OK this is a little funny. I feel sorry for the cop, but who knew Chihuahuas traveled in packs?

Everyone seems to have top ten lists this week. Top ten this, top ten that. Joel Siegel among others has a top ten movies of 2005 list. It kind of sad when I see a list of the top ten movies of 2005 and I haven’t seen any of them. Even worse, I don’t want to.

The one movie on Mr. Siegel’s list I have any interest in is The Chronicles of Narnia. Based on a great book this one should be interesting. If I wasn’t fairly confident that they screwed it up in some way I’d probably go and see it. Good books are rarely made into good movies. Good books with a Christian theme are never made into good movies.

The really sad part is that I really like movies. They just aren’t making very many good movies these days. Brokeback Mountain? Give me a break. Why would I want to see that? I’ll give you a clue to my philosophy on sexuality, if you’re gay I don’t want to here about it. If you’re heterosexual, I still don’t want to here about it. A person’s sexual preference is a personal thing, and I wish they would keep it that way. I don’t want to share. If these two cowboys loved one another, great. Have a nice life, move on. Why should I want to see a movie about a self inflicted tragedy.

If that’s the best movie of 2005, I’m glad I stayed home from the theater this year.

I finally saw Serenity. It was incredible. Better than I had hoped. Exciting plot, lots of action, but stayed true to the series. I was afraid they’d change the premise of the story or something. I virtually always dislike TV shows made into movies. Books made into movies aren’t much better. Directors always seem to feel the need to mess around with the basic story. Change some major premise. Fortunately, the series and movie had the same director. It was the series expanded into a movie. I own the series on DVD so I can’t speak as someone unfamiliar with the series, but I think as a movie it would stand up reasonably well on it’s own. Well worth the wait.

I hope hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday. Merry Christmas, God Bless.

Why is it that everyone gets a little nuts around the holidays? Driving round town has been taking my life into my own hands this week. Everybody rushing around with no thought to safety or basic traffic laws. This is usually a pretty quiet place to live. Not this week.

I’ve never been one for crowds, but they’re even worse around the holidays. Too many people and everyone is in a hurry. While I’ve seen some incredibly generous people during the holiday season, I’ve seen a lot of rude people too.

The last few years the rudeness has been pretty visible not only in the shoppers, but in the retail staff as well. I can’t understand how stores can stay in business with some of those employees. I had jewelry clerk look me right in the eye tonight, then close out the cash register and walk away.

Unlike most people I will actually talk to managers about employee behavior. I’ll track down managers to report both good and bad behavior. If somebody really annoys me, or gives less than satisfactory customer service, I let someone know. Usually I don’t do it for a first offense, they could be having a bad day but a second offense is fair game.

Good behavior I don’t wait for a second chance. I tell their manager or supervisor how pleased I am with the service, and I tip if appropriate. It’s purely selfish on my part. If they did a good job, I want to make sure they’re still there to help me the next time. If they’re really good at their job, and are recognized for it, maybe they’ll in turn pass on those skills to others. Maybe if enough of us do this, I won’t have to do the Postal Dance in the jewelry department next year.

I spend time each day taking care of my horses. I have most days since I was a teenager. You can learn a lot about human behavior from watching herd animals interact. One horse in particular has been amusing me lately. Actually she’s amused me for twenty plus years, but lately my wife has put a name to one particular behavior. The Postal Dance.

It’s the behavior you see when someone pushes her too far. She’s one of the smaller horses, and the most polite in the herd, but oddly the most dominant as well. Some horses take the politeness as submission, and try to push her around. She’ll ignore them for a while, but there is a point that they aren’t allowed to cross. Then that thin veil of civility moves aside for a second, the her opponents see the see the Hell Bitch in true form. In twenty years I’ve never seen a horse look the Hell Bitch in the eye without backing off. Whatever it is they see when they look at her, it isn’t something they are willing to stand up to.

Most horses back off quickly… some not quickly enough. The ones that are slow pay the price. Her first move is usually with teeth, then a quick spin into them with both back feet. It’s always over in a few seconds, and I’ve never seen her really injure another horse. I’ve seen brutal horses, and horses left marked up and bleeding from fighting, but never with her. She goes for fear and intimidation and not injury and pain. Both the biting and the kicking are used to prove dominance and control. She completely overwhelms the opponent’s defenses, and then quits. It is the rare horse that tries her twice. The Postal Dance, that lightning fast transition from civil to psychotic and back. The seemingly blind fury of righteous indignation, barely controlled, and then shut off like a switch when the moment has passed.

I’m not always sure what I should learn from her behavior. Self control, possibly. The idea that there is a point where you can’t be pushed any further, maybe. The one hundred percent commitment to a goal, at the expense of all reason and logic, I hope not. Most likely what I will take is, never start a fight, but always finish one.

I’m reading Field of Thirteen by Dick Francis again. Quite good. I don’t usually care for short stories, these don’t seem so short. He gets so much detail and character depth into his writing, they seem longer than they are. I’ve always been impressed by Mr’s Francis’ ability to draw you into a story right from the start, and keep you involved in the story right to the end. The ending which, in true Francis style, is never quite what you thought it was going to be.

I still think my favorite book by Mr. Francis is To the Hilt.

As I said once,

The key to a successful Wandering is not to enjoy the destination in spite of the trip, but to enjoy the trip, regardless of the destination.

Althouse has a post on a similar subject today. Her topic is the use of navigation systems. I can see why they are useful, but I don’t have much interest in having one in my car. Same with DVD player. The trip is often the point, not just the means to an end. Some of my best childhood memories are of traveling with my family. I spend a lot of time in a car with my children. That’s time I’m not willing to give up to a DVD player. As for the navigation system, I think I would find it harder to keep from fixating on a destination. Sometimes I just like to wander. Knowing where I’m at and where I’m headed would defeat the purpose. I like to go to over the next mountain just to see what’s there. I like not knowing how far the next town is. I like an aimless trip down a road just to see where it goes. Having a navigation system in the car, even turned off, might ruin the effect. I’d always know that in an instant I could answer the question “I wonder where this road goes?” I want to wonder. I want to wander. I want to find out what’s over the next hill, when I go over the next hill.

I got a flier in the mail today from a hospital in Maryland. Apparently we’re still on the mailing list even though we’ve moved out of state. The whole point of the flier was brag about what a wonderful hospital they must be because two radio personalities are raving about their maternity ward. It seems that these two local celebrities got great service and attention when their children were born.

One male and one female on air personality had children at the hospital recently and they are raving about how good Shady Grove Adventist Hospital was. Having had a daughter born there I’d beg to differ. If you aren’t locally famous and they are a little busy, you don’t get particularly good service. In fact they might ignore you entirely. You might sit in your delivery room until they are ready for you. You might go long periods of time without seeing anyone. And then when they have time, they might try to rush the labor along.

I’m happy for the new parents, children are a blessing. I’m sorry for people who read the ad and think this is how they will be treated. Maybe they will, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Big names might get you good service in a big hospital, but I’d choose Montgomery Regional in Christainsburg Virginia ove Shady Grove any day. Better service, better rooms, and they have time for you. Not just time for the important people.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time using PhotoShop lately. Still spending most of my days in DreamWeaver MX, but I’ve had to some heavy PhotoShop work this last week. It got me to thinking about the nature of digital images and image manipulation. Why is it that some images that seem technically correct just scream “fake” while others that shouldn’t pass a close examination look real?

I’ve noticed that a like a lot of things images can be overworked. In fact that seems to be the most common sign of fakery. Objects in nature have a certain randomness to them. Everything has a natural texture to it, no matter how subtle. If you disturb this texture in the wrong way, it doesn’t look real. By removing the natural randomness of an image, you make an object look too perfect and unreal.

On the same theme, letting your brush strokes show can have the same effect. By letting the shape of your editing tool leave it’s stamp, regardless of the shape, you are giving the pixels an unnatural organization that the eye can pick up. It might even be so subtle that the viewer doesn’t recognize what they are seeing, but they won’t believe. A picture might be worth a thousand words, but people know when an image lies. At least when it lies poorly.

The trick is in making the image scream when it tells the truth, but whisper when it lies. It’s important to start with a good quality image, so that you have a solid foundation of detail to start with. Build on that foundation by making any alterations fluid, blending the real subtly with the fake. Don’t over work or over smooth. Leave as much of the natural texture of whatever surface the subject has intact. If you need to put something into the picture, or take something out, make sure the substituted area is of a similar quality as the rest.

Don’t think that you can just slap two images together and expect them to blend. They need to be of similar qualities, light levels, sharpness of focus, and with compatible light sources. While these can be altered, they must be altered for this to work. When something is to be removed, make sure you have natural looking detail to take it’s place.

I removed a tree from a image on Friday, the difficult part wasn’t in removing the tree, but in inserting bits and pieces of rocks into the rock wall which replaced the tree. I could have just blurred out the tree, but the loss of detail would have showed the subtraction. By adding natural detail to the wall in place of the tree, nothing appeared to be missing. I had to add pieces of stone over the tree without letting the additions show. With a combination of the stamp tool, healing brush, brush and pencil, and of course working on a separate layer, I added pieces of wall from an area that wouldn’t be prominent in the final image. I used custom brushes to lessen the chance of leaving brush marks, and to increase the randomness of the stone pattern. Finally I adjusted the lighting of the area slightly to compensate for the removal of the tree and it’s shadow.

The real talent in PhotoShop comes I suppose, not from making being able to remove a tree from an image, but making it into an image which never appears to have had a tree in it to begin with.

Despite posts to the contrary, I’m still puttering around with the new site. Mostly just trying new things. Tried several new plugins to go with the new WordPress website. Discarded them all so far. One didn’t want to install properly. One didn’t want to install. several just weren’t what I was looking for after more careful evaluation. Unfortunately the spell checker is the one that wouldn’t install properly. Figures.

Althouse has a post on an upcoming movie, currently being filmed, called “World Trade Center”. She calls it “unspeakable”. I was concerned when I saw the premise of the movie, I was horrified when I saw who was behind it. I think I’ll pass on seeing Oliver Stone’s 9/11.

“Sensitivity and accuracy, at the end of the day, are the same thing,” said Michael Shamberg, who is producing the movie for Paramount Pictures with his business partner, Stacey Sher. “Because of what we’ve heard from the police, firefighters, civilians, the Port Authority, everyone who was there that day, loved ones - they said, ‘Tell the story accurately so people understand what happened.’ You can’t do the Hollywood version.”

What are the odds that Oliver Stone can make a non-Hollywood version of this event? I have to agree with “unspeakable”.

What is it with weather forecasters these days? The forecast yesterday was for “very very cold”. We weren’t supposed to worry though, because it could have been “much much worse”. What exactly is much much worse than very very cold. The also used the adjectives brutally, and bitterly to describe how cold it was. It was in the mid 20s!

This post is a test of an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux 5.10. I’d say this is a success.

It’s annoying that there’s nothing on TV. Nothing good anyway. I was watching Law and Order earlier this evening and I was reminded of this. While it is often a reasonably good show, tonight’s episode dealt with something they thought should hit close to home. Mass shootings in a park by a lunatic with an automatic weapon. Can’t say that I worry about that much.

In true Hollywood style, the murderer got a plea bargain. Of course the person who illegally sold the gun to him and the person who illegally sold him a conversion kit weren’t even charged. Almost half the show was devoted to the “real bad guy”. The gun manufacturer.

The people who thought up this moronic show couldn’t even come up with anything particularly original. The used the same garbage that a couple of our states dreamed up. Attack the gun manufacturers for making “dangerous guns”. In this case they brought the fictitious manufacturer to court because their handgun could easily be converted to fully automatic. They just expected us to accept that a company would manufacture a pistol that could be converted to automatic (they didn’t sell an automatic version) in thirty minutes with a file and a soldiering gun. Apparently we are supposed to think that all guns are capable of automatic fire if the only the owner would pull out a file and fix them.

While I’m against gun control, I might have liked the show if they had done anything to base this in reality. Done anything to give both sides of the issue air time. Come up with anything even slightly original. But of course, this is Hollywood.

Summary of all recent Hollywood action plots:
Flee! Flee! Someone owns a legal firearm, we must flee! Thankfully the hero shows up, shows a complete lack of understanding of the rules of both safely handling a firearm and physics, points the gun at everyone on the set including himself and saves the day!

Mix in a lot of special effects which must include at least two of the following: 1. Man getting thrown fifty feet after getting shot with a handgun which the hero hold in one hand. (please ignore any knowledge of the Newton’s Third Law of Motion) 2. Hero shrugs off a shot to the shoulder by a rifle or shotgun. 3. Car exploding with the force of a small nuclear device after being shot by a handgun. 4. Hero drives through a shower of machine gun fire, but fortunately they all miss him. 5. Someone is shot in the back while being held in the hero’s arms, the hero is unhurt. 6. The hero shoots someone and the bullet goes on to kill three more people.

Nothing on TV, this sucks. But it’s time to wrap this up, make some popcorn, and get back to the couch. Nothing on TV - Part Two is on at 11:00.

I’m actually done. Preparation of the new web site took longer than I thought. I did a lot more work to it than I thought I was going to. I thought I would go with a slightly modified theme, but I got an idea for something completely new and ran with it. I’m very pleased. The spurs are mine, a gift from my father when I was a teenager. The texture on the left is part of the saddle I inherited when my father passed away. This site seems a lot more like my style than the previous one.