Eish!

There is a little understood component in working with digital images that involves blending between layers.

Blending dictates, essentially, how one layer interacts with or affects another layer (below it). Photoshop and its many little ugly cousins provide us with a miriad of possibilities from blending brightness to contrast to colours to plain weirdness. You probably won’t ever need more than about 5 of the basic blending modes but the one that I find the most useful is the “Luminosity” blending mode.

When increasing contrast in an image, whether you use Levels, Curves or any other contrast enhancing tool, it is important to note that it affects contrast across all of your colour channels. This can be easily remedied by simply changing your contrast enhancing layer or adjustment layer [1] to use a Luminosity blending mode.

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I don’t own a TV.

This is partly because I secretly enjoy telling people that I don’t pay my TV license because it’s the right thing to do. It’s also partly because the internet is jammed pack full of awesomeness that I can rely on it for all my amusements, abusements and bemusements.

It’s been a long and eventful journey since my first taste of the world-wide-wait. Now I crave it from my parched intellect to my my starving need to be entertained. Herewith follows an (almost) chronological account of all the poignant moments in my web-surfing career, the highlights, the old faithfuls and once-a-day fixes.

If you are not familiar with these gems already, it will only serve to highlight your diminuative age or your complete and utter failure of ever having grasped what the internet was created for in the first place. Don’t be embarrassed, like athlete’s foot, it can be cured slowly.

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I’m teaching myself to multitask.

I fear I have much to learn. Amelia managed to send 30 emails, edit a spreadsheet, apply makeup, find all the crap on my iPod, make 3 phone calls and drink a Savannah in the time it took to drive from Somerset West to Blouberg. If she hadn’t pre-prepared the salad I can only assume that she would have chopped and tossed  that en-route. I may have set my sights a bit high.

It makes me think though, and I don’t like to think much most mornings. It puts unnecessary strain on a well groomed hangover.

JJB reckons that woman can’t actually do two things at once, but rather can do two things half as well at the same time. The two parts simply add up to a single whole. Although the notion has merit, I find it unlikely that I would be able to apply that theory in a rational debate with a woman. Nor would I want to. They are capable of burning holes through your spine with their eyes, slapping you in the face with a wet fish and driving a high-heeled shoe through your temple all at the same time.

I don’t care which one is done half well.

All this is moot though. Amelia is capable of bathing a dog, building a 1500 piece puzzle, deciding who will win Survivor and deboning a chicken all on the way to work. All I’m capable of doing in the same time is driving over a nail, whacking my wing-mirror on the garage door, scaring a small child, jumping a red light and running out of petrol under the boom at the entrance to my office park.

Multi-tasking is, in fact,  for the birds.

Halloween, contrary to some belief, is not a Yanky festival.

It actually has it’s origins in Celtic tradition. That’s right, it was the Irish who taught us to let our children dress up as freaks and knock on strangers’ doors asking for sweeties (I live opposite a primary school, it’s normally the other way round).

I’m tasked this year with constructing a Halloween playlist and it’s turning out to be quite an intellectual mind-bender. Here’s the shortlist so far. Starting with the obvious choices:

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…and it looks like a chicken? Well, that’s settled then.

I may have mentioned chicken somewhere before. I forget why exactly but when I considered that I’d mentioned vegetarianism before too, it all started falling into place [1].

Can one, indeed, dress Mutton as Lamb?

I cannot begin to think why not. The one is none other than an ovine O.A.P. [2] that’s trying to stay hip (or at least with a hip-replacement). It is a tactic adopted by most cougars on the hunt for nubile, blind young men who are impervious to the smell of moth-balls. These are, for obvious reasons, in short supply, hence the need to dress down so to speak.

Dressing Lamb as Mutton, on the other hand, would be like photographing your child with a slicked down comb-over, a little tie and a blazer that’s been pulled taught behind his back with safety pins to make it fit. My parents have many of these pearls. I know yours do to. Don’t make me prove it.

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Somerset West is on fire.

Literally, that is. This is not a town ablaze with cosmopolitan delights; burning with brazen, youthful zeal;  or even conflagrant with exotic and filthy Eastern temptations. Mind you, the Ladies of the Elsies Riviera are known to impart certain kinds of tantalising treats that should leave something burning for a few weeks at least.

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…and take them on a tour of the facilities. It’s the WAB [1] equivalent of ambling around with a clipboard to look important.

This reminds me of a  meta-study performed on various public surveys where people on the street had to fill in personal details on a clipboard. It turned out that a higher percentage of individuals than expected are CEOs of their own blue-chip companies, several participants where named after K. Kong and the average earning potential left a gap in the GDP so large that the revenue service died of boredom and got reincarnated as “cash only” showgirl.

These are great times. Great Times.

—-

[1] Work Avoidance Behaviour

As a tax-payer I’m one of the few and the proud.

Which in turn, appears to make me fewer and consequently more proud. With all this pride going round, it is surprising that I have not, as of yet, sprouted a golden mane and growl a lot. Yes friends, like a rubber hose the tax season is brought down upon us and as I grind my head through the SARS schedule mincer, I cannot help thinking that if only I knew how to file my tax properly I’d probably not get audited every year. [1]

Tax money is a useful thing for an aspiring government. Least of all, it pays for a better quality of finger-foods but occasionally a road gets built, a child gets schooled and a man who hits his thumb with a hammer can get a plaster and a little white pill. These are the things governments provide. Wonderful isn’t it?

Yet I can’t help thinking that I’m being taxed twice over.

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Occupational Health and Safety is, ironically, designed to melt the brain.

It is a difficult matter to work on a mine and to stay safe. For one you have to stay sober at all times. Why one would want to stay sober in the dust that is Polokwane or the yellow fog that is Secunda, I have no want for knowing. Hence the elevated risk I guess. The last OHS induction I attended had a 3 minute stint on how to detonate entire hillsides in a safe, efficient and responsible manner followed by a 3 hour diatribe on how not to spend your weekend behind the Spaza gawking at the girls with two heads through the bottom of a home brewed beer bottle. The contrast was noted.

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Can vegetarianism be trusted?

There is an old adage that instructs us to not make decisions on an empty stomach. Wise words and ones which I try not to take too lightly. It is therefore that I am watchful of what I eat, lest I make a wrong decision based on my protein intake and end up razing Kosovo with a gardening trowel.

The last thing I want is to be grumpy from ignoring my Atkins impulse to consume large quantities of red meat, feeling sorry for myself and having to self-console in ice-cream or movies with teenage girls on ponies or ice-skates.

Those ponies would start to look quite delicious.

You are what you eat, we are told and for this exact reason I am dubious of vegetarianism. For obvious reasons. So consider yourselves warned against rampant and totalitarian Vegetarianism. The nitrogen cycle shudders in its very wake. Consequences are hazardous and potentially dire:

• sheep shall multiply exponentially, with no natural predators, to start an ovine pandemic
• cows will walk the streets, blocking traffic whilst looking for China shops
• we will all be plunged into a green hell where we fight for foraging rights with the very species that we once displayed domain over
• our egos will quake from neglect and our hands will shiver from malnutrition
• our children will scream in the night hungry for a piece of chicken.

Then again, maybe not. We can still eat cake.

As long as it fell naturally from the tree.