Mercedes’ Neighborhood

Flags

KingOfAnkh
Dec 20, 2009
9 comments

Apparently the flag counter below should provide flags for individual States in the U.S. So before I bugger about with changing my code, I thought I'd test it here as a post.

Nothing more to see, please move on...

On the wave of the Copenhagen failure, because when you really look at what has been achieved you will realise that not an iota of forwardness has been reached, I thought I might share my feelings over climate change.

I saw with a slight feeling of horror at how one of my childhood icons was jeered and 'slow clapped' off a stage for standing up for what he thought was insubstantial science.

I was always taught that the default position of science was, 'we don't know'. Now it seems that some scientists are getting rather evangelistical over climate predictions and any other point of view is ridiculed. Let's face it, once you know something without any doubt whatsoever you are stepping into religious fervour rather than enlightened comprehension.

Personally I will agree that 'perhaps' mankind is affecting our climate, but I don't think we are contributing to the changes we are seeing as much as our scientists and politicians would like us to believe.

Geological evidence has provided us with an amazing amount of data to suggest that climate change happens on a regular basis, it has also been widely believed that we have been due another ice age for a long time but it has not yet happened. I doubt very much that any changes in our global output of carbon emissions will make any difference whatsoever to what is happening as the sequence of events is already in full flow.

What I'm seeing is a natural cause and effect situation to a cycle that has been going on since time immemorial. Perhaps mankind has hastened the outcome by a few years but not so much as to be responsible for the happenings of a common side effect of the Earth regenerating itself.

Perhaps all these specialists who have an amazing amount of knowledge learnt over the last 500 years or so should look at a broader picture, especially one on a cosmic scale. Planets and stars don't care much about mankind's records over the last few hundred years, nor do they particularly care about the small effect that a case of human nits will cause.

Nature has always found a way of balancing out parasites, perhaps that is what Earth is doing now. Not against mankind but against all life as a whole. We all know she has done so previously, in a biblical sense and in a scientific sense.

Human vanity is clouding our view I feel.

Let it happen, try to stop it happening, I doubt very much that any of us can do anything at all once mother earth has decided how it should be. Good luck...

Gosh! A Scandal!!!

KingOfAnkh
Dec 17, 2009
7 comments

I had a slight grin and a little twinkle in my eye when I read this story a moment ago.

A New Zealand church has posted a billboard in an effort to get people to discuss the Christmas story. Doesn't sound so bad does it. I'll share the image in question,, but be warned, it's shocking!

Mary & Joseph

I'm not a religious individual, I have always thought the Bible to be nothing more than a collection of fables put together by a ruling religious class in order to instil their authority and subjugate women and other religious beliefs. However I do believe in other peoples right to believe in the Christian dogma. Personally I would rather idolise J.R.R. Tolkein's effort.

But does the image above instil so much wrath in your eternal soul that you would feel the need to be offended or even stand on top of your car with a tin of emulsion to paint over it? I don't think so.

I find it humorous and it does highlight many problems within relationships today, after all, shouldn't the church be addressing such issues?

I don't think it was meant as an offence and I can only guess it's the fundies that are taking umbrage, and as with all things highlighted in such circumstances by people who don't want you to see something, it's now been blown out of all proportion and it's now reported upon throughout the world. Quite the Streisand effect.

I'm not a church goer but I'd definitely pay a visit to St. Matthews over Christmas if I lived in New Zealand.

Bah! Humbug!

My Christmas spirit is crashing fast. At this point I can't wait for the end of January...

Customer Service for a mail order company at Christmas sucks! ......The little voice is getting harder and harder to keep under control. If I don't let it speak here, It might get loose and cost me my job.

I am sick of getting yelled at! Below are examples of the calls I take and how I wish I could deal with them.

I have been yelled at because we ran out of ______. Fill in the blank with any item that was promised to little Janey or Johnny for their gift..........What the hell were you thinking waiting 2 weeks before Christmas before calling to order, and how about letting Jr get a dose of reality....you don't always get what you want!

I have been told at least once a day that I am ruining some kids Christmas,because I won't let the dead beat place an order on an account that is already 6 months past due........You should have worn a rubber....we wouldn't be having this conversation.

For every idiot that complained about having to be on hold forever just to pay their damn bill........Go to hell!
You could have mailed it, you could have pushed a few buttons on your phone and had it done already yourself, but you decided to just stand there and listen to our festive holiday music instead of having your check/debit card ready!

To all the customers that call to complain about an issue that happened this past summer....Seriously? You waited this long to call and complain, couldn't you wait another month and not call at our busiest time of the year?

Customers that order/call on their lunch break......If I want to listen to cows, I will visit the farm. Please refrain from eating during our call.

Management.......If you send me one more email telling me how far ahead projected sales are one more time......well, the little voice just might tell you were to go.......

Company keeps making more money, but I'm paid the same wage I was paid to do this crap last year.....When raise time comes around, it better be a good one. A big enough one to make me forget how much this jobs sucks this time of year.

To all the customers that are yet to call. Give me a break. I didn't loose your package, I didn't screw up your order. I didn't cause the problem........all I did was answer the phone.

Merry F***ing Christmas!

New Header

KingOfAnkh
Dec 12, 2009
15 comments

Well, I've had the old banner for seven years, its been part of my blog for such a long time I can't even think what the place would look like if I changed it. So being the rather adventurous individual that I am who likes to live life on the edge, I decided it's finally time for a change.

As you can see I went full on Discworld this time round, even blatantly lifting Paul Kidby's most excellent painting of Great A'tuin itself and adding my own little embellishments.

I'm not sure if I like it yet, it's too soon to tell as I'm slightly wary of the change. Will people like it? Will my regular readers visit and think that they have arrived at the wrong blog? Will it attract strange people who like to dress up as wizards at weekends? Who knows, time will tell.

There are a couple of little things hidden within that mean nothing to nobody but me, two constellations in the background, one is Scorpio, because I was born under that star sign, and you might notice Orion, which is the easiest set of stars to see in the northern hemisphere. For those of you who like crackpot theories, it is thought that the Pyramids at Giza have been built to emulate these stars' pattern.

Anyhow, I'm not going to waffle on about it. What do you think? Is it a stayer or shall I revert back to the old one?

Food for Thought

KingOfAnkh
Dec 12, 2009
4 comments

Ever since our local supermarket changed hands from Somerfields to Morrisons, I've been reaping the benefits of a better run store. I used to work for Somerfields way back when so I understood why it was such a useless retailer. Luckily they went out of business and my favourite food shop of all took over.

Now we're blessed with amazing offers and a better variety of grocery and fresh produce. This week, for three days only, they made this offer.

496x279_festive_V3

A joint of pork, two cartons of Covent Garden soup, a variety pack of vegetables consisting of potatoes carrots and sprouts and to finish it off, a trifle. All for £4.

The joint itself is worth £6.50 normally! Unfortunately the offer was one per customer, but it didn't stop me from going back more than once and now my freezer has quite a lot of food in there. :D

Being on a very tight budget this is a godsend for me. For months before Morrisons opened I literally lived on cheap noodles, eggs, potatoes and bread, it was simply all I could afford to buy, now I can splash out on well rounded meal options for the same price. This £4 deal is enough to feed me for possibly three days so I'm a very happy bunny.

I can imagine that a lot of the needy families around our town are very happy also, £4 to feed a family of four is amazing. I have no idea how they manage to make such offers, I can only assume they are arse raping the farmers an using this as a loss leader, personally I'm not complaining, when needs must and all that.

So guess what I'm having for Sunday lunch tomorrow....

Chrome For Mac

KingOfAnkh
Dec 9, 2009
6 comments

I like many others have downloaded the brand spanking new Google Chrome for Mac beta that has just been released. I'm not unhappy with Safari, I find it very adequate for surfing the net although I would like to add a few useful third party plug-ins like you can in Firefox. I hear a lot of you ask, 'why don't you just use Firefox then?' I say it's not that good and the overall user experience is shoddy on a Mac as the whole program smells of PC to me.

Anyhow, I had been looking forward to trying out Googles effort for over a year now, the PC version has been out for a long time and Google have been dragging their feet somewhat in releasing a Mac version. So when it finally came out yesterday I simply had to test it out.

Initially it looked great. Graphically it looked good, the downloads were quick, I liked the bookmark icons in the menu bar and its integrated external download window was a nice gimmick.

Then I had a look in the bookmarks menu, the whole thing is a mess. I have no idea why they have set it up like they have, fair enough it is a beta version and there will be a few changes, but why release something when it is obviously wrong?

Also they have no provision for blocking advertisements by adding user content style sheets. I can see why they have done this, Google are the number one culprit for adding adverts onto websites, but I don't want to see ads nor do I want to waste my precious bandwidth downloading them, so Chrome fails badly.

As a browser it felt good to use but it has no functionality, other browsers like Opera and Camino do exactly the same thing but better. I suppose there will be a lot of tweaking in the next few months and hopefully they will improve on what they have. The simple UI is great, but it offers nothing that Safari doesn't have so I fail to see why I should change. Speed is a great selling point but if I can't be patient for 0.032 of a second whilst a page loads slightly less quickly in Safari then my soul is lost.

A pitiful effort by the internet giant.

Photoshop Fun

KingOfAnkh
Dec 5, 2009
8 comments

I've been busy this evening on the old Photoshop, my initial thought was to make a Christmassy avatar for Twitter, but after I finished and resized the image it just didn't look good as all you could see was a brown smudge because the image was too small.

So instead I'm going to print it out as a christmas card for the family.

Without further ado, here it is

Me Scrooge

I'm not totally pleased with it, there's something about it that I can't get my finger on, it just doesn't look right to me. I think I've been a little bit too over-ambitious with this one and my shopping skills are simply not up to it. I think it may be because I started off with an image that was computer generated and I've made it too real.

Anyhow, just for those of you who are interested I saved a few intermediate stages for you to see how I went about producing the finished result.

I started off with these two pictures, one is the poster from the film Christmas Carol and a photo I took of myself.

2

1

The crucial part of this stage is to get the right pose to go with your base image.

I took around thirty photos before I finally settled on the one that I used.

I simply took a rough selection of my head then copied and pasted it onto the base image and flipped it horizontally.

Taking the eraser tool, set on soft with a large brush setting I erased the parts I didn't need. I ended up with the next image.

3

As you can see theres a lot of work to be done now to blend my face to match the background. This took me an absolute age to get right. The more time you spend doing this the better the result will be. It's a combination of curves, brightness/contrast, photo filters, vibrance, colour filters and further erasing until I have come to a stage where I think the colours look like they should.

4

It's certainly not easy to do when the image I chose doesn't have much to go on to start off with. I took around three hours to get it to some kind of semblance of being right.

Even then I kept playing around with it until I thought that if I carried on there would be nothing left.

The final stage was to add all the candle light highlights on my face and glasses.

This was simply done by copying pieces of the light in the top hat and pasting them where I needed them.

The skill here is in resizing them and manipulating the shapes by using the liquify tool. It takes a little time to get it right as you can only use this on one layer so you are literally working blind by shaping the piece without being able to see the background, so a lot of it is guesswork.

Hope you all like it, took me ages and I think I may yet work on it some more but I needed to stop for a while just in case I overworked it. Any thoughts?

You Never Know...

KingOfAnkh
Dec 2, 2009
14 comments

Here's an interesting one.

A few months ago this chap that one of our gang knew joined our social group in the pub. Nobody thought much about it, we're all amicable and enjoy meeting new people. He was a bit on the strange side I thought, he liked to dress up like a cowboy, even though it wasn't fancy dress and we don't live in some hick town in America. But to each his own and nothing was said. A few weeks down the line, once we had got to know him a bit better, he came out with a bombshell, he was being investigated by the police for grooming a 15 year old on the internet.

Now I'm a firm believer in the old adage that you are innocent until you are proven guilty, I listened to this guys sorry tale and from what he said it sounded like he was being entrapped by the girl in question and he was being made a scapegoat. I can understand his point of view, there have been times I've been chatting to someone online only to find out that the person is not who they said they were. At the time I explained to him that should the impending trial find him guilty I'd be the first person in line to kick the living shit out of him, but until that day I would give him the benefit of the doubt and say nothing about it.

Time went on, he attended a few court days and he said he was worried but things were going his way. I think it could be said that we all were a bit fooled by him as we didn't know the particulars of the case and he wasn't as forthcoming with the facts as we realised. For instance, we never got to hear about how he drove up from Nailsworth to Preston to meet this girl, we didn't hear about how he visited a lingerie store to buy her sexy underwear, we didn't get to hear about him being seen caressing this girl in an intimate manner when he knew how old she was. We also didn't get to hear that he tried to force her into his car. If it wasn't for a sharp eyed taxi driver, who knows how far he was prepared to go.

So this leaves me, and I suspect everyone who socialised with him in the pub, in a state of mental sickness. I actually gave this pervert the time of day.

A couple of weeks ago after the sentence was passed he had the nerve to come into the pub thinking that people would not have found out that he was found guilty. Luckily for him it was early in the evening, there were not many people in there and nobody was sufficiently inebriated to lose it and give him a beating. He soon ran with his tail between his legs though when he caught wind how people were feeling. That was the last I saw of him, I hope I never see him again either.

Today an article appeared in a local newspaper from Preston, we found out he only got 12 months for his crime. He got off very lightly I feel. However he's a married man with children, I doubt very much that anybody from his family will want anything to do with him now and certainly the people of Nailsworth will be gunning for his blood when he gets released in a few months time.

One can only hope that Big Brian from cell block H will teach him a lesson in disappearing soap bars.

Paying For News

KingOfAnkh
Nov 30, 2009
24 comments

A few of you with your finger on the pulse may have heard that there are a few news organisations that are thinking of asking their customers to pay for their online content. In doing so they will be erecting paywalls to stop the casual surfer from accessing further details on a particular story unless they pay a subscription. I say good luck to them, well, when I say 'them' I mean Rupert Murdoch.

I see a few problems about asking people to part with their cash for something you can already access for free. Once these paywalls go up I can see that people will just go elsewhere, especially when a great news service like The Guardian Online or The BBC have stated that they will not be charging their customers now or in the future.

Let's face it Mr. Murdoch, your News Corp. list of UK newspapers do leave a lot to be desired. Are people likely to fork out a fiver a month to read the thrilling news that is shared in The Sun? Am I likely to subscribe so I can see Keeley, 21 from Bromley, get her tits out and state her feelings about the Iranian intention to carry on with its nuclear enrichment program is a bit naughty? I don't think so and I doubt the people that The Sun is aimed at know how to use a computer and still barter for their food, so they are very unlikely to be able to electronically pay for your 'news'.

But what about such illuminated titles like The Times? Not a bad effort newswise; for decades this was the newspaper of choice amongst our lords and peers, in fact I'm guilty of buying the paper myself for many years (I liked the crossword) until I refused to buy into the Murdoch empire because of the views shared amongst its many media outlets. The problem is you see, although the content may be good I can get it it for free elsewhere and since The Times Online have stopped seeding their RSS feeds I haven't even bothered to look at their website, so any company that pays to put their advertising on your page will undoubtedly have less exposure. Less exposure equals no income, no income equals no advertisers.

So why alienate your readership? If you are like me, god help you, you rarely buy a newspaper unless you have a long journey or an hour to kill, instead I use news generators all over the web, especially Twitter and Atom/RSS feeds. If I had to pay for any of them I'd undoubtedly find another source that is free because the paid content adds no intrinsic value to something that is essentially information that everyone has a right of access to. News information is not copyrightable in the way a book or a film is, news happens, people talk about it and a writer will write about it.

In todays digital age I can be reading news as it happens on Twitter within seconds of the event, in fact you can see a lot of lazy journalism rehashing what is being said on Twitter all the time. So why would I want to pay for news that I most likely have already heard about? Just because it's been dressed up smartly by a professional and displayed on a polished website doesn't make it any more newsworthy, they just need to change their business model, not the outlook of their readers.

I'd visit a website if it offered competitions, asked me to enter by texting the answer, kerching! I might even click on an advertisment that has particular interest for me, kerching! I might need to find historical data from their archives, kerching!

All I'm saying is there are literally hundreds of ways to finance your website without having to erect a paywall, and for a company with revenues in the billions, I don't think they need to ask their customers to pay for something that is free elsewhere.

I really do hope that Murdoch goes ahead with his plans, I know for a fact he will see a nosedive in revenues if he does and within six months of his monetizing efforts, those sites will be free once again. I'm just wondering who's advising him and why they are in the positions they hold when they are so far out of sync with the digital age.