February 2006

Another "Amazing Circle!"

Here is an amazing circle I created using a picture of Sarah. She posed before a laser simulation of human DNA at the Atlanta Science Museum last year. If you look carefully, you can see her left eye (the image is reversed when creating the circle). I thought the colors looked cool. What do you think?

Unusual new technique with Photoshop CS2!

Take a look at this picture:

They are called "amazing circles," and can be made from any high-rez picture. I got the technique from Here. I plan on trying it out on some more photos to try and get a symmetrical effect. Perhaps Trudy would like some printed out for her room!

Raptors vs. Celtics

Another game, another win for the Raptors! This was actually Karl's worse game, insofar as shooting baskets, but he made several nice passes to open teammates, and pulled down 7 rebounds (2nd most on the squad).  

I think I am getting the hang of shooting indoors under terrible lighting conditions. I had to go to an older lense I had (35-70 f3.5), and shot entirely in manual mode. If I set the ISO to 800, I can speed up the shutter to 250-320/sec and freeze the action better. The above shot was done at 125, and you still see movement...

Raptors vs. Knicks

What a week of reflection will do (not to mention daily at-home practice with Yours Truly!). The boys were on fire today, handing the Knicks their worst loss of the young season, 34-6. Karl had 7 points, 7 rebounds and 1 assist. The other 2 guards, Jordan and Wilson (Coaches son) had 12 and 11 points, respectively. We still are rushing things, giving up easy buckets and not allowing the plays to develop. But what can you expect with only 1 hour of official practice a week...

Karl inbounds to Jordan, then circles the baseline and sets up in the corner...

To hit the corner jumper It went in!

Poor Natalie! She had a beach performance scheduled with the gymnastics team, but it was canceled on Friday due to inclement weather. This is the second performance set aside; the first one (at a nursing home) was rescheduled because the residents all had colds. Sounds like a good reason to me; we don't want to get sick ourselves! Anyway, she is gearing up for the next show on March 4th, a huge retirement condo on Lido Key!

Hope everyone is doing well. Send some posts my way, will ya?

New Lossless Bittorrent forum and Tracker!

As everyone knows by now, I do a considerable bit of downloading music; whole albums, as a matter of fact, with the artwork included. A few weeks ago, the site that Henry and I frequented (Pedro's BTMusic Tracker) was hacked. It is still unclear whether any IP addresses were collected (don't think so), but the damage was done. I am maintaining my membership there, but have found a new, more friendly place located in France. It is called Gnutracker and can be found Here. The tracker itself can be found under This rock!

As most (nearly all) of the files are encoded as FLAC (lossless audio codec), you can't simply burn them to disc and hope to play them on your CD player or in your car. You need to decode them to .Wav first. But there is a program that does this automatically: Burrrn, which can be found Here. You simply add the CUE file (of the album you downloaded) to Burrrn, and it will decode the files behind the scenes, then burn them to CD. In case the CUE file is for .Wav, simply open the CUE file in Notepad, and replace .Wav with .FLAC .

If you look at the sidepanel to the right, you will see an "MP3 of the week." I will provide an unusual mp3 and you can listen to or download it. They will be encoded to 256K standard, using LAME, a professional-level mp3 encoder. I hope you enjoy this little service!