Posts Tagged Tech

One of my hobbies is restoring and retouching/enhancing photos and portraits. Now combine that with the fact my beautiful bride to be is 5000 miles away I tend to work a lot on pictures of her! :) I guess in some sense its a touch from far away, well it is for me, each one of the photos is a memory of some event shared between between us, or from some event we attend in our respective countries, but still share them to let the other feel they are joining in the day to day activities. I find myself many nights sitting in front of the pc and looking through all the many we have and often times open up my Paint Shop program and just play around a bit seeing the different effects and moods I can create. And also in some way only those in a long distance relationship can understand, to touch the woman I love! :)

Well tonight I found one that just seemed to be calling to me to open up and do just that. This particular one is cropped from a larger photo, ad i replaced the background and then just gave it a few fixes here and there, these photo filter plugins can really give a normal digital photo a professional look too it. Well I’m not trying to brag, just saying even a regular pic without any other work on can be much improved just applying one of these filters using the default settings. I do ten though to do a few more things first, such as removing a busy background and adding one to focus the attention on the subject, not that my attention is ever long from Alison! ;)

Oh I may get myself in trouble now as I cant remember off hand now what the date was this picture was taken, I want to say late September or early October of last year. It was a wedding she was going to attend and she took a few pics before she went.

Here’s the original… Well not that she doesnt have a lovely home, I just thought the plant and the part of the kitchen showing was taking away from over all look of the photo, and I was just wanting all my attention on her :) Well I hope she’s not minding me using the picture, at least its photographic proof of a sort that I was thinking of her tonight! ( Hi baby, I Love you! XXX) 

Well its not really hard to do these if you have had a bit of practice. most of the work is done using layers in the program, well like stacking parts of photos over top of another if you will, except the areas fo some are transparent and what lies underneath shows through those parts. So basically all I did in this one was to add a layer beneath this original and fill it with colour using two shades, the darker around the edges and the lighter bit behind here, just a sort of emphasis and a basic photo backdrop. then I went to the original layer and just erased everything but her. The most time of course is doing the fine lines close to her, which is where I get to have the feeling I am touching her in a sense, so that part takes time and to be honest i am taking my time doing it, I love to lala! ;)  lol well once all the bits not her are removed I simply merge the layers and then go about sorting the colour levels and lighting and deciding what kind of effect i want. In the case of this one it, I basically left it as it was and just maybe added a bit of warmth to it and a just a very slight blur to give it that bit fo a dreamy feeling is what I call it. :)  Anyway just thought I would share with the world what I ahve been up to this evening and now I better go and write my love’s morning mail or she will soon be up and wondering where I am!! Well I think she knows by now I sometimes get sidetracked either with pictures or on YouTube. :) 

I was just reading this post from ZDNet, Google launches Friend Connect with mixed reviews , and it caught my interest. Well first as a site owner its an ideal way to make just about any site into a social site very quickly and easily. Well they always say easy don’t they, copy and paste some code, etc… well it should work on most sites that allow you to edit html and allow iframes. Friend Connect was just launched a couple of days ago. It’s not being released yet to the public, but there is a preview release sign up link to add your name to the list on their site (remember doing this with GMail?! That turned out to be a pretty good venture I think! ) There’s a preview video, a couple of example sites set up, as well as it already being integrated in one or two existing sites. it looks very promising to me. well not just as something to make your site easily a social one, but one that opens up the web to possiblilites we haven’t yet imagined. it will be more than a passive web in that regard. Imagine just having to remember one or two identities and passwords! And being able to share what you do on one site with another, or not. as you see fit… I welcome it personally as long as we still have the ability to stand back and be a passive user too and not become just a statistic on some hit counter or how deep I followed the links on some ad goal set up on a website… ok that all happens anyway, signed in to anything or not~ ;) But I do like the idea of it and have always been a proponent of the OpenID movement. Just makes sense and makes things simple.. I like simple :)  Of course this being the launch of something new, it will be a work in progress and it seems for now its a bare bones sort of thing with not much control on the aesthetics and tying it into your sites look, but I’m sure as development goes forward we will be able to integrate it seamlessly in a spot on our pages. I’m impressed a lot here lately with the way these large companies now are finally beginning to realise the enduser is fed up of having to feel like he or she has to choose one place over another as their favourite social site, there are always those diehards who will praise myspace over Facebook or vice versa,, well each has its own followers,just they cant interact, well couldn’t i should say. I did see the other day that its now possible to add your Myspace profile and comments to your Facebook profile, and again vice versa. Well that alone was great for me. Oh I am not a big fan of either of them really, but I have family here in the US that uses only Myspace and then Alison and her family and friends are all on Facebook there in the European Union. Well now whichever site I am on I can see at a glance if a new comment has been added to the other.. well i should say it worked a few days ago. As of yesterday Facebook has now banned Google from accessing it so I dont know if thats affected the Facebook/Myspace connection in any way or not. Facebook is saying its protecting its users info as the reason. Well in my opinion thats up to the user isnt it, Facebook is very big on these third party apps to add things to your profile and each one you add is accessing that same info if you opt in to use it. whats the difference? I want to opt in to Friend Connect. I think in this case Facebook has put up a wall that may keep the info in, but it wont keep its users inside for long when they all realise its a whole new web out there. ( shades of the Aol broswer anyone?) Well i will be following this closely and cant wait until its available. I’ll be able to keep up nicely with all my friends, all 7 or 8 of them   LOL ;)

Speedtest.net is a site I use often to check my dsl speeds. I dont know if its the most accurate or if any  of them really are but it seems to be a least consistent in the results. Of course speeds will vary depending on your connection and what type, as well as how many people may be on your same line. If nothing else its something to pass a few minutes while surfing the web and pretending like you’re some kind of geek ;)  If you have your own server they have a Speedtest Mini shockwave and javascript package that enables you to plce a mini test on your own site.

This is very cool picture plugin for Live Writer that turns an image into a Polaroid style pic with the ability to rotate it in either direction with incredible ease. Its available here for anyone using Live Writer to post to their blogs. So for an example I obviously have to use one of my favourite photos of my beautiful bride to be.

Hope she wont mind! :) Well she shouldn’t as its a great picture! I made this black and white from an original which was taken in Cyprus on our trip to the village in Omodos. You can see the original here. It was just outside the church there in the village square and the colours in the original were wonderful. I just felt this was one of those that makes an excellent greyscale pic too. You may notice the crossed fingers emoticon in this post which was added by another great little plugin that’s free the plugin gallery on Windows Live. It loads the same emoticons that are in use on Live Spaces, which I really am not a fan of, but I have to admit that I like the way MS has of late seemed to be playing a little nicer with its competition, but I guess its all about money in the end and they are realising now that end users have an incredible selection of software and social networking apps from which to choose. Amazing really to look and compare today to what is available to us now from even a couple of years ago. I can remember a time we had spent hours on MS sites and groups just getting a picture to show in a post, now those ‘red x’s’ are generally a thing of the past.  so far things have come, and so much more yet to come~ well like my Brit and I ! :) the good times haven’t even started!! see you soon my almost Americano! :) love you! XXX 

I was toying with Live Writer again this evening and I am actually very impressed with it and what it can do, now that I finally have it set to where it it works with my WordPress installation on my site. To be honest I have gotten to the point of being fed up with the bloat of most M$ stuff but I like this. And whats cool about it is I can also use it with my blogger sites as well! the only thing I was having trouble with was having to go back to the admin section on my site after posting to add the tags, but just looking around a little deeper in this program and found out I can actually do that from here too! it’s under “View>properties” the box comes up and I saw a space to enter keywords and I gave it a try and Voila! it added the keywords as tags! YEA!!! This old man is still learning crap! LOLNow if I can just figure out how to make the proprties dialog open automatically when the program opens I will be set! well now all I have to do is find where to put the code to show the tags with the post and I will be even happier!

I’m still sort of in shock this is a Microsoft program working and playing so well with others! You hear all the talk of the battle between Google and M$ and it seems LiveWriter has a leg up over google in that regard, wish it was working the other way around, I would dearly love for Picasa to be able to make a blog post to a site other than blogger, or do they and I have missed it?! Well it wouldnt surprise me if I did miss it, this old brain of mine is most always in lala land with my beautiful Alison Michelle! :-) xxxxx love ya baby!