(no subject)

I just listened to the the last two songs on Jill Sobule's self-titled album.

The first one is a heartbreaking true story of two lovers from opposite sides of a civil war who were killed as they tried to leave their city. It makes me cry a little bit every time.

The second is a pained evisceration of a former partner and the hell zie put her through. It's about leaving a life made unlivable by your partner behind and beginning to live with and for yourself....yet still having a twinge of sadness for that person who's no longer in your life.

They are both fantastic songs. But it must be the most severe case of thematic musical whiplash between consecutive songs on an album that I've ever heard.

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On the topic of artists who use music to work through their feelings about the end of a relationship, next on my list is Shawn Colvin's "A Few Small Repairs," which, sadly, I only have as MP3s.

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The maps are done! I ended up using a little bit of Photoshoppery to add transparency to a portion outside the frame of the map, around some callout text bubbles that didn't fit inside it. I hope the professor doesn't mind. I'll ask him if he wants this done 100% in ArcGIS and change if necessary.

Now I have to write up the webpages and add my pictures of the things on the to-see list!

(no subject)

To create a background image for my web page, I loaded one of my photos of the interior mural of the Empire State Building into Photoshop. The mural is an image of the building itself, with a corona of angular rays shooting out from around its mast in a sunburst of lines, patterns, and transecting circles.

I fully desaturated it, then lowered the contrast until the whole image was a soft gray, with the geometric pattern of the mural a series of subtle lines and shapes projecting out across the image from a central point. I addded a little color back into the whole thing, making it ever-so-subtly purple so that the grey wasn't quite so sterile. I resized it so that on my monitor, the top of the mast is maybe a fifth of the way in from the right side, and the majority of the background is taken up by that subtle pattern of the mural. It's light enough then when I add some black sans-serif title text, it's more than readable. Yet the pattern is there, looking sophisticated and attractive, yet not pulling attention away from the text.

I've never tried something like this before, but damn, that looks pretty nice!