Revenge of the chicks

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Happy Easter!

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass

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Keepon Dancing

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Your moment of robotic bliss. Happy Holidays!

If you have not seen video where Keepon dances to Spoon’s “I turn my camera on”, check this out: http://dennismueller.org/blog/2007/04/zomg-robots/

Virus and Spyware protection

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My newest concoction of virus and spyware protection (and yes I use all three…)

Spybot Search and Destroy (with TeaTimer)
This is free (though you should donate to the cause!) and very effective at preventative measures with browsers and detecting spyware after it is downloaded.

Symantec Endpoint Protection 11 (or Norton AntiVirus 2010 for the home user)
Both products support real-time file system and email protection.

To not have it conflict with NOD32 do the following:
add the exception: “C:\ProgramData\ESET\ESET NOD32 Antivirus”
Change Settings >
Antivirus and Antispyware Protection “Configure Settings” >
on the “File System Auto-Protect” tab click “Centralized Exceptions”
Click “Add…”
choose Security Risk Exceptions > Folder
Then navigate to the “C:\ProgramData\ESET\ESET NOD32 Antivirus” and click Ok.

ESET NOD32 Antivirus 4
This product is new to me but has saved my butt from a keylogger so I like to include it in the mix. It is also very reasonably priced.

To not have it conflict with Symantec do the following:
On the Setup menu choose “Enter entire advanced setup tree…”
Then expand the “Antivirus and antispyware” tree
> choose “Exclusions”
Click “Add…”
Enter the path “C:\ProgramData\Symantec\SRTSP” (or the equivalent for Norton “C:\ProgramData\Norton\”)

Old San Francisco

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San Francisco – Market Street – circa 1905

From Ed Rabbit

Photoshop to the rescue

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I really enjoy taking photos. Generally I do more candid work which does not allow me to stage the background. I took this photo of my friend Joyce in her lovely dress. Unfortunately, there are a lot of distracting elements in the background that draws my eye from what should be a stunning picture of beautiful woman in a fabulous dress.

Click on the photo to make it larger.

Notice the brown box in the back, the white board has scribbled upon with blue ink, a garbage can just to the right of her and the depth of field is such that the background is in focus.

Click on the photo to make it larger.

I started by adjusting the contrast and color to make adjust for the flash. This is easily done in Picasa or other free tools and it makes a significant difference.
I then cropped the photo so that the some of the distracting qualities were diminished while placing her face in the upper right third of the picture and keeping the angle of her body going along that same axis to the lower third of the shot. Notice the red line that I drew to cut the photo into thirds.

Then next thing I worked on was removing her from the background. This was done by using photoshop and a the magic wand tool to select the subject, used feathering and copied her from the background layer to a new layer.

From here I identified the offensive background objects and did a quick job of removed them. I just cut and paste the wall and molding over them. Then I changed the brightness and size to make it fit. That works pretty well and should be relatively quick. Also it does not need to be perfect because I knew I was going to blur the background. Then I blurred the background layer and saved it as a jpeg.

And poof!