Never has it been more relevant… and, of course, this was made before the Gulf Disaster and the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster that continues to vomit radioactive material into the Pacific and our atmosphere. The only constant in this life that you can count on is change and the fact that, ultimately, we’re all going to die… the only question is how.

There is power in the people but it only works when organized. Last night’s vote in Wisconsin threatens to plummet us back decades.

What ever happened to WE THE PEOPLE? Forget all the propaganda that our leaders spout at election time, few of them care about us, they’re either part of the elite or wannabes, which are even worse. Wannabes will strip the rights of people just like them in the ignorant mindset that allows them to believe that they somehow will be allowed into the “big boy’s club” if they spout and enforce the greedy interest of the power elite.

It’s why neighbors kill neighbors in Libya. It’s how and why the elite get a mind-controlled group of thugs to enforce their agenda of greed. Get the rabble destroying each other while waiting for it all to end and collecting all the spoils after the dirty work has been done for them by the very people they are oppressing!

It’s not just Wisconsin, it’s not just Teachers, it’s you and me and everyone who has to work for a living or is trying to.

Raise your voice against the debacle that happened last night in Wisconsin. Do something, SAY SOMETHING ~ don’t let this go by unnoticed. Tell your friends, explain to them why having a collective bargaining unit is a GOOD THING. Don’t listen to the propaganda, they try to vilify collective bargaining by pointing out the cases where it SEEMS like someone is getting more than their fair share. But look at the LION’S SHARE that the propagandists, politicos and union nay-sayers are taking EVERYDAY away from you and “your kind” because if you think you’ll ever be let into that “club” , the “big boy’s club”, you’re sorely mistaken.

UNITE!!! Unite your neighborhood. Unite your town! Unite all blue-collar workers. Unite the unemployed. Unite with the people who need you and who you need.

If you pay wages, remember, those are HUMANS you are paying. Cut the fat elsewhere… because there’s plenty.

CUT THE LINING OF THE POCKETS OF THE ELITE!!!

No matter what you’ve been sold… Unions are good. If you’re on the “outside” well, that IS a club you can join. You are most welcome. The elite will NEVER let you into their club. NEVER!

Don’t let this just happen without saying something to someone. Enlighten your friends and co-workers. Enlighten each other!

Good Luck.

Let’s face it, job hunting sucks. Whether you’re currently employed or not. And the current economic climate does nothing of benefit to help in this arena (for the job hunter, anyway). I have some tips for would-be job hunters that I urge you to pay attention to:

1. Create a new email address that is just for this round of job hunting. This one has bitten me. Not only will you receive a plethora of unrelated job offers, no matter how emphatically you state that you are “not willing to relocate” you will get an over abundance of offers that are based in other areas of the country and the state you live in. This is fine if relocation is on the menu, but very annoying otherwise.

2. Use a different phone number if possible. Buy one of those pay-as-you-go “disposable” phones or buy a voice mail box that is not attached to any of your primary numbers. This is the voice of experience here folks, in the tech sector, anyway. You will be inundated with phone calls from eager, if not rabid, recruiters who want to make a buck off of you. Some of these people work on a volume basis paying little attention to your stated skill set and the “mandatory requirements” of the job. These mandatories can be just that if you are talking about a State or Federal job. If this seems like an unnecessary expense bear in mind that money spent job hunting is tax deductible. So rather than examining your current cellphone expenditures to filter which came from job hunting, to have a single device or service that is totally dedicated to the task of job hunting will make tax time less of a burden administratively.

3. Accept some interviews for jobs in which you are not, on the surface anyway, particularly interested. This serves two purposes: you may find during the interview that the ad you responded to was not truly reflective of the position or its’ opportunities and benefits and you may find that you are indeed interested; secondly, even if you remain uninterested in the position being offered, there may be another position within the company that has not yet been announced for which you’re a perfect fit; and thirdly if you’ve been out of the hunt for a while, you get that much needed practice.

4. Beware the Recruiter. I have worked with some lovely recruiters who are really working hard to place me in a position that I will be satisfied with as well as please their client. There have been a couple of recruiters, however, who shall remain nameless here (contact me via email if you want an exhaustive list and my critique thereof) who are, shall we say, less than scrupulous and who will do your career more harm than good. Not all, but some and they tend to dominate the job boards.

5. Write down ALL the boards to which you’ve submitted your resume. Then, once you have accepted a position, you can quickly and easily remove your resume from their websites. This will save you having to sift through many unnecessary phone calls and emails once you have accepted a position. And, when you have accepted a position, do your best to go back to each of those sites and remove your resume or make it “invisible”. This will not eliminate 100% of the blanket recruiters or the automated recruiters, because, face it, once it’s out there… it’s out there, but it will help to reduce the number of things you have to deal with and allow you to concentrate fully on your new job.

6. Do not talk money over the phone, initially, anyway. Do not name a price until the recruiter or prospective employer emails you the job description and benefit package, if any, and you’ve had a chance to look it over. Then instead of naming your price, get them to tell you the salary range they are willing to offer. This might be exceedingly hard to do because they want all your talent for the least money they have to pay but it will save you (and your prospective employer) wasted time by paying a wage you are happy with, rather than contractually obligate you to some sort of indentured servitude that you will be looking to leap from at the earliest opportunity. Besides, you may name a price that is out of the range for the prospective employer which may end the discussion prior to you seeing that the job description might be attractive enough that you’d be willing to lower your normal wage in order to take advantage of any perks or benefits that the employer may not even recognize as being important to you. For example, you may be willing to forego some of your previous price because the current employer has an easier commute or parking than what you are used to, or because you find that they are a “green” employer or have donated to charities that you endorse or support. So again, to divulge your price may cut the conversation short and create a lose-lose situation.

Both prospective employers and employees should strive to create a win-win situation. When one tries to gain the upper hand whether it be ego-driven or needs-based, further conversation can be stifled and thus create a lose-lose situation.

Just a few tips from one who knows… Hope they help and Happy Job Hunting!!!

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
—Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.
—Robert Bresson

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.
—A. A. Milne

To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.
—Abraham Maslow

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought.
—Basho

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
—John Ruskin

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but seeing with new eyes.
—Marcel Proust

We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.
—Bill Vaughan

Never be afraid to laugh at yourself, after all, you could be missing out on the joke of the century.
—Dame Edna Everage

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
—Ellen Parr

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
—Aristotle

Work like you don’t need money, love like you’ve never been hurt, and dance like no one’s watching
—Unknown Author

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
—Albert Einstein

The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits.
—Unknown Author

Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.
—Oscar Wilde

Sometimes questions are more important than answers.
—Nancy Willard

Seize the moment of excited curiosity on any subject to solve your doubts; for if you let it pass, the desire may never return, and you may remain in ignorance.
—William Wirt

He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
—Chinese Proverb

I’d rather live with a good question than a bad answer.
—Aryeh Frimer

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
—André Gide

Time Magazine has named Mark Zuckerberg, their “coveted” “Man of the Year”. The youngest since Lindbergh, who was 25 years old when he was named.

It was a toss up to speculators whether it would be Zuckerberg or Julian Assange. Whether Time would make it a true honor or dish out it’s unique? brand of sarcasm. Apparently sarcasm is not their goal. But with that picture, apparently irony is…

THIS is the FACE of FACEbook… yeesh… could they have picked a worse picture?

It’s obvious that the editors at Time Magazine have not lost their sense of humor… or are they just being mean?

It looks like the picture the police take when you’re booked for a crime. He looks stunned, like a deer caught in the headlights. Well, billions of dollars can go a long way toward stunning someone, I guess… but you’d think with that kind of money he’d be able to have final say on a picture for the front cover of Time. Well, I guess there are some things even billions of dollars can’t buy. I don’t know about you but when I make my first billion, I’ll be sporting a perma-grin that will rival that of the Cheshire Cat! MEOW, baby.

Click HERE to read yahoo’s take on the matter.

In my last posting I outlined ONE way to change the color family of an image. In this one we take it a step further and COLORIZE the image with more than one color.

So, if you haven’t read my previous blog entry, you may want to do that as I will be referencing it.

Start with your desaturated image as referenced in the previous blog posting. Using the RECTANGLE SELECT option (MENU – Tools – Selection Tools – Rectangle Select), select (isolate) the first shape, in this case, the icosahedron. And now, just as you did in the previous post, choose Colors and Colorize from the menu (MENU – Colors – Colorize). Play around with the “Hue” and “Saturation” until you achieve the desired color. When you’re ready to move onto the next shape, get back to your “Rectangle Selection” tool (MENU -Tools – Selection Tools – Rectangle Select), click inside the existing rectangle once to activate the Gimp window, then once again to enable the four-way “Move” arrow, drag the selection rectangle over the next shape and adjust as necessary to isolate just the shape you want and repeat the steps above to colorize that shape. Keep doing this until you’re done.

NOTE: You don’t really want to adjust the “Lightness” slider bar in the colorizer as this will “colorize” the white space, but if you need to to get the exact color you want and you end up with “artifacts” (bits of color in the white area) simply “Erase” them. Better yet, erase them from the desaturated image.

Note the “haze” of reddishness around the red image… when you zoom in it will become very obvious.

Further NOTE: You may find it easier to erase if you zoom in to the picture (MENU: View – Zoom). Sometimes when you zoom in your erasure tool is a little sluggish, you may erase a part of the picture that you did not intend to, in this case, your UNDO option is your BFF. (MENU: – Edit – Undo). Remember when erasing to do it in small bits (take your finger off the button every once in a while) otherwise, if you make a mistake and have to “undo” you undo a lot of work!

And now we have our finished product. I hope this helps Anastasia!

There are a lot of tutorials and info on swapping one color for another but not any that I could find about changing an entire color scheme or family.

I found the picture below on images.google.com (a favorite place of mine to harvest images). I was looking for a set of images of platonic solids and I wanted them in blue but was only able to find yellow.

Here is the image I found:

Now, when I first attempted to do this I sampled one side of one of the solids a couple of times to see what the hex value was of one of the yellow colors (my poorly conceived plan was to sample the various shades of yellow, get their hex value and find my base blue color and do some math on the hex values to get the shades of blue that corresponded to the yellow) This was a bad idea on MANY LEVELS. First of all it’s the “long way around” and secondly, when I’d sample a certain shade, depending upon exactly where the eye-dropper tool was placed I would get a slightly different value. So, if I were to replace an entire side’s color with ONE shade of blue it would lose whatever “depth” of color that was created by the artist who created this image.

So I thought about it for a while and it occurred to me to use “desaturate” to remove the yellow and create the same image in grey-tones, so I did exactly that: From the pull-down menu I chose “color” and then “desaturate” which resulted in the following image:

Pretty cool. Actually I could have used the images just as they are, but I was going for a certain shade of blue, so then in order to turn these grey scale images blue, from the drop-down menu I chose: “color” and then “colorize” this brings up a dialog with preview and, in my case colorized them a teal blue, which was pretty, but I was going for a more bright blue, therefore I messed around with the “Hue” slider-bar and left the “saturation” and “lightness” controls alone. By sliding the “Hue” slider around I was able to watch the colors change and stop when I’d hit just the right shade of blue which resulted in the following image:

This was EXACTLY what I wanted! Yay!

Since it wasn’t obvious how to do this and since I couldn’t find any “tutorial” on the internet of changing an entire color family or scheme, I thought I’d share it with you!

Have fun with Gimp and Good Luck.

If you get an email with a subject like: “Laura would like to be your friend on hi5″ or anything from hi5 don’t open the attachment.

yahoo reported to me that a virus was detected in the attachment. (Thanks yahoo!)

Forewarned is forearmed!!!

You should NEVER open emails from people you don’t know, of course, I know a lot of Lauras… : )

NOTE: the subject line of this virus may or may not be the same that I experienced.

This has been a virus alert from your favorite computer pro… ME!!! Have a beautiful day.

The Patriots sent the Vikings packing!!!

Box Score
	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	OT	F
New England Patriots	0	7	14	7	0	28
Minnesota Vikings	0	7	3	8	0	18