I suppose it’s cliche to say ‘I never win anything’. But by and large that is true for me. However, this week has been doubly good for me.
First, I arrived back home from vacation to find a nice shiny copy of Linux Journal in my mailbox. I won a subscription (as did Mr. Heathenx and others I think) for some banner ads we did for the guys at The Linux Link Tech Show. Great Stuff! And thanks again to the boys over at TLLTS.
And now this morning I’m ecstatic over the fact that I won the coveted Finger of God (a carnival-esque electro-mechanical torture device) from the guys at LugRadio! A couple of episodes back they announced a contest to photoshop a picture of Aza Raskin. Now, I absolutely love doing silly photoshops of friends and family. So just the concept was enough for me to give it a quick go, but to include a prize? Now there was no question about it! You can check out my entries over on the announcement page. And no, despite the use of the term “Photoshopping”, there was nothing involving Photoshop at all. All my work was done exclusively in Inkscape, except for maybe a final conversion from .png to .jpg using the Gimp.
Yay me! 
I recently arrived back from an almost two-week vacation down to Myrtle Beach and Disney World. While not completely “off the grid”, aside from a daily email check and a couple of blog comments, I pretty much unplugged. I gave the camera a decent workout with a few hundred snapshots just downloaded onto the pc tonight. Highlights? Space Mountain, my daughter having fun fun fun, and a visit to Kennedy Space Center.
This is really just a check in post while I unwind (yes, I know a vacation is supposed to unwind me, but it never seems to work out that way) and slip back into ‘normal’ mode once again, a little more refreshed and recharged. There will be a few more photos likely posted, but here are two for now:
I’ve tried moon shots before and have never been satisfied. But one night this past week, looking out onto the Atlantic, the full moon seemed somewhat dimmer than your typical bright shiny full moon, so I thought I’d give it a try. Handholding my 300mm lens fully extended, ISO 100, and F5.6 at 1/125, I braced the lens against the balcony railing and fired off 3 or 4 shots. Suprisingly, a couple of them seemed fairly sharp when I reviewed them. Here’s the full shot and a 1:1 crop of the moon to show you some actual detail instead of the washed out mess that my previous attempts have always produced:
Here’s the 1:1 crop of the moon itself:
And of course, another shot I liked getting was this restaurant’s sign along Hwy 17 which made me laugh. It may not appeal to those of you without a grade school sense of humour like myself - but for me it made for at least 10 minutes of quality bathroom humour.
Perhaps this is old, and maybe everyone’s seen this one before, but I thought it was funny. The part about Mother-in-Law 1.0 made me almost snort out my coffee…
Dear Tech Support,
Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0
and noticed a distinct slow down in overall system
performance — particularly in the flower and jewelry
applications, which operated flawlessly under
Boyfriend 5.0.In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other
valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal
Attention 6.5 and then installed undesirable programs
such as NFL 5.0, NBA 3.0, and Golf Clubs 4.1.Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6
simply crashes the system. I’ve tried running Nagging
5.3 to fix these problems, but to no avail.What can I do?
Signed, Desperate
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
Dear Desperate:
First keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment
Package, while Husband 1.0 is an Operating System.
Please enter the command: ‘I Thought You Loved Me.exe’
and try to download Tears 6.2 and don’t forget to
install the Guilt 3.0 update.If that application works as designed, Husband 1.0
should then automatically run the applications Jewelry
2.0 and Flowers 3.5.But remember, overuse of the above application can
cause Husband 1.0 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5,
Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Beer 6.1 is a very bad
program that will download the Snoring Loudly Beta.Whatever you do, DO NOT install Mother-in-law 1.0 (it
runs a virus in the background that will eventually
seize control of all your system resources).Also, do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0
program. These are unsupported applications and will
crash Husband 1.0 .In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it
does have limited memory and cannot learn new
applications quickly. You might consider buying
additional software to improve memory and performance.
We recommend Food 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.Good Luck, Tech
Support
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Expressions can be a odd thing. I had someone at work ask me for something and they jokingly tacked on a word to make the point:
“Please send it to me.. Pronto.”
Pronto. Now there’s something I hadn’t heard in a while.
These days “ASAP”, undoubtedly pronounced “aye-sapp”, seems to be the most common (and maybe the most trite) ending to a request. I use it myself, but always give the person enough respect to spell or say it fully.
But back to the matter at hand. How in the world do you out-do ‘pronto’?
Here’s one,
“I want that thing. Post-haste.”
Get my smoking jacket and slippers Jeeves…
Do you have any odd, old or seldom-used expressions you like to trot out every now and then? Pray-tell?
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I thought I’d scratch something out. It’s kind of ‘inside baseball’ - or “inside linux podcasting” so to speak, but what the hell. For J.C Hutchins - 7th Son fans, it’s not Kilroy 3.0 who is ‘everywhere’. It’s Verbal (from Chicago) who’s really everywhere…
Update: Sorry if you got this post multiple times. But it appears the theme I’m using really fubars things when I embed a YouTube video in the post. So for now, I’m going to post the links to the YouTube videos (instead of embedding them) until I find out what the problem is.
Original Post:
When you think of “Photoshop” and “Screencasts”, then humour is something that doesn’t immediately spring to mind. At least not until you’ve checked out Donnie Hoyle’s hilarious ‘You Suck at Photoshop’ screencasts. Here are two of them: (caution: strong language)
I’m not sure about the idea of people-powered search. But maybe Jason Calacanis should stick to video trailer production instead. This intro video for the new Mahalo Daily video podcast was very good. The part with Alex Albrecht was genius.
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Stuck with a crappy graphic designer? Say goodbye to all your worries with easy to apply “Make My Logo Bigger Cream”. Big improvements with only one application. And there are lots of other deals to be had too, like “Whitespace Eliminator Spray” and more.
This company could put many hard working designers out of business. 
ps. The look on the designer’s face when confronted with “Flouresencizer” is priceless.
Check out all of these wonderful products right here.
[via boagworld]
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Although as a parent, I’m twice removed from this situation (I have only one child, and she’s a ‘she’), I did grow up as the younger of two boys, so Tony Woodlief’s post made me genuinely guffaw this morning. Mind your step.
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