penn

Adjusting Light Levels in Photoshop

Amazing tutorial about adjusting light levels in photoshop at photojojo. I'm itching to try it out myself (when I finally get a copy of photoshop for my mac).

via Kottke

Say Thanks to a Soldier

Xerox now has an online opportunity to say thanks to a soldier. Go brighten someone's day!

Need some honest opinions

I'll (hopefully) be getting new glasses before I move. So, I'd like some honest opinions in my current glasses, because I'm not sure what kind to get. Thanks for your help :-) Below the cut are two pics of me with each of my glasses, and there are a ton more pics of me in my flickr vanity group.

Baseball Thoughts

The Red Sox are in town, and I can't believe the number of fans at the Mariners' stadium. I wonder how many are true Sox fan. It's my hunch that many are either "I hate Seattle" Boston fans or "Ooh, Boston = good baseball I think" fans. Regardless, it's hard to tell what's going on in the game, because people cheer just as much for Boston hits than they do for Seattle ones (or perhaps more).

Last night at the game, I saw a crying woman sitting on the floor by the bathrooms. I went over to her to make sure she was alright, and it turns out she was crying over her boyfriend. He flew out from Connecticut to be with her for a week, and she took five days off work. Apparently, she does not feel like he's been treating her well (reports are that he was flirting with another woman at the game). What an unfortunate situation. I hope she gets up the gumption to dump his ass, because he knew she was crying, and he went back to his seat to watch the game. I feel bad for her even if the situation isn't exactly as she painted, because boyfriend needs to be with his crying woman, especially if he flew out from Connecticut to be with her.

Some people at work are awesome, and some people suck. I've done this job way too long. I'll be a bit nostalgic for it, I think, but I also look forward to getting my adrenaline rush in other ways.

Absolutely Amazing

Coming from a PC to a mac has been extremely difficult. In fact, there's still stuff I'm getting used to. One thing that has (note the past tense) been bugging me is the lack of the tap-click on my trackpad. I love the two finger scrolling and everything, but the tap-click was my lifeline.

Today, I had a brilliant thought. I looked in my system preferences.

Lo and behold, I managed not only to set a tap-click on my trackpad but also a tap and drag. I also set it to secondary click (aka right click) when I tap with two fingers.

Plus, I'm figuring out the whole fn + backspace for delete, and I can use my command key with the arrow buttons.

Life is slowly getting better.

Captcha

I'd like to take a moment to apologize for the new commenting system on my blog. I realize that all commenters (myself included) now have to type in some letters from a box before being allowed to comment.

I think it's a huge pain, and I don't like doing it on other sites.

That said, deleting spam comments was beginning to be a bigger pain. I was leaving for vacation, and I didn't want to deal with three trillion spam comments when I came back. In my mind, spam comments block conversation and limit the flow of ideas (not that that's been happening much recently here . . . ).

For now, captcha is staying up until I can figure out something better. Perhaps when I have more time, I'll try taking it down for a little while to see how much spam I get. But for now, I just don't have the energy to deal with extra spam around here.

As seen at the park

Today, at the park near my house, the neighbor boys and some friends were playing cricket.

I walked up there with a friend of mine to enjoy the beautiful day and have a good, long chat. It was wonderful to watch a boisterous group of kids play a sport that is entirely un-American; unplayed and probably misunderstood by most Americans, I've always seen cricket as a fairly civilized sport.

It led me to do some thinking about civilization, sport, and the rules of the game. Stereotypically speaking, the British are known for constraint. They are not an overtly passionate people. I wonder how they play soccer (and where the soccer hooligans come from -- that is great passion of Britain. I also wonder if the punk movement arose along with hooligans due to centuries of personal repression).

I've also been reading a lot about soccer recently. I didn't follow much of the world cup, even though I think it's fairly interesting (summer right now, unfortunately, has me pretty occupied with baseball due to my current job, but I only have 12 days left before freedom). By far the most interesting article I've read about the world cup issues (specifically, the Zidane/Materazzi headbutt) is one from the New Yorker. Beautiful, evocative, exploratory, and even expository. I wonder if soccer started out as a civilized game; I wonder if cricket has ever experienced similar outburts?

All we are saying is give peace a chance

How sad that I came back from a week of "Peace Talks" to find the world in turmoil. Camp was absolutely amazing, and I'm sad that it's over. I'll (hopefully) write more about it as I decompress. Our theme for the week was peace talks, and we spent the week learning about a few key words:

1. Aloha -- hello/goodbye
2. Shalom -- peace
3. Be Still -- self explanatory
4. Agape -- unboundless, unconditional love
5. Ubuntu -- humanity in an affirming, loving, sharing community
6. Heiwa -- a deep inner peace that is a peace of the heart & soul

North Korea

Years ago now, during my freshman year of college, I had a great opportunity to visit the People's Republic of Korea (PROK), otherwise known as South Korea. It was a wonderful trip, and I really enjoyed seeing a country I'd never thought to visit.

While there, I was told a great deal about North Korea, but I didn't see any of it other than a few views from the DMZ (de-militarized zone, or the border between North and South Korea). Therefore, these pictures were a real eye-opened.

via Standard Mischief

Small Year

as seen in a Grey's Anatomy transcript (I'm trying to catch up, and reading is easier than downloading episodes). Scene: two people eating dinner.

WAITER: Should I send the small year over?

Obviously, spelling and culture knowledge are overrated.

Side note: no posts for the next week -- I volunteered to be a counselor at a JH week for my church camp ^^