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Jul. 19th, 2010 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogSeems that the majority of our users were all locked out this weekend by something the server team did. Our on call tech had about 90 of them to deal with. I'm glad I'm not on call until next week.
Moira and I had ice cream at Culver's last night and I was introduced to a new treat. A 'cement mixer' (basically a DQ Blizzard) with Andes mints and Oreo cookies. It's one of the most enjoyable treats I can remember eating! Then we went out to Woodman's where I bought some cheap meat and cheese to go with the really good bagels I got for $1.50 at Big!Lots earlier in the day.
Moira; thanks for taking time out of your busy day to come visit. I really appreciate that.
Coworker G took me out for lunch again. I tried something new. I forget what it was called, but we went to the Thai place we frequent and I had something with rice noodles, steak, and bean sprouts. It was yummy, especially once we borrowed some sweet chili sauce from the table next to us for me to spice it up some. I love the way Thai cleans out my nose!
G is also going to see about getting me down into the basement of the building I work in today. He says UPS picks up down there, so if I'm going to ship a UPS package, they'll let us in the basement to drop it off. Awesome! Next time, I'm going to do it with a camera! I already have pictures from on the roof; I need basement pictures to match. Maybe I can find the waterline from the Great Chicago Leak of '92!
I found a really great Chicago photoblog today while looking for info on the Randolph Tower. We pass by it on the way back from the restaurant, and it's such a neat neo-gothic facade I finally decided to look it up. I was guessing early '20s, because I keep forgetting that Art Deco wasn't really in full flower until the end of the decade. Randolph Tower was built in '29, and was one of the last of its breed. But anyway, check out A Chicago Sojourn. Good stuff there. He has a Flickr page too.
Finally, here's another picture of mine. This is a rehash of a picture I posted some time ago of the interior of a smokestack at an abandoned power plant. The original version is here. As I wrote in Facebook, the differences are primarily the color, but I also tweaked contrast and sharpness differently. I've learned how to use the shadows/highlights command to squish the brightness range down toward the center a little, then follow that up with bumping contrast up to make spots of of varying brightness across the image really pop more. The problem I have with the new one is that, though I was trying to preserve shadow detail, I still lost the ghostly looking bricks around the left side of the image in the near-dark. One of these days, I'll learn how to do things like layer-masking in Photoshop so I can take a selection of the image and apply changes in gradiants over different portions of it.
I wish I could manage a Photoshop class. I am picking a good number of things up on my own though, as I slowly go along. I've even managed to figure out how to better avoid harsh outlines around things when I edit different pieces of the picture, though I still end up with wider and more diffuse glowing auras that I then have to try to tweak via contrast and other things to make them less noticable. You can see such an aura around things in my rehash of the stamp sand beach at Gay, Michigan.
But anyway, here's the smokestack picture.
Smokestack, Take 2
© Stormdog 2009
Moira and I had ice cream at Culver's last night and I was introduced to a new treat. A 'cement mixer' (basically a DQ Blizzard) with Andes mints and Oreo cookies. It's one of the most enjoyable treats I can remember eating! Then we went out to Woodman's where I bought some cheap meat and cheese to go with the really good bagels I got for $1.50 at Big!Lots earlier in the day.
Moira; thanks for taking time out of your busy day to come visit. I really appreciate that.
Coworker G took me out for lunch again. I tried something new. I forget what it was called, but we went to the Thai place we frequent and I had something with rice noodles, steak, and bean sprouts. It was yummy, especially once we borrowed some sweet chili sauce from the table next to us for me to spice it up some. I love the way Thai cleans out my nose!
G is also going to see about getting me down into the basement of the building I work in today. He says UPS picks up down there, so if I'm going to ship a UPS package, they'll let us in the basement to drop it off. Awesome! Next time, I'm going to do it with a camera! I already have pictures from on the roof; I need basement pictures to match. Maybe I can find the waterline from the Great Chicago Leak of '92!
I found a really great Chicago photoblog today while looking for info on the Randolph Tower. We pass by it on the way back from the restaurant, and it's such a neat neo-gothic facade I finally decided to look it up. I was guessing early '20s, because I keep forgetting that Art Deco wasn't really in full flower until the end of the decade. Randolph Tower was built in '29, and was one of the last of its breed. But anyway, check out A Chicago Sojourn. Good stuff there. He has a Flickr page too.
Finally, here's another picture of mine. This is a rehash of a picture I posted some time ago of the interior of a smokestack at an abandoned power plant. The original version is here. As I wrote in Facebook, the differences are primarily the color, but I also tweaked contrast and sharpness differently. I've learned how to use the shadows/highlights command to squish the brightness range down toward the center a little, then follow that up with bumping contrast up to make spots of of varying brightness across the image really pop more. The problem I have with the new one is that, though I was trying to preserve shadow detail, I still lost the ghostly looking bricks around the left side of the image in the near-dark. One of these days, I'll learn how to do things like layer-masking in Photoshop so I can take a selection of the image and apply changes in gradiants over different portions of it.
I wish I could manage a Photoshop class. I am picking a good number of things up on my own though, as I slowly go along. I've even managed to figure out how to better avoid harsh outlines around things when I edit different pieces of the picture, though I still end up with wider and more diffuse glowing auras that I then have to try to tweak via contrast and other things to make them less noticable. You can see such an aura around things in my rehash of the stamp sand beach at Gay, Michigan.
But anyway, here's the smokestack picture.
Smokestack, Take 2
© Stormdog 2009
