optimiced | en

So winter never came to Bulgaria this winter… and now it’s almost gone.

No, the photo above is not mine, and it is not from some park in the city I live in… It’s just a thumbnail of a very nice winter paysage by Joshua Bryant (click thumbnail to see in its original size on Joshua’s flickr account). I almost envy him that he had had such a winter – snow and all…

I look now outside of the window. Everything is bathed in sunlight, it is almost 20 degrees Celsius outside, no snow, no wind, and the trees will start to blossom soon, I guess. Lots of days in January, February, even in December, were like this one. I’m a cyclist and the whole winter I was able to ride without problems, without freezing, without the usual battle with snow and ice on the roads… So I should be happy. Or should I?…

It is strange, not natural, somehow. Usually, during winter in Sofia, there are lots of cold days, with snow, fog, freezing wind, temperatures dropping way below zero degrees C… and now?

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I drink my Jacobs Cronat Gold coffee now (mmmmh…), with honey and cream, and think how beautiful Life is:)

My experiment is over – the week without coffee, black and green tea, beer, wine, chocolate and other things, which contain caffeine, tanine and alcohol:)

And here come the long-awaited results from this experiment:

1. I survived;-)
2. I feel good:-)
3. Everything is much tastier to me now:-)

I may repeat the experiment, one day. But now…

…I plan to have some crispy potato chips tonight (or fried potatos), together with some nice, cold beer, mmmmh;-)

Lately I wanted to say a couple of words about the comet McNaught. What decided me finally was this extraordinary photo, published on the 12th of February on the APOD website (click the thumbnail to see it in its original size). The shot was taken in New Zealand, at the end of January. You can also see part of the Milky Way – our home:)

This comet was called by many “the most photogenic comet of our time” и “the great comet of 2007″, and not without a reason.

Now the comet moves away from the Sun and the Earth, but it still can be seen in the Southern hemisphere. Not a long ago was published a photo in which the tail of the comet stretched on almost the whole Southern sky – its lenghth was 150 million kilometres, or approx. 1 astronomical unit (AU)!

You should also see one incredible montage from 3 photographs of the photographer Antti Kemppainen!

Enough about Space for today… Now I go to the window – it’s true that the comet cannot be seen anymore from our latitude, but I can at least wave to it with my hand, right? :-)

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Note: The Astronomy Picture of the Day, supported by NASA, is a very valuable resource – on this website every day is published one photograph or image/illustraion of our Universe, together with a short explanation by a professional astronomer. Some photos, especially those made by the Hubble telescope, littereally can take your breath away with its beauty and depth… and they make you realise, how small we are, people:-) I visit it often – there’s always something to see and discover:-)

First, happy St. Valentine’s day to everyone;-)

Sorry for the dark accompanying image, but I couldn’t restrain myself – this artist (a recent discovery of Ani’s, btw) brought me to tears from laughing with his black humour, but maybe my it’s just due to my fatigue (too much work lately), the tries of the French flu to get hold of me a second time this winter, and my slightly dark mood…

We exchanged already a couple of presents with Ani (including a very interesting book by Bernard Werber) and plan to have a great evening, supper and all and pondering upon the meaning of the Universe over a cup of orange juice (the reason being my recent vow for no caffeine/wine/tanine/beer for one week;-)

Yes, I am firmly decided. It’ll be this week. I start right now. This morning.

The experiment will continue exactly one week, or 168 hours. From Friday to Friday.

I will exclude from my daily diet everything, which contains caffeine and alcohol, also tannin. Any stimulating or calming chemical substances.

I won’t drink coffee. Regular coffee, and also decaffeinated coffee. Nor soluble coffee. No coffee at all.

I won’t eat chocolate. Nor waffers. You won’t be able to seduce me even with Lindt pralinés (although this one will be tough, If you’ve tried Lindt Lindor, mmmmmh… then you know what I’m talking about;-)

In the evening, I won’t drink a beer or two to relax. The wine also will be included in my “black list”. Same for the tea with some honey and a bit of whiskey, before going to bed.

I won’t drink green tea as well, as it contains caffeine and tannin. Nor black tea. Only herbal infusions and Rooibos tea.

You won’t be able to tempt me with some Coke, too.

Everything which is stimulating and calming goes into this list. You won’t see me even with my favourite Aldo Morelli bent pipe, blowing small beautiful smoke clouds to the wind (not that you can see me with it often, anyway, but this way the list looks more impressive;-)

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You asked for it – so here it is! Michel with a twin – again! (See also this post: The Double Michel – inspired by Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir)

The tutorial?

You’ll have to wait a bit more – it’s cooking right now:-)

There’s a video and you should watch it.

Better with sound.

Better with sound on your THX-certified sound system, volume to the max:-)

(If you don’t happen to own such a system, err… Then use whatever sound system is available around;-)

The intro video (currently, the only video available to watch at the Minuscule.tv website) is great. I enjoyed it a lot – it was fun, fast-paced and beautifully drawn. The technique the guys and girls from Minuscule/Futurikon (Thomas Szabo, Hélène Giraud) use is quite unusual – they use a mix of real footage and 3D animation, plus real-life sound, very suitably selected.

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Sounds incredible, but Ani has discovered yesterday that there’s a galaxy a pair of galaxies called The Mice (NGC 4676)! Wow!

Quoting the Hubble Telescope website:

This pair of galaxies, NGC 4676, also known as “The Mice” for their tails of stars and gas, have collided and will eventually merge into a single galaxy. Streams of material have been tugged out of the galaxies by the force of gravity, triggering new starbirth.

When will be discovered a galaxy called Optimiced, then? ;-)

(I guess, I’ll have first to discover it…:-)

I avow, that this post by the famous photographer Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir (no, don’t ask me to pronounce this Icelandic name!:-) inspired me… And also a question on the same subject, which my wife asked me a few days ago:

How this is done? And this?
Can a normal digital camera be used for this purpose?

Can the technique be reproduced using Macromedia Fireworks?

So, here’s the answer:

It could be done using a variety of methods.

Yes.

Yes.

The results are shown above [click on the thumbnail to see the image in full size]:-)

This is it – short and sweet. It’s me in the office today, shot by my small Pentax Optio S40 digital camera. And this is me, again… although, my second me is holding a knife and looks a bit evil;-)

If there’s interest, I may try to write a tutorial on it:-)

A while ago I posted two Yahoo! logos on my website, asking the audience to tell, which one is the original Yahoo! logo made by Yahoo! and which I have re-created using Macromedia Fireworks.

Now comes the long-awaited answer:

Yahoo! logo #1 is the one I made, and Yahoo! logo #2 is the original Yahoo! logo from the Yahoo! Messenger starting screen, captured as screenshot while the Yahoo! Messenger was loading.

I thank everyone for their participation, votes and comments:-)

I’d like to thank you here especially Alan Musselman from Adobe (formerly Macromedia), whose answer and comment was one of the most thougthtful and thouroughful ones:

Definitely the one on the left (#1). The only way I noticed is the Y is not proper like the Yahoo! branding. :) Good job though… I will also say the shadow on the teeth is a little stronger on #1 as well. If it wasn’t for these two things I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. :)

Both remarks are correct – the “Y” wasn’t perfectly made, and the shadow on the teeth is a bit different. Also, a lot of people reported that Y! logo #2 is somewhat saved with a bit worse compression than Y! logo #1 and because of that they presume #2 is the original logo, because probably it’s a screenshot and thus, was saved with worse compression and some artifacts, while #1 was exported from a high-quality vector-based file.

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