Month: May 2005

Greasemonkey extension for Firefox

Extensions for Firefox are great. There are so many of them, that sometimes good ones hide and pass unnoticed. Greasemonkey received a lot of publicity, but still some people don’t know about it. Greasemonkey allows for insstallation and usage of numerous user scripts that fix problems with famous sites and make certain sites more usable. For example, there are scripts to remove all sorts of advertisements from feeds displayed by Bloglines, make Delicious and Slashdot look better, or add some aggrigated information to IMDb pages. The best thing is that there is no need to restart the browser between installations and removals of these user scripts.

Try it! It probably fixes annoyances that you are complaining about on a daily basis.

Sleeping beauty

Sleeping beauty

One of the things Maxim got from me is his ability to sleep with semiopen eyes. Sometimes they are wide open, sometimes they are open just a tiny bit. Can you see a light reflection in his eye on this picture? Well, that’s a tiny bit open eye…

On the photography side, I’ve postprocessed this image a bit. Original came out OK, but looked somewhat boring and casual. Firstly, I played with layers and color balance to get rid of the yellow tungsten cast as much as possible. I am still practicing my skills in this area. Than, I decided to try something that I wanted to try for some time now – selective blur. I’ve selected Maxim’s face, feathered the selection by 300 pixels, inverted the selection, and blurred by 30 pixels both vertically and horizontally the rest of the picture. The result looked much better than the original, but I thought that since I went this far, I should also add the glamour glow. I copied the layer, blurred the top one by 15 pixels in both directions, changed the opacity mode to overlay, and played a bit with the scroller there until I liked what I saw. Than I merged layers, flattened image, saved it, uploaded and published, and here is the result.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-05-05_POTD

Shopping for baby accessories

It’s been a while since we bought Maxim any new accessories. He is running out of soothers and his small bottle starts to be, well, too small. So I went on a raid to pharmacies around the town to find everything he needs.

The choice is great. There are so many companies making the same things, that my eyes weren’t focusing properly. MAM, NUK, Chicco, bibi, Avent, and many others are all represented.

The thing is that their brand names are all short words that were made easy for a baby to remember. In my head they all mix and match and I can’t remember what brand of what I wanted to buy. As a result, I managed to confuse a few items and get Olga pissed off (apparently, she told me what to buy like a zillion times). What can I say… I hope Maxim will suck on to what I got him.

And he should. In my days we had bits and pieces of old tyres for soothers and I dare not to mention what we were drinking from. Yet I am alive and kicking blogging.