Atlas Shrugged the Movie?

Ayn Rand’s most ambitious novel may finally be brought to the bigscreen after years of false starts.

Lionsgate has picked up worldwide distribution rights to “Atlas Shrugged” from Howard and Karen Baldwin (”Ray”), who will produce with John Aglialoro.

As for stars, book provides an ideal role for an actress in lead character Dagny Taggart, so it’s not a stretch to assume Rand enthusiast Angelina JolieAngelina Jolie’s name has been brought up. Brad PittBrad Pitt, also a fan, is rumored to be among the names suggested for lead male character John Galt.

I can’t think of two worse actors to play in this movie than Jolie and Pitt. Roseanne Barr and any of her ex-husbands seems a more likely pair. You know that Pitt and Jolie will try to spin the theme of the movie in some way. I loved the book, but I’d much rather it was never made into a movie than see it done badly.

h/t to Rob at the SayAnythingBlog.

Doug TenNapel has a great post on True Tolerance.

Notice how he can completely disagree with my religion while robustly respecting my participation.

My religion rejecting Judaism or his religion rejecting mine is NOT intolerance.

Allah Pundit has a great PhotoShop humor piece on HotAir today. I love good PhotoShop work. It’s a pleasure to see something like that well done.

I think a variation on that image would look good as a promo piece for Michelle Malkin and her new site. What do you think?

I haven’t seen this yet, but it looks like I’ll have to.

OpinionJournal - Featured Article by David Beamer

Paul Greengrass and Universal set out to tell the story of United Flight 93 on that terrible day in our nation’s history. They set about the task of telling this story with a genuine intent to get it right–the actions of those on board and honor their memory. Their extensive research included reaching out to all the families who had lost loved ones on United Flight 93 as the first casualties of this war. And Paul and his team got it right.

I encourage my fellow Americans and free people everywhere to see “United 93.”

Be reminded of our very real enemy. Be inspired by a true story of heroic actions taken by ordinary people with victorious consequences. Be thankful for each precious day of life with a loved one and make the most of it. Resolve to take the right action in the situations of life, whatever they may be. Resolve to give thanks and support to those men, women, leaders and commanders who to this day (1,687 days since Sept. 11, 2001) continue the counterattacks on our enemy and in so doing keep us safe and our freedoms intact.

May the taste of freedom for people of the Middle East hasten victory. The enemy we face does not have the word “surrender” in their dictionary. We must not have the word “retreat” in ours. We surely want our troops home as soon as possible. That said, they cannot come home in retreat. They must come home victoriously. Pray for them.

Mr. Beamer is the father of Todd Beamer, a passenger on United Airlines Flight 93.

Update: Michelle Malkin’s Vent issue for today is on this subject as well. She has a lot more information. Well worth viewing.

I actually got an image on Hot Air the other day. Hot Air » Blog Archive » BDS Now Features Props

Here is an updated version of the image.

This exciting post is almost as exciting as my post on PhotoShopping Grass... And slightly more exciting than watching grass grow.

Vince Aut Morire - Test

Geek humor, quite sad, I know.

When a co-worker comes in a little too happy singing “good morning” to everyone and you think, “Somebody needs to slap the s#@! out of her”… You need to pray at work.

When someone comes in and announces, “office meeting in 5 minutes,” and you think, “what the f*&% do they want now?” You need to pray at work.

When your computer is mysteriously turned off and you want to say, “which one of you sons of b*&^%$# turned off my computer?” You need to pray at work.

When you and a co-worker are discussing something, and a third person comes in and says, “well at my last office…,” and you want to throw a stapler at him… You need to pray at work.

When you hear a co-worker call your name and the first thing that crosses your mind is, “what the h*&^ does she want now?” and you try to hide underneath your desk… You need to pray at work.

When you are asked to stay late and help do someone else’s work and the first thing that pops in your head is, “both of y’all can kiss my a@@!!”… You need to pray at work.

When you’re in the elevator and it stops to pick up someone who stood for five minutes waiting for the darn thing only to go DOWN one floor, and you say “that lazy b*&%$#”… You need to pray at work.

When you take some vacation time and come back to find a mountain of paperwork sitting on your desk because no one else would do it and you think, “sorry a## M#$^%F%&#s”… You need to pray at work.

If you have ever thought about poisoning, choking, punching, slapping or flattening someone’s tires that you work with… You need to pray at work.

If you avoid saying more than hello or how are you doing to someone because you know it’s going to lead to their life story… You need to pray at work.

If you know all the words that have been bleeped out… You need to pray at work!

Let us all bow our heads.

I can’t take credit for this, it was sent to me in an e-mail and I don’t know the origin. Thanks AW.

I regularly see problems with print documents and with website design that could be easily avoided. Here are three problems I see on a weekly if not daily basis. These problems can range for minor workflow issues and lack of productivity to major print and website failures.

The first problem I see is often with beginning or amateur graphic designers, the tools they choose to use. There is a wide variety of tools available to us, some more appropriate than others. MS Word for instance, is I suppose a decent piece of word processing software. It isn’t however a graphic design tool, it’s almost useless for our purposes. The most significant problem I have with it is that while it gives us some control of our craft it doesn’t give enough. Combine that with Microsoft’s habit of not playing well with others and you get a software dead-end. Software that can’t do the job, and won’t let you easily transfer your work to another media. MS Publisher and other MS products have the same problems.

The second problem I see is designers who haven’t learned the software they’re using. While a learning curve for new software is to be expected, some designers never bother to fully understand the capabilities and limitations of the software they use every day. Modern graphic design software can be very complex, but that’s no excuse for not bothering to learn the basics. There are a lot of features on modern design software that can greatly streamline a designer’s workflow and make their life easier.

Global styles or style sheets are a common feature that I see underutilized. Whether it’s Quark or InDesign for print design or some form of CSS for web work, these styles can make your job much easier. Learn how they work, and use them correctly. I see a lot of work produced in software that supports styles, but does not utilize it. If you regularly make global style changes to documents, this will save you hours if not days. If set up using styles correctly, document formatting can be changed globally with a few minor changes to the style definitions. Change the definition of a style, all text defined by that style changes. If you aren’t using styles then you are taking the longer path, and section by section, sometimes word by word, manually changing the formatting.

The third problem I see often is with print publication. Print specifications, or the lack thereof. If you are designing something for print, there are specifications (or specs) that you need to meet. Whether this job is being printed on the color printer on your desk, or a web press across the country, there are specs. A surprising number of designers don’t meet these specifications. This can occur through lack of training or more commonly lack of knowledge (the specs were never supplied to them). Either way, the print job has problems. Either it is printed without correcting this problem and the job suffers, or it is fixed. It can be fixed by the designer at his expense and loss of productivity, or by someone associated with the printer at the expense of the designer and loss of profit. Both solutions are bad.

The real solution is to know the specifications ahead of time, and this isn’t always as easy as you’d think. Sales people with printing companies don’t always know the specs, or know them incompletely. Desktop printers don’t always list their specs anywhere. Lately I’ve had trouble with print companies giving out what appeared to be complete specs, but which were not in fact complete. When supplied with my files for printing they then gave me the complete specs with a list of things they wanted to charge me to fix. I did manage to convince them of the error of their ways, but I also had to fix the files at my expense. If I’d been in control of printer choice, that job would have moved elsewhere, but it wasn’t. Someone less stubborn or arrogant than I am would have been stuck with some serious charges tacked onto their print bill. It could have been an expensive lesson.

These three things that all designers should know can be summed up in the title of this post, Designers, know thy tools.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » CNN burns McKinney - again I commented on this at the site, but I thought I’d post it too.

Ms. McKinney requested something be off the record after the fact? That’s absurd. Funny, but absurd. Any discussion about whether you are on or off the record needs to be done in advance, and she should know that. She likely in fact does know that, but like the police checkpoint issue, she is not willing to pay the consequences for her actions.

I’ve been touching up the grass in a Photo for the last half an hour (It’s a large photo). You’d think that the key to nice and natural looking grass would be the color. It’s not. You can make grass just about any shade of green you’d like. Brown works too, as do a lot of yellows. Texture is the true key. If you get the texture of the grass right it looks like grass, even if the colors a little off. If you get the color perfect but the texture a little off, it looks like some bad science experiment. I had enough nice grass to use the Healing Brush and a little of the Stamp Tool to get the right texture throughout.

I had to be careful to match the textures though. The texture changes over the expanse of lawn depending on the lighting and the distance. If I have the wrong texture at the wrong distance, or in the wrong lighting conditions, the whole effect is ruined.

Michelle Malkin’s new site Hot Air seems to be getting swamped. I’m curious how much traffic it’s getting. They had to have known and planned for a lot of traffic, but I keep getting timed out when trying to view it. I finally got to it, but it’s running incredibly slow.

Update: According to sitemeter she’s gotten 28,174 hits today as of 12:42 p.m. EST. Over 8,300 in the last hour.

Update: 61,137 hits today and 11,184 in the last hour. 5:00 p.m. EST.

Signal 94 has a great post on the Border Security and Immigration Fraud
Signal 94: A Failure To Protect

If I remember correctly, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 established broad powers for federal agencies to gather and share information. Except if it actually may indicate if someone is breaking the law.

There should be rule forbidding clients from viewing any websites during the final proofing stages of their own site rebuild. I was minutes from a final approval when my client e-mailed me with new ideas. Completely different than what they originally requested of course. They’d been surfing the net and found a site they liked.

It’s not like they’re not paying me here, but I’d like to finish the project before I start it again. Perpetual, consecutive rebuilds would be OK. One perpetual rebuild… not so fun.

I don’t know why I like this site, but I really do.

gapingvoid: i don’t have a blog

Not really, but I wanted to prove a point, partially to myself. I wrote about Honest Photography the other day. I ended with:

Honesty and integrity are two of the biggest things a photographer can bring to their job. Even when not manipulating the photos digitally they can strongly influence their images. What you shoot, what don’t you shoot, how did you frame the image. In front of a monitor or behind a camera, these things all effect how the images are perceived. While a picture is worth a thousand words, a dishonest photograph is worth considerably less.

Yesterday I was browsing my favorite forum, Your American Backyard Forum, and noticed someone was talking about my post.

I would suggest instead that a dishonest photograph is worth a thousand words of cleverly disguised propaganda. I suspect the LA Slimes dismissed that photographer because he got caught manipulating images. That institution has been willing to manipulate the facts to serve their political agenda in the past. Manipulating images for the same purpose isn’t materially different.

Offline djl4570 added,

The era of digital images may force retirement of the old adage that “Pictures don’t lie” and ultimately add an entry to Mark Twain’s “lies, damn lies and statistics”

He had very good points. For news purposes an altered photo is useless, but for propaganda purposes, it can be priceless. Something I hadn’t thought of. I was thinking specifically of news photographs and the need for integrity in the photographers. I didn’t think of using faked photos for propaganda or satire. Sorry for the low quality job on the photo, I was rushed. (I’ve updated the photo and the text slightly since the original post.)

Update: I keep going back to djl4570’s comment on Mark Twain’s famous quote. Maybe it should be “lies, damn lies and photographs”.

I haven’t tried this yet, but this looks like an incredible idea.

joey interactive » Blog Archive » Portable Firefox

If you’ve got an iPod or a jump drive (or as I like to call them, “dirty needles”), you’ll want to go over to freesmug and download portable Firefox.

Firefox and Thunderbird from a Thumb Drive!

The Good: On the work front I’m getting a new computer, another Dell Optiplex. It’s due, the old Optiplex is getting a little flaky. I haven’t gotten it set up yet, but it’s sitting on the desk next to me. I did install the new monitor though. I use a dual monitor system, and one of my monitors was quite old. Now both of the monitors are new, a definite improvement. Now if I could just get a new Mac G5…

The Bad: The The power supply on my home PC died this weekend. How annoying. I shut it off because I saw an incredible thunderstorm coming, and it won’t turn on again. Ironic, because we didn’t actually get any power outages. My primary home computer is a Mac G4 which is still working fine.

The Ugly: Used a rototiller for several hours this weekend. That’s like some archaic form of torture. “I’ll talk, I’ll talk, just don’t make me put in any more flower beds…”

There is a job idea being floated in my area. I can’t go into detail because I haven’t been offered the job, (and won’t be) and I don’t want expose the person who shared it with me. Someone is looking for some website design and print design work. They have recognized a flaw in the perceived image of their product and wish to correct it. The actual product (high end technical product) is irrelevant in this case because they aren’t actually trying to fix it. No, rather than fixing the product (the flaw is real) they are trying to change the way their product is seen.

Rather than do anything to improve their product, they are spending their money on an improved website, and a “flashy new brochure”. Graphic Design at it’s worst. Selling something that isn’t quite what it appears to be for more money than it’s worth. I don’t feel the need to identify this product because the public perception is already poor, and this ad campaign will fail. I reserve the right to make fun of it later if it actually develops. Management always likes to overestimate their ability to sway customers with flashy brochures and slick websites. Like a customer (highly educated for this product) will decide that a product isn’t worth the money but change their mind because the company has a really cool website. Or when comparing specifications they will be swayed by the superior quality of the brochure, even though the product looks like crap and the reviews are poor.

Their expected result would probably sound something like this… “Looks bad, too expensive, poor service, but Wow! Shiny paper!“

Don’t you love it when something goes well. Here’s a photo of one of the rock walls I put in last year. The Creeping Phlox and the Hens and Chicks I planted in the wall are thriving this spring. Perfect.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Real Or Fake? (04/10/2006)

Thanks to digital technology, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the most photographed in history. Photographers with digital cameras have provided, almost instantaneously, an enormous flood of accurate, dramatic, and even shocking images to people around the world. But the daily downloads of news photos include some that are staged, fake, or so lacking in context as to be meaningless, despite the Western media’s best efforts to separate the factual from the fictional.

Being someone who manipulates images for a living, I’ve wondered how much of a problem this sort of thing was. I know I look at images a lot different than the average person. When I look at an image in a magazine, TV or online I look to see how it’s been changed. I look to see how it was made. Call me a cynic, but it’s much easier to get the effect you want in PhotoShop rather than take the picture right to begin with. Apparently some others have had the same thought. Unfortunately some of them have been behind the camera it seems.

Poynter Online - L.A. Times Photographer Fired Over Altered Image

“Being in the desert away from your readers does not mean you have free license to deceive them,” agrees Maria Mann, former AFP, North American Photo Director and now the principal of The Creative Eye Consulting.

“The Los Angeles Times acted swiftly and decisively in dealing with a photographer who felt that altering the truth was a viable option,” she says.

Honesty and integrity are two of the biggest things a photographer can bring to their job. Even when not manipulating the photos digitally they can strongly influence their images. What you shoot, what don’t you shoot, how did you frame the image. In front of a monitor or behind a camera, these things all effect how the images are perceived. While a picture is worth a thousand words, a dishonest photograph is worth considerably less.

BLACKFIVE and Michelle Malkin are all over these stories today.