Anyone ever wonder why most of what this guy says doesn’t make any sense?
Archive for January 2005
Update to this post:
They’ve taken my station away… again! Why is it that Utah can not have a decent radio station? Now it is some weird genre bending “we’ll play whatever we want to” station, which is ok when they are playing something good, but really sucks the rest of the time. Argh.
It was inevitable, probably. The fish have White Spot, or Ich, a parasitic disease that is fairly common. I’ve started treatment by increasing the water temperature and adding salt to the tank. The procedure is to keep that up for about two weeks and the parasites should be completely gone.
It’s been more than three weeks since the fish went in the tank, and they are all still alive and seem to be well. I’ve done weekly 25% water changes and the waste chemicals in the tank have stayed pretty steady right around 0ppm, so I think we are in good shape.
I’ve been trying to take some pictures of the little guys, but they don’t like to hold still and smile for the camera. My little P&S digital camera is not really up to the task either. It has no way to control external flashes, so it’s next to impossible to get enough light into the tank to get a decent picture. The flash built into the camera provides enough light, but washes out the colors in the tank. Maybe I’ll be able to come up with a diffuser or reflector setup to help with that. What I’d really like is to be able to fire my two big strobes straight down into the tank from the top. I think that would give enough light to get some good pics. I’ll keep playing with that, but for now it is more fuel on the fire to get a dSLR that will enable me to do a little more of the photography that I am used to being able to do. Anyway, below is what I feel is probably the best of the bunch. The picture was taken at ISO 800 and showed a lot of graininess and some nasty noise. I used a smart blur in photoshop to obtain the effect below and then removed the noise that was still noticeable with the healing tool.
So I have been playing with a fun little internet toy called the St. Andrew’s Face Morpher. Here’s what it thinks I would look like if El Greco did a portait of me:
and Modigliani:
Kinda cool stuff. I need to go home, though, and take a self portrait from straight in front of me and see what it does with that. The original picture these came from was at an angle. Anyway, if you want to play a little, you can find it there:
Driving home this afternoon, after learning that my four year old is going to need about $1000 worth of dental work, I found myself thinking about how insanely jealous I am of anyone who drives a luxury SUV. What brought this thought to the front of my mind was the moment I drove past a shiny off-white Escalade. The list of the things I could do with that car payment must be at least a mile long. I would be perfectly happy to keep driving my cheap cars. Somebody just gimme the money!!!
