Learning Photoshop

Work has been getting to me this week. While I've kept up with my personal journal I've missed a couple of days here. Today I made my way through 150 pages of Adobe Photoshop Classroom in a Book as I try to finally teach myself Photoshop. I had a good day of it and actually understand how to do a number of things that had always mystified me when I tried to use Photoshop before. I'm about to go to be but before I do I thought I would upload a little before and after action from a picture I took last year that I turned into a fake movie still. I got the how to from this site.

Feeling Out Of It Today

It was my day off from work today and I skipped my morning routine. I didn't write in my journal. I didn't convert any of my September 2005 to a computer copy. I didn't post on this blog this morning. I didn't even read very much of the news today. I did only a few of the household chores I had planned. I did watch a bunch of West Wing and I cleaned up my desk a little. It wasn't until tonight that I was trying to play a little bit of catch up that I read this snippet in the Mercury News. Nothing made me feel so out of touch like missing the fact that a major presidential candidate was only a block away from my apartment last night. Not that I would have blown the $250 to get in.

Modigliani and Me

I changed my profile picture this morning thanks to the Perception Laboratory's Face Transformer. You can upload a picture and it can age it, change race, sex, or even species. They also have a couple of artist filters. I ran my regular profile picture through it and the best was the Modigliani. I think it makes me look thiner.

I Love Gridlock

The conservative side of me is always happier when our government is divided. As long as the branches are fighting themselves and each other they are doing less to screw up the country and the world. That's why my heart was warmed when I read this article from yesterday's The Hill on the Republican bid to stop changes to the earmark process. Frankly, I have no opinion on the rule change itself. When it comes to money I have long given up trusting either party. The whole purpose of earmarks, no matter when they are slid into the budget, is to hide spending in a document that is too massive for anyone to read before it is voted on. All I know is that slowing down the legislative process in a congress as deeply divided as this one before presenting bills to a president of a different party is going to make it unlikely that they are going to be able to do much of anything. So the Libertarians win without having much of a caucus. Not bad in my opinion.

More Fun Stuff I Missed

I have not been much of a shutterbug lately. Yesterday I added a new San Francisco event that I failed to get pictures of. The Great Gorilla Run is a 4.3 mile event that was started in London in 2003 to raise money and awareness for the endangered Central African Mountain Gorilla. What makes this event interesting is that the participants run the race dressed as Gorillas. I may not have been there but the Chronicle was and took some pictures.

Again I'm Late to the Party

One of the things I love about the internet is that there always seems to be something new to find. Even if it isn't really new just new to you. Or in this case me. Anyway, after hearing about it, scrolling past it on Digg and even being asked about it, I finally got around to watching an episode of Ask a Ninja. And I laughed my ass off. I'm actually standing to write this post because I no longer have an ass. I was actually looking at some videos that explain web concepts for my mom and came across this one for explaining podcasts. I think I watched about 10 episodes before I finally went to bed. Here are some links.

Ask a Ninja

Podcast

Digital Filmmaker on You Tube

The Good News

Nothing I have read in the news has made me this happy in a long, long, long time.

Yesterday Was a Good Day

I've begun to take stock of my days by asking myself "What did I create?" and "What did I do to impact my own future?" I am especially critical of my days off from work. The old, "You had all this time to yourself why didn't you create a masterpiece?" issue. I'm trying to through a whatever into the masterpiece part and concentrate on the create part. Yesterday I wrote in my personal journal, I posted on a couple of things on my blogs, and I made a doodle that I don't actually hate. Good day.

On the "Impact of Future Days" front there was more. They were small but they will make my life better in the days to come. I bought the metal strip in the picture and it's accompaning magnets. I've been thinking about this for quite awhile and now that I've done it I'm very glad I did. I bought some new pens and I'm hoping that I can use that space to inspire myself a little bit more. The strip is on the bookcase that sits right next to my writing desk. I can touch it from here.

Other things that will impact beyond today include determining that Yahoo Pipes is not for me, cleaning up my RSS feeds, and the discovery of Klaus Schulze thanks to Jeff. I've been playing him pretty much exclusively since he stopped by last night. I think you will see that name more often on my recently played list. But the big one is that I've started copying my handwritten journals onto my mac. One of the changes that I finished in the last week was the transferring of my computer journals onto a new program, MacJournal. MacJournal has this thing I love. It's a calender that highlights all the days that there are entries for. It fills me with an irrational level of accomplishment to see those days highlighted. And I want credit for everything I've written. So I started copying old entries, at least one a day. If I keep it up (a big if history tells us) I should be done in about a year. I'll keep you posted. For now I will simply leave you with a small quote from what I copied this morning which is from a dream I had in September 2005.

I just woke from the strangest dream. I changed my commute. It was the middle of the night and I was getting home from the city by means of street luge. Except I don’t think I actually had a luge. I think I was just lying in the gutter flat on my back wearing a brown coat.

Believe it or not it goes on. And gets weirder. Whatever, yesterday was a good day. I didn't get my laundry done but it was still a good productive day.

"Fun" Flash Game

I thought that I was a bit of a geography buff until The Geography Challenge made me feel like a complete idiot. I've spent the last half hour letting it tell me how stupid I am. I got to 70% twice in that time. Good luck.

Update: I just got a 90% on one I hadn't played before. I'm quitting while I'm ahead.

I Want One of These

Take a look at what this guy did to his monitor. Actually, I have the same monitor. It's too bad that I have no mechanical aptitude whatsoever. The keyboard may even be cooler than the monitor. I'm going to have to check back and see what he does with his mouse.

A Nice Take on the Republican Debate

Here is a nice take on some of the foreign-relations quotes in last night's Republican debate, from Juan Cole at Informed Comment.

My First Political Contribution of the Season

Hillary may be my personal front runner at the moment but my first dollars went to a Republican candidate. From Texas. I can hardly believe that I just wrote that but frankly I like where Ron Paul is taking the debate. I think the longer he can stay in this thing the better the rhetoric on all sides. So I slipped him $10 and hope he can keep a campaign going as long as possible. This is probably the closest we will ever get to a viable Libertarian candidate. Check him out on The Daily Show.

My Francis Scott Key Moment

Legend has it that Francis Scott Key woke to an enormous flag flying after the 25-hour British bombardment of Fort McHenry promoting him to write the verses that would become our national anthem. One of the first things I found in my inbox this morning was a link to Jason Linkins in the Huffington Post about the fact that the Wall Street Journal had lived through the night. Linkins is using a necking metaphor in his piece saying that Rupert had failed to get to second base with the Bancroft family. Here is where I would re-write The Star Spangled Banner if I possessed better turn of the phrase than I actually do.

For another day at least the WSJ lives, although this particular dance may have more to do with price than anything else. This is some video from last week when the Bancroft's first cracked the door open to Murdoch. Here is the article it references.

Tough Week To Be a Politician

It is a tough week to be a corrupt politician (redundant?) Scooter Libby gets 2 and a half years and may not be able to avoid prison on appeal. The feds finally catch up William Jefferson but may not be finished handing out indictments to congressmen. The CHP thinks my own State Senator should be charged with reckless driving for getting into two accidents that she doesn't even remember. President Bush got trashed by members of his own party. Still that's all better than Senator Thomas of Wyoming who didn't even survive the week. I'll leave you with some video of Scooter, well, scooting.

Almost Makes Me Miss Having Cable TV

This is a ten minute preview of the upcoming Star Wars episode of Family Guy.

Very Cool Clock

Speaking of cool flash sites check out this clock.

Bookmarks

I continue to work on migrating my bookmarks onto del.icio.us. I have spent the last couple of days working on the tags that stay on my desktop as my main reference bookmarks. I'm still tweaking it so I'm not going to go to far into the details. I have, however, tagged all of my favorite flash sites (as flash) and while I was visiting each one to make sure the links worked and they were tagged properly I came back on jacksonpollock.org. You to can create your own drip masterpiece without converting your garage and buying a hundred gallons of paint. Try it out. Click the mouse button to change colors.

New Music

All of Mp3.com may be unable to take my money any more but the Russians haven't given up yet. I managed to get a twenty to Mp3City a couple of nights ago and was rewarded with some great new (for me) music. I have long suspected that Tom Waits was my man but finally getting my hands on Closing Time has cemented the deal for me. Other gems include The Arcade Fire's Funeral (which I'm listening to right now) and KT Tunstall's Eye to the Telescope (which I played all night long last night). I still haven't listened to everything I picked up so you will have to wait for a later update. I will say that I couldn't make my way through Maroon 5's new album. I was through after four songs.

My lastFM widget hasn't been updating correctly this morning but I think that's because it's Sunday and that's when all the charts get updated for the week. Do check out the new lacadaz radio button that I added for your own listening enjoyment.

Some Good News From the Zoo

This morning Karen emailed me this story from the SFGate about the new habitat for the grizzly bears opening at the San Francisco Zoo. The new diggs sound great. I'm happy for the bears. They put on the best show last time I was there. Here is a few seconds of video I took of the bears when I was at the zoo in April.

What's Going On

Sorry I missed yesterday. Usually I skip because my internal censor takes over and I start second guessing my thoughts and opinions. That wasn't the case yesterday. Yesterday I tried to read 600 rss feeds. (Actually, only about 30) It was tough. But Scoble was right, it's all about the keyboard shortcuts. (I know. I know. This is devolving into another computer process story and I've just lost Paul) The good news is I think I have a work flow for reading and tagging. Now I just need add that final step of taking the best of what I read and getting it on to this page along with my superior commentary. And I should probably work on actually having some superior commentary. The only real news from this is that Google Reader won. Especially after it upgraded to allow me to work offline thanks to Google Gears. That may come in handy especially since I no longer get wireless at work. The more services that Google can give offline functionality to the better for them. Gmail and Blogger would be huge.