optimiced | en

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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Everybody is talking about the new Microsoft Windows Vista OS.

Meanwhile, I didn’t write about a lot of interesting things which happened lately - the light show in Sofia on New Year’s Eve, when Bulgaria became officially a member of the European Union; the climb to Vitosha mountain with friends, to Cherni Vryh (2290 m), a few weeks ago - January 13th, to be precise (and the unpublished photos from this climb, too); the concert of the Dublin City Workingman’s Band in Sofia (on January 26th, in NDK, Hall #2); and I didn’t even write a post, explaining what is the real Yahoo! logo, and what is the one that I have drawn myself.

Shame on me!:-)

Instead of writing, I was ill for some time, because a nasty flu coming from France (or so they said) caught me; and I was working, working a lot. This is what happened and I hope that I’ll have again some time to update my blog; meanwhile, let’s return to the subject of this post:

Windows Vista or MacOS X? I don’t know, frankly.

But here’s a nice picture on the subject (click to enlarge):

:-)

PS Some say The WOW starts now! and some say that it already started; for my part, I don’t believe something so revolutionary happened; time will show:)

OK, today’s riddle:

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Or A Story about How my Intel Pentium-D Computer Became Ultra-Fast… again* :-)

…So here I am, sitting in the office yesterday, sipping at my coffee peacefully and thinking about doing some boring PC optimisation work - defragmentation, disk cleanup, etc.

Lately I noticed, that my computer is acting strange from time to time - slows down, opens applications with much more delay than usual; the whole Windows was feeling somehow slowish, but not in the way it slows down after too much work performed since first install (besides, I installed this Windows XP Professional SP2 myself not a long ago, and that wasn’t an option).

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