

Free as in

I’ve been cleaning out the LScript attic, and came across a couple of scripts that either need, or have recently received some loving.

I’ve updated Sean’s Dial Ticks , a nifty little gadget for making all variety of dial-based instrument panels. It has new color choosing features, a working font selector, and a spiffy new built-in help file.

Check it out.

Now the sad news. I also found a sad little orphan script by the name of SHM ArcView Importer . This little ragamuffin is a work I laughingly call in-progress.

It reads ArcView shapefiles allowing you to create some cool, high resolution maps. But it has the potentional to do so much more. I haven’t worked on this one in about two years, so use it as is, or jump in and add some of the missing functionality. Links to shapefile resources, as well as coding resources are available.

Head on over to the LScript download page to get in on the action.