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get your replay or tivo ready, oln has released their 2004 cycling schedule. of special note is the announcement of a behind the scenes documentary of lance armstrong and the usps team. it’s a 13 part documentary that details the road to the 2004 tour de france for lance and the posties. they’ll be following lance on commercial shoots, public appearances, wind tunnel testing, team training, scouting of courses, and more. it’ll be available in hdtv for those of you with really big tv sets. thanks to marc corbin for the heads up.

if your looking for some nicely written step-by-step photoshop how-to examples with movies and downloadable pdf directions look no further than dvgarage techtv downloads. each week (i think it’s weekly) they appear on techtv and provide a new tip for using photoshop to modify and retouch your photos. they have some very cool tips like bluescreen compositing, creating an unsharp mask (very cool and works great), curves, brushes and more. if your new to the more advanced features of photoshop like i am you’ll find these examples priceless.

i’ve been reading a lot of articles about the newest release of photoshop. the marketing guru’s have decided to throw us all a curve ball and instead of following a logical software numbering scheme they took a page from the microsoft obfuscation handbook and named this release photoshop cs (creative suite). sure it sounds snappy but really, what’s the point?


anyhow, i’ve been thinking about picking up this latest release but wanted to make sure i was getting some bang for my buck. here are a few of the reviews i found useful, maybe you will as well.

• creative mac’s review goes into great detail about the 16-bit image upgrades, camera raw formats, new image manipulation functions (check out the cool butter fly example), file browser, text on a path and more. lots of images and the usual detail you get from the creative mac folks.
• brainstorms & raves review has brief overviews and links to several of the same articles that i read, and more.
• bergman graphics review asks the experts to give their review of the new release. i was really hoping for more information and detail from lynda weinman but she was surprisingly quiet and short on words. the other “experts” seemed to have many positive things to say about the new feature set.
• dp reviews’ review yet more detail and depth to the camera raw support, color match, new commands, and the way cool filter gallery feature.
• macworld’s review somehow without a single photo they reviewed a piece of photo editing software. oh yea, you have to buy the magazine to see the pictures. that’s so 90’s …
• adobe, from the horses mouth …

there are a few others but needless to say the message was getting repetitive. i definitely think that i’ll be picking up a copy of photoshop cs when time and cash flow permit. given the amount of time spent in 7.0 recently doing image sharpening and tweaking i found myself really having fun. actually i’ve been looking into taking a photoshop class recently, just to have a structured class to learn within. is anyone else finding the cs upgrade worthwhile? complaints?

i know i’m behind the curve a bit on favelets but i realized this past week all of the web work i was doing and i could have been doing a few of the things a lot easier. so i went about reorganizing my bookmarks, creating some tools, searching online for favelets to ease my web development. here are the ones i came up with. i don’t claim to have written any of these (except fixing the post to movable type to get it to work in safari). in case you don’t know what a favelet is, it’s a bit of javascript code that you can put in your bookmarks to perform some action in your web browser. for example you can select a word in a webpage and then just click the favelet and have it open a new web browser window to dictionary.com to define the word. anyhow, here are the ones that i’m found useful:

• search
  • define acronymn
  • dictionary lookup
  • google current site
  • lookup php function
  • search ebay
  • search google
  • search google groups
  • search google images
  • search imdb
  • search php.net
  • thesaurus lookup
• search with prompt
  • define acronymn
  • dictionary lookup
  • google current site
  • lookup php function
  • search ebay
  • search google
  • search google groups
  • search google images
  • search imdb
  • search php.net
  • thesaurus lookup
• tools
  • check link on webpage
  • check website uptime
  • disable stylesheets
  • resize browser 640×480 vga
  • resize browser 800 x max screen height
  • resize browser 800 x 600 svga
  • resize browser 1024 x max screen height
  • resize browser 1024 x 768 xga
  • show image sizes
  • show alt info
  • tidy html
  • validate html
  • validate html in new window
  • validate typed url
  • validate typed url in new window
  • validate css
  • view http headers
  • display webhost info
  • babelfish - japanese to english
  • babelfish - french to english
  • babelfish - gernam to english
  • babelfish - spanish to english
  • babelfish - italian to english
• movable type
  • make selected text a movable type posting — this was copied from the one that comes with movabletype to get it to work in safari. you need to change the beginning of the url in that favelet to point at your movable type installation.

just drag any of these links to your tool bar and click to use. if you have any other cool ones let me know about them, i’m always looking for cool new tools.

pi·an·ist, noun, one who plays the piano … well not quite yet but we’re trying. specifically i’ve picked up the complete idiot’s guide to playing piano and i’m also researching lessons at a few local music shops. gone are the days of lost hobbies of my youth. i’ve always wanted to learn how to play and i even toyed with it a bit when i was younger but i never really took off with it. well now i’m really doing it. clear nights are for astronomy while cloudy nights are for playing the piano and relaxing. i’m knee deep in learning how to read sheet music while playing marry had a little lamb but i’m really getting into it. amy is teaching me some things as well, she has quite a few years of music experience to pass on to me. pretty soon i’ll be playing some steve reich or maybe norah jones. now if only we had a piano …

mozilla … nope phoenix … i mean firebird … dang it, no wait firefox 0.8 was released today. despite their inability to pick and stick with a name they have a great browser. if your into branding i recommend you check out this good writeup. i use safari on my laptop most of the time but at work and on my windows machines firefox is my browser of choice. now if i could just get the bad ars new firefox mac theme on my windows machine i’d be all set.

we’re into week six, almost at the halfway point. amy and i finished off last week on a positive note. i was down 4 pounds to bring my total to 21 pounds and amy was down another 4 pounds to bring her total to 9 pounds. we had a really which made up for the previous weeks setbacks. all in all i can’t think of anything i would have done differently with regard to the food portion of body for life. on the exercise side we should have made it to the gym in the morning for our cardio workouts. we did the weight training in the morning without problems but ended up doing all of our cardio at home and some of them in the evening. yea, we still worked out which is great, but we really should have made it to the gym. some people may think that i’m splitting hairs but i’m just trying to be honest and remain accountable.


my body really felt in tune this week and i felt like i was really burning some fat. i have kept one vice in my diet that i think actually helps my metabolism, coffee. i figured it wouldn’t kill me and since i’m not drinking the foofoo coffees, instead i drink americano’s. in case you didn’t know already an americano only has water and espresso shots. of course i go and ruin it with half & half and sugar in the raw. all said though it only works out to be a few hundred calories in the worst case which if you think about it really isn’t that harmful. i could be worse like a 660 calories white chocolate mocha with whipped cream. those are reserved for the free day.