I have exerienced the forgotten taste of beer and brainstorming today. I had a very pleasant yet productive meeting with a couple of friends of mine. Main question was about making more money without breaking any existing contracts. Gladly we had a couple of worthy ideas that we will be looking into in the nearest future.
If these things won’t work commercially, we would have some great time anyway, so this is a win-win scenario. And this does not happen every day, you know…
The powder that Maxim is sucking off my finger seems to work. Yellow bits started to appear in his poo during the first day. More and more of yellow saturation comes in every day. Yellow is winning over green. These are good news.
Contrary to popular belief, Gimp is not the only image manipulation application for Linux. There are a few.
Today I came across yet another one. digiKam is a KDE-based application for editing and maintaining collections of digital photographs. Iti s possible to store images in albums with comments, tags and dates. SQLite database backend allows for more metadata. digiKam also has a number of image processing features. Basically, it supports KDE image processing architecture and thus can utilize a number of plugins from other applications. The usual suspects for image rotation, levels, curves, cropping, annotating, white balance and color corrections are all there. Check it out.
Going around the web and seeing a whole bunch of beautiful pictures fires up the need to photograph something inside of me. Having the will to create beauty and having my creative self totally on vacation really hurts. I know that I can photograph anything and everything around me. At the same time I have difficulty actually seeing the photograph.
I decided to shoot something never-the-less. The first thing that got into my camera’s viewfinder was the mouse. Out of three shots I’ve chosen the last one. I postprocessed it a little bit in Gimp. And here is the result.
Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-20_POTD
I was suspecting that blogging is getting more popular than some people want it to. But today I got two reasons to belive that blogging is officially in the mainstream now.
The first reason is my mother. She usually tries to stay as far from technology topics as I try to stay out of business discussions. Today though she was aksing me all about blogging. We spend about two hours talking on the subject with me giving her an overview of the general concepts as well as the demonstration of practical side with LiveJournal. She was very interested. She made a whole bunch of schemes and notes in her notebook (the paper version). I have a strong feeling that she will join the blogging world in the near future.
The second reason is “Cosmopolitan“. If you were living under the rock for the last few decades, “Cosmopolitan” (or “Cosmo” for short) is one of the most popular magazines for women. It covers a broad range of topics modern women may be interested in – fashion, sex, travelling, housekeeping, getting married to a rich guy and stuff like that. From time to time one can find technology articles in “Cosmo”. They are usually on a very basic introductory level, but deep enough for a number of women to go out and try things. The latest issues of “Cosmopolitan” has an article about different ways of communicating in the Internet. It talks about emails, instant messaging (ICQ, MSN, etc), forums, and blogs. While emails and instant messaging don’t surprise me at all, blogs do. Not only it shows how to use LiveJournal (LiveJournal is one of the most popular blog services in Russia thus it is very logical to find an article about it in the Russian edition of “Cosmopolitan”), but it introduces readers to some parts of netiquette and terminology.
All of these lead me to believe that blogging is interesting for way too more people than I could have thought. Some people are in such a need of a diary software and means to share their thoughts and experiences that they are ready to overcome technology difficulties and laziness. Who would have thought of this five or ten years ago?