The UK is going through what some people would call some inclement weather at the moment, a cold snap if you will. Today's temperature was a meagre -5˚C outside, not that bad some of you would say. Slightly colder than New York, considerably warmer than Grand Forks, N.Dakota at -18˚C where my friend Nysak lives, so I have a lot to be grateful for, even if I don't have any heating in my flat.
The inside of my windows have frozen, the interior temperature was around 4˚C this afternoon which is the same temperature as my fridge. Conversely the warmest parts of my flat are behind the fridge and behind the freezer, I suspect the heat exchange from both these white goods is what is keeping my flat 'warm', or warmer than outside. During the summer I'd be glad of the cold, i've been known to sit in front of the fridge for a time to cool down.
The cold brings its own challenges, mainly on how to keep warm, I generally huddle up under a quilt and a sleeping bag with a hot water bottle, occasionally venturing out for a hot drink. Works quite well until the time you wake up in the morning with your feet sticking out the bottom of the bed feeling like a couple of frozen kippers.
Another challenge is eating hot food. You have to make smaller portions because the food gets cold quite quickly. Today I made a bowl of pasta and by the time I was halfway through the dish it was cold so I had to microwave it.
I have also noticed that these new energy saving green lightbulbs that are meant to save the world from global warming are working rather well, the feckers don't throw out any heat whatsoever. Bring back the old bulbs, at least I could warm my hands on my desk lamp! When someone next says to me I'm not doing my bit to save the planet I'll remind them that I suffered sub-zero temperatures keeping my carbon footprint to a minimum whilst they were driving their gas guzzling Chelsea tractors and enjoying a super heated living room and hot saunas!
I must admit that I am my worst enemy where the cold is concerned. I hate to wear much in the way of clothing at home, I'd rather stroll around in the buff, but even now with the temperature reaching the brass bollocks range, I still only have a pair of underpants and a jumper on. Perhaps I should invest in some comfy sweat pants and some thermal socks...
I am a bad blogger, I haven't written anything for ages, mainly because I've been rather busy doing other things, like celebrating Christmas and the New Year.
I went back to Wales over the holidays, spent a week with my parents and sorted out their computer and set up my nieces new laptop. Visited the best kebab house in the world only to find it is no longer as good as it was, I was slightly devastated about this turnabout.
Christmas itself was a quiet affair, I didn't get many gifts, I never do, but I did get a bit of cash so I bought some new walking boots and a new Wales rugby shirt, my first ever red shirt! I do feel that you have to spend any gift money on something a bit special, even though I should have saved it for a rainy day or restocked the larder. So come the Six Nations I'll be suited up in my new Wales shirt to annoy the English supporters.
New Year came and went, I got horrendously drunk on the eve along with most of my mates, I didn't intend to but these things seem to happen without my knowing.
So now we're back to normal, back to the job hunting in earnest and hoping that 2010 will be a better year. The potential of having met someone and the deep belief that I will find work can only mean that this year has to work out well.
Here's to 2010, the year we make contact apparently...
Apparently the flag counter below should provide flags for individual States in the U.S. So before I bugger about with changing my code, I thought I'd test it here as a post.
Nothing more to see, please move on...
On the wave of the Copenhagen failure, because when you really look at what has been achieved you will realise that not an iota of forwardness has been reached, I thought I might share my feelings over climate change.
I saw with a slight feeling of horror at how one of my childhood icons was jeered and 'slow clapped' off a stage for standing up for what he thought was insubstantial science.
I was always taught that the default position of science was, 'we don't know'. Now it seems that some scientists are getting rather evangelistical over climate predictions and any other point of view is ridiculed. Let's face it, once you know something without any doubt whatsoever you are stepping into religious fervour rather than enlightened comprehension.
Personally I will agree that 'perhaps' mankind is affecting our climate, but I don't think we are contributing to the changes we are seeing as much as our scientists and politicians would like us to believe.
Geological evidence has provided us with an amazing amount of data to suggest that climate change happens on a regular basis, it has also been widely believed that we have been due another ice age for a long time but it has not yet happened. I doubt very much that any changes in our global output of carbon emissions will make any difference whatsoever to what is happening as the sequence of events is already in full flow.
What I'm seeing is a natural cause and effect situation to a cycle that has been going on since time immemorial. Perhaps mankind has hastened the outcome by a few years but not so much as to be responsible for the happenings of a common side effect of the Earth regenerating itself.
Perhaps all these specialists who have an amazing amount of knowledge learnt over the last 500 years or so should look at a broader picture, especially one on a cosmic scale. Planets and stars don't care much about mankind's records over the last few hundred years, nor do they particularly care about the small effect that a case of human nits will cause.
Nature has always found a way of balancing out parasites, perhaps that is what Earth is doing now. Not against mankind but against all life as a whole. We all know she has done so previously, in a biblical sense and in a scientific sense.
Human vanity is clouding our view I feel.
Let it happen, try to stop it happening, I doubt very much that any of us can do anything at all once mother earth has decided how it should be. Good luck...
I had a slight grin and a little twinkle in my eye when I read this story a moment ago.
A New Zealand church has posted a billboard in an effort to get people to discuss the Christmas story. Doesn't sound so bad does it. I'll share the image in question,, but be warned, it's shocking!
I'm not a religious individual, I have always thought the Bible to be nothing more than a collection of fables put together by a ruling religious class in order to instil their authority and subjugate women and other religious beliefs. However I do believe in other peoples right to believe in the Christian dogma. Personally I would rather idolise J.R.R. Tolkein's effort.
But does the image above instil so much wrath in your eternal soul that you would feel the need to be offended or even stand on top of your car with a tin of emulsion to paint over it? I don't think so.
I find it humorous and it does highlight many problems within relationships today, after all, shouldn't the church be addressing such issues?
I don't think it was meant as an offence and I can only guess it's the fundies that are taking umbrage, and as with all things highlighted in such circumstances by people who don't want you to see something, it's now been blown out of all proportion and it's now reported upon throughout the world. Quite the Streisand effect.
I'm not a church goer but I'd definitely pay a visit to St. Matthews over Christmas if I lived in New Zealand.
Well, I've had the old banner for seven years, its been part of my blog for such a long time I can't even think what the place would look like if I changed it. So being the rather adventurous individual that I am who likes to live life on the edge, I decided it's finally time for a change.
As you can see I went full on Discworld this time round, even blatantly lifting Paul Kidby's most excellent painting of Great A'tuin itself and adding my own little embellishments.
I'm not sure if I like it yet, it's too soon to tell as I'm slightly wary of the change. Will people like it? Will my regular readers visit and think that they have arrived at the wrong blog? Will it attract strange people who like to dress up as wizards at weekends? Who knows, time will tell.
There are a couple of little things hidden within that mean nothing to nobody but me, two constellations in the background, one is Scorpio, because I was born under that star sign, and you might notice Orion, which is the easiest set of stars to see in the northern hemisphere. For those of you who like crackpot theories, it is thought that the Pyramids at Giza have been built to emulate these stars' pattern.
Anyhow, I'm not going to waffle on about it. What do you think? Is it a stayer or shall I revert back to the old one?
Ever since our local supermarket changed hands from Somerfields to Morrisons, I've been reaping the benefits of a better run store. I used to work for Somerfields way back when so I understood why it was such a useless retailer. Luckily they went out of business and my favourite food shop of all took over.
Now we're blessed with amazing offers and a better variety of grocery and fresh produce. This week, for three days only, they made this offer.
A joint of pork, two cartons of Covent Garden soup, a variety pack of vegetables consisting of potatoes carrots and sprouts and to finish it off, a trifle. All for £4.
The joint itself is worth £6.50 normally! Unfortunately the offer was one per customer, but it didn't stop me from going back more than once and now my freezer has quite a lot of food in there. :D
Being on a very tight budget this is a godsend for me. For months before Morrisons opened I literally lived on cheap noodles, eggs, potatoes and bread, it was simply all I could afford to buy, now I can splash out on well rounded meal options for the same price. This £4 deal is enough to feed me for possibly three days so I'm a very happy bunny.
I can imagine that a lot of the needy families around our town are very happy also, £4 to feed a family of four is amazing. I have no idea how they manage to make such offers, I can only assume they are arse raping the farmers an using this as a loss leader, personally I'm not complaining, when needs must and all that.
So guess what I'm having for Sunday lunch tomorrow....
I like many others have downloaded the brand spanking new Google Chrome for Mac beta that has just been released. I'm not unhappy with Safari, I find it very adequate for surfing the net although I would like to add a few useful third party plug-ins like you can in Firefox. I hear a lot of you ask, 'why don't you just use Firefox then?' I say it's not that good and the overall user experience is shoddy on a Mac as the whole program smells of PC to me.
Anyhow, I had been looking forward to trying out Googles effort for over a year now, the PC version has been out for a long time and Google have been dragging their feet somewhat in releasing a Mac version. So when it finally came out yesterday I simply had to test it out.
Initially it looked great. Graphically it looked good, the downloads were quick, I liked the bookmark icons in the menu bar and its integrated external download window was a nice gimmick.
Then I had a look in the bookmarks menu, the whole thing is a mess. I have no idea why they have set it up like they have, fair enough it is a beta version and there will be a few changes, but why release something when it is obviously wrong?
Also they have no provision for blocking advertisements by adding user content style sheets. I can see why they have done this, Google are the number one culprit for adding adverts onto websites, but I don't want to see ads nor do I want to waste my precious bandwidth downloading them, so Chrome fails badly.
As a browser it felt good to use but it has no functionality, other browsers like Opera and Camino do exactly the same thing but better. I suppose there will be a lot of tweaking in the next few months and hopefully they will improve on what they have. The simple UI is great, but it offers nothing that Safari doesn't have so I fail to see why I should change. Speed is a great selling point but if I can't be patient for 0.032 of a second whilst a page loads slightly less quickly in Safari then my soul is lost.
A pitiful effort by the internet giant.
I've been busy this evening on the old Photoshop, my initial thought was to make a Christmassy avatar for Twitter, but after I finished and resized the image it just didn't look good as all you could see was a brown smudge because the image was too small.
So instead I'm going to print it out as a christmas card for the family.
Without further ado, here it is
I'm not totally pleased with it, there's something about it that I can't get my finger on, it just doesn't look right to me. I think I've been a little bit too over-ambitious with this one and my shopping skills are simply not up to it. I think it may be because I started off with an image that was computer generated and I've made it too real.
Anyhow, just for those of you who are interested I saved a few intermediate stages for you to see how I went about producing the finished result.
I started off with these two pictures, one is the poster from the film Christmas Carol and a photo I took of myself.
The crucial part of this stage is to get the right pose to go with your base image.
I took around thirty photos before I finally settled on the one that I used.
I simply took a rough selection of my head then copied and pasted it onto the base image and flipped it horizontally.
Taking the eraser tool, set on soft with a large brush setting I erased the parts I didn't need. I ended up with the next image.
As you can see theres a lot of work to be done now to blend my face to match the background. This took me an absolute age to get right. The more time you spend doing this the better the result will be. It's a combination of curves, brightness/contrast, photo filters, vibrance, colour filters and further erasing until I have come to a stage where I think the colours look like they should.
It's certainly not easy to do when the image I chose doesn't have much to go on to start off with. I took around three hours to get it to some kind of semblance of being right.
Even then I kept playing around with it until I thought that if I carried on there would be nothing left.
The final stage was to add all the candle light highlights on my face and glasses.
This was simply done by copying pieces of the light in the top hat and pasting them where I needed them.
The skill here is in resizing them and manipulating the shapes by using the liquify tool. It takes a little time to get it right as you can only use this on one layer so you are literally working blind by shaping the piece without being able to see the background, so a lot of it is guesswork.
Hope you all like it, took me ages and I think I may yet work on it some more but I needed to stop for a while just in case I overworked it. Any thoughts?
My Groups
-
Photo Quest Updated: 25 minutes ago
-
Photography Love Updated: 1 hour ago
-
EFx2/EFx3 Bloggers Updated: 2 hours ago
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
Links from my Family
September 5th is/was our wedding anniversary. This shall ...
Brookville Daily Photo | Br...
I spent the better part of two hours, on Saturday, waitin...
I sort of roared. Okay, so it was a politely cool roar, ...
Rachael Ray's Official Webs...
You've reached the official website for Rachael Ray, wher...
This recipe came from Headless Mom, and the second I read...
