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;-)

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;-)

Don’t get me wrong – not that I am so terribly addicted to caffeine, tannin, alcohol, Coca-Cola and chocolate;-)

Rather the opposite! (I appreciate moderation, and I am not against caffeine, tannin and wine. I am curious, will it be easy to escape the habit for a while, and what’ll happen. Call it “Purification”. Or “Experiment”. Or “What will happen, if…”. It doesn’t matter.)

Well, during the day, I drink one or two cups of coffee, with great pleasure (sometimes three). During the week-end I don’t drink coffee usually, only tea, Rooibos, herbal infusions or green tea. In the evening I like to open a cold beer from the fridge – do you know, how well they go together, cold beer and fried potatoes and a salad from tomatoes and cucumbers, mmmmh!:-)

I love and I appreciate the good wine, too. A glass of red wine, in the evening, is something beautiful, and lots of studies proved that the moderate consumption of red wine leads to longer life (see France, for example), and also may act stimulatingly if you do some creative work.

I don’t drink Coca-Cola, maybe a couple of times during the year, maximum.

In fact, the goal of this experiment is to see, how will I feel, if a whole week my body is deprived from any of these substances – caffeine, tannin, alcool, etc…

And after a week? Nothing:) I’ll just write about the results of the experiment. Wish me luck, for now! I go to get myself another glass of water:)))

Note: If you see that after a week there is no single new post in my blog, it means… The experiment was unsuccessful and my body was too accustomed to all of these substances. Tell a short prayer in this case and… no matter what happens, don’t stop the coffee and beer!:-P

UPDATE: Errrr, well… I guess the start of this righteous decision should be postponed for tomorrow – right now I am drinking cold beer at home after being with friends and some great red wine:)

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:-)

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.

You were correct!:-)

(Note to myself: Always save screenshots with highest possible quality from now on, if a similar riddle will be published again by me, and the secret must not be revealed so easily;-)

Now, on to the raw numbers:

• 7 votes go for the option that the first Y! logo is the original one, and the 2nd is my work (the fake one)
• 9 votes go for the option that the second Y! logo is the original one and the 1st is my work (the fake one)
• Finally, 4 people voted that they either: can’t tell the diference between them, that both logos are fake or that they should not tell which is which;-)

My goal in this experiment was not to make a perfect imitation of the Yahoo! logo from the Messenger screen, but rather to try to quickly make a copy, which would be at least partially hard to be distinguished from the original, and see, how much time this would require in Macromedia Fireworks.

I’d say, the results are pretty satisfying. A number of people were fooled by my imitation, and as to the time needed, I think the copy was done in less than 10 or 15 minutes. I may try to repeat this experiement one of these days, with more zeal from my part, and more attention to the detail:)

I’ll publish here the original PNG file from Fireworks 8, in case someone’s interested to see how the vector copy was made.

Thanks again to everyone for the comments, votes and suggestions!

Now off to Microsoft website, to download a fresh copy of Windows Vista logo for a new series of Fireworks fun;-)

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One of these two Yahoo! Messenger logos is a fake one. Which one? Number 1 or Number 2? Guess! :-)

Note (a): Opening Yahoo! Messenger right now is strictly prohibited! Opening www.yahoo.com website or any associated with Yahoo!, Inc. websites is strictly prohibited, too. Any search using Google Image Search or similar is not allowed as well:-)

Note (b): One of the graphics is the original one, copied as screenshot of the Yahoo! Messenger during sign-in; the other is made in using Macromedia Fireworks (my graphic tool of preference), in maybe 10-15 minutes. It’s up to you to decide, which is which:-)

Note (c): You can click on each the image to see the images compared (click on the left/right sides of each image after opening one of them).

Note (d): I’ll post the right answer here (or in a new post), together with the Fireworks .PNG file, as soon as I get enough feedback:-)

If you try to guess, please, post your comments below, just #1 or #2 and (optionally) why you think so, would be enough:-)

Thx:-)

PS I wanted to write first about the great adventure we had on Vitosha mountain last Saturday, but I got a nasty flu right after that, so it’ll have to wait a bit :-(

UPDATE: Comments are now closed. You may read the answer to the riddle here:-) Thank you for your participation!

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Sideline: Sometimes, maybe I simply want to prove to myself (and to the world) that Macromedia Adobe Fireworks is a tiny, yet powerful, full-featured program for web & graphic design; the fact that Macromedia didn’t promote it enough (think only that the Mozilla Firefox logo was made using Macromedia Fireworks and this remains quite unknown to the broad public!) only proves that Fireworks was somehow overlooked in favour of Flash/Dreamweaver — but now that Adobe owns Macromedia, I have new hopes:-) I’ll write on the subject more one of these days. For now, a small Yahoo! Fireworks Riddle is enough;-)