Anonymity

Here's an interesting article from The Telegraph today. It relates to a court ruling that bloggers will no longer be afforded their anonymity to protect them from disciplinary action from the workplace or even criminal investigation.

I'm unsure where I stand on this issue.  On the one hand I think certain individuals, like the one mentioned in the article should be allowed their secrecy, but others who publish vile rhetoric should be revealed to the world so we know who they are and that they have to show culpability for their views.

I can see this ruling being misused by many employers or ex-employers to find out who may be publishing defamatory writings about their company, I know of a couple of bloggers who have lost their jobs because they were found to be writing disparaging remarks about the workplace, but surely if their workplace was a good place to be employed then such remarks would be non-existent? Isn't critical commentary a way of finding new practices to improve on what at least one employee finds unacceptable to work with?  So rather than chase down the messenger, wouldn't it be more prudent to act upon the information to make the company better?

I can imagine that there would have to be stringent rules or even a regulatory body to oversee who could be revealed and who could remain anonymous, but at what point do you set your benchmark?  It's quite easy to decide whether a right-wing nutter should be made accountable for rousing the unintelligent, but like the case in the article, a man who was risking his job to reveal the inadequacies of an entrenched public sector monster with many secrets, where do you draw the line?

It will be interesting to hear your thoughts on this issue.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Space

My hard drive has been getting pretty full recently with one thing or another, so I decided earlier on to have a look around and see if there were any errant files that I don't need so I could free up some space.

What I didn't expect to find was 14GB of space. That's just over 10% of my hard drive going to waste.

I'm a bit silly when it comes to saving my files, I tend to just throw things in certain folders and forget about them in the intention of doing something about it later, which I never do.

Like my music collection for instance. When I bought this laptop I had to transfer all my tunes and videos from my iPod in a slightly naughty way, so I ended up having two copies of everything.  I did this three years ago, I never bothered to get rid of the duplicates.  Same thing happened with the photos.  I also noticed that iPhoto was storing all of those silly photos that you don't want to keep, usually the ones taken in dark pubs that haven't come out as you expected.  Trashing the cache there saved me nearly a gigabyte.  Quite mad really as my first computer only had a 500MB hard drive which I could manage quite easily, now I have a 120GB hard drive, I struggle!

I only did this because the lack of space cost me about an hours work today, Photoshop closed on me as I was finishing a little job for a school-friend of mine because the scratch disk was full.  I was slightly pissed off at the time because one part of the poster I was making was quite delicate and fiddly and took me some time to neaten up by hand drawing everything, needless to say I had to do it all again.  So the war was on to find more space and find it I did.

I have promised myself to be more astute with my file management from now on, but what I really need is an application that spots duplicates and removes them on a monthly basis, or something similar to that.  Anybody know of a free program that does such a thing?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Selling Stuff

As times are getting tighter I've put out the feelers to start selling some of my stuff.  My car is one of these items, a mate of mine is looking for a buyer apparently although I have yet to hear anything, but he's a trustworthy sort and he will get me the top dollar for it.

Today I received a phonecall from a prospective buyer for my fish tank.  Yeah I know, it was my pride and joy, but I can't warrant keeping something that needs a lot of money to look after, especially since the damn thing is probably worth a couple of grand.  I've looked after it for nearly four years and the little guys inside are closer to me than my family, but if I can raise about £600-700 for it, I will have to let it go.

Although it saddens me greatly that this is the way forward, I must look at the positive side of things.  It means I will have nothing holding me back so travelling will be easier plus I'll be able to look for work further afield.  

I've had to move the great big thing twice and both times it took an amazing amount of time and effort due to the size and complexity of carrying fifty gallons of salt water and the bulkiness of it, plus my landlord wasn't too impressed to see it in the flat when he came over to fix my faucets.

Can you see that I'm trying to persuade myself to sell?  hehe

Hell, it was only an initial phonecall, this person might not even want to buy it.  It isn't cheap and times are hard, it's not like it's an essential for daily life.

I need to de-clutter my life anyway. With the advent of e-books I no longer need to have hundreds of books and shelves.  I generally wear the same clothes most of the time so I should just throw out all the old stuff, I generally hold on to them because I might need them for any building work etc.  In fact looking around the place the only things I really use on a daily basis are my microwave, my laptop, camera and iPhone, I could live in a cave with all that and a car battery for all the difference it might make.

Anybody want to buy my life?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Patagonian Immigration

I read this little news story earlier and I thought I'd share.  It's a tale of a young Patagonian woman who wanted to visit  some family friends in Wales for six months to improve her Welsh language skills but as she landed in Heathrow she was deported as I assume she didn't have the right to be in the country.

Although, as I understand the immigration rules of the UK, anybody can visit the UK for up to six months as long as you have the funds to do so and that you don't contravene any of the immigration rules.  So I'm slightly at a loss as to why she was deported.  I find it a great shame for her as it would have been a great learning experience for her and the family who she was going to be staying with.

I'd be fuming if I was her, having paid for the plane ticket and organised everything, then flying for 35 hours only to be expelled from the country once she landed.  But I suppose there was nothing she could do.

I suspect a lot of people in Wales are up in arms about this as we still hold strong connections with Patagonia.  Personally I would love to visit this part of Argentina just to see how well I'd manage with the local dialect and how much of the Welsh culture they have retained since the exodus in 1865.  I can only imagine what it would be like as I assume that they have integrated a lot of the Argentine customs and language within their lives and one would assume that there has been a lot of changes over the generations.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Here Be Trolls

Look what I found on Vox!

Here Be Trolls

I guess someone wanted to do something about the problematic issue of idiots who blog here.  I think I'll make a submission myself, I think it might involve someone who we hold dear to our hearts but shall be unnamed at this particular juncture.

I think we all need to spread the word about this new blog, I have a feeling that it might become very popular.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Even More Ken Fun

I had a brief chat with Honeychild a couple of days ago and the subject of Our Ken came up.  It was decided that it was time to have a go and see if it was possible to really see the true colours of this sad little man's soul by thread-jacking one of her posts.  After an all too brief button pushing, I managed to get this reply.

• ken replied to KingOfAnkh’s comment:
• Yesterday
• Reply

so to make a long story short you enjoy being a little jackass,i took the post down because i saw myself trying to play a honorable game with a dishonorable guy.back down me? never!!you are a buffoon that needs a vaccume hose shoved up his backside just to suck the hot air out of you..and again like some people at vox you felt free to post at my blog and then like the little bitch you are ran back to your own feeble excuse of a blog and blocked any chance for a response.you are what used to be called a 'cunt' in just about every way you seem to be the poster boy for cuntness,your cunt like attitude is who you are.a welsh cunt,not to be mistaken for welsh rabbit,although they both need to be cooked well done

Now I'm not one to cast aspersions about anybody, I'll let you come to your own conclusions, but does this sound like a man who feels beaten?  Looks to me that he's having to resort to abuse when the situation has become too difficult for him to cope with.  Sad really, I hoped that he was stronger than this.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Dear Me!

It's a sad day for British politics, the BNP, a far-right fascist party have won two seats in Northern England and now have two MEP's who will represent Britain in Europe.  The thing is, this should never have happened.

You see, the UK uses a most unintelligible system for voting at local level. It's Mixed Member Proportional Representation system, I'd try to explain it to you, but I don't know exactly how it works and if someone like me doesn't, what chance do the rest of the population have?

The gist of the system revolves about fairness.  A voter has two votes, you vote for a party and you vote for a candidate. If a candidate wins both party and constituency seats they don't get two seats, rather they are struck off the party list and replaced by the next candidate down.  To make sure that parties with a minimal following don't make the grade there is a threshold of 5% that they must attain to be eligible.  This is how the BNP lost in 2000, they never made the grade but this year they managed between 8-9%, not because people were favouring smaller parties due to the recent scandals involving government, but because the public don't understand how their vote will be counted.

You see, a lot of the voting public haven't got the faintest idea what is going on. Many of them are used to the 'First Past The Post' system.  It's been in use worldwide since forever.  You cast your vote, if enough people think the same way, the person with most votes wins, sounds simple, after all the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. It's the core belief of Democracy and we would all lay down our lives to make sure that this is so.

But with MMPR the general public fail to realise that although the eventual winner of the seat will be picked by FPTP their secondary choice might be disregarded if you vote in a certain way.  For instance if you were a Labour supporter through-and-through and voted Labour as a party and voted for the Labour candidate and he/she subsequently won, one of your votes will be disregarded as this candidate can only have one seat.  The next candidate down then wins a seat.  This is meant to make for a more diverse result which is meant to reflect the overall proportion of votes so that both representatives will be able to work together to make a better world.

Personally I feel this has given extremists a foot in the door.  If people don't use their votes intelligently then their votes will be disregarded and lets face it, with the intelligence quotient of most Brits being only slightly higher than an amoeba, it was bound to happen.

So we are now in a Britain that has two radicalised idiots who can vote on our behalf.  Not only are they xenophobic racist bastards they will stop at nothing to demonise gays, single mothers, immigrants and progressive thinking.  This might have been easily dealt with at a local level, but in the European Parliament it's going to cause a lot of problems.  Okay, there's only two of them, but they can be vocal and they will use their voice to rouse the other right-wingers to further their own causes.

This is totally despicable but it seems that the people have voted, or have they?

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

How To?

I've had quite a lot of feedback from my Photoshopping album on Facebook and a few messages asking how do I do it, so I thought I'd do a quick run-through on how my latest Star Trek picture was made.  Unfortunately I don't have any intermediate shots of the work in progress, but I'll share what images I have. I'll assume you have a rudimentary knowledge of Photoshop tools and where the various options are in the menus.

Firstly you have to choose a good base picture, one that is easily editable and is large enough to keep in the details. I can only stress that the higher the resolution the better your result will be.  A lot of pictures might have nightmare elements to them, especially if you are a beginner, hair for example can be tricky to manipulate.  I always find it easier if my base picture is something I'm interested in too, for some reason it makes it psychologically easier to do the work, so being a Star Trek fan I chose the poster from the new movie.

The second and most critical step is taking the photo of your head.  This is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you are on your own.  For the most part I usually take head shots without a tripod and without using a timer as the resulting photograph looks a little better than one posed for ten seconds waiting for the flash to go off.  As you may realise you have to hold a pose that is as similar to the original picture as possible.  I normally have to take between 10/20 pictures to get the one that suits. Also make sure that the resolution is as high as you can manage on your camera as the more detail you have the easier it is to manipulate.

So here we have the base pictures and the final image..

Star Trek Poster

ST Head Shot

Me Trek

As you can see the head shot is relatively close to the original.  Your first job is to get the lasso tool and draw around your head to select it, then copy and paste it over to the base picture.  Don't worry about being too particular about selecting, a rough outline will do as you will fix the edges of your head later on.

At this stage all of the scale and rotation is incorrect so that is the first thing you need to sort out.  I usually use the distance of the eyes as a guide as to the scale of the head, if your eyes match the width of the base subjects eyes then you are pretty close.

At this point you could run into some trouble with parts of the base picture showing underneath your face, don't worry, we can fix all of this later on.

I have found that most people will not see certain things in a picture unless they look for it, for instance if you look closely at my finished picture you will find that the arms of my glasses disappear into nothingness and never make it to the ears, I could have fixed this but it would have taken a lot of time and effort for something that nobody would really notice, so unless you are a Photoshop guru, there's not much point in being that anal about it.

Now once you have your scale sorted out and you have rotated the head shot so that everything is in place, you need to erase all of the erroneous elements from around your face.  I generally use a largish brush set on soft.  I also have a graphics tablet and a pen which makes this task so much easier.  A real Photoshop artist would do this with all kinds of selecting paths and feathering, I just erase what I don't want. With a little care and attention you can get reasonable results. I usually use the eyebrows and jawline as my guide here as people will not notice the join between the two layers as easily.  Once you are happy with your result, it's now time to blend both layers together.

As you can see from my head shot, the colours are very different to the poster.  There are several ways around this, I used Curves to get the balance of the shades right and I used Hue/Saturation to get the colours correct.  This is a fiddly process and it's worth taking your time over it.  If this is done sloppily it's easy to tell that you've stuck someone elses head on another picture.  You may need to adjust the contrast as well so everything matches.  Once you have a reasonable colour scheme all you may need to do is make sure the blending is unnoticeable.  I like to use the Burn tool to do this, you may also need to use the Dodge tool to lighten some areas.  Try not to use the cloning tool or the smudge tool as these are very noticeable if used incorrectly and can leave a dirty look to some areas of your image.

It's hard to explain everything to you without step by step pictures, but I hope this gives you some insight into how this simple image manipulation is done.  The easiest way is to have a go yourself, feel free to use my head shot and have a play. If you have any problems give me a shout and I'll see where you might need some guidance.

Above all, remember that it should be done for fun, so if you find such things boring or a chore, perhaps you should take up knitting instead.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Trek ‘shopped

Me Trek

In a mirror universe somewhere, this really happened….

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Further Ken Fun

So, it seems one of my posts has rattled a certain individual and he decided to try and copy me by posting a mildly amusing rhetoric of his own, as per usual he hasn't done his homework.  I know a lot of you don't want to visit his pitiful excuse of a blog, so I'll reprint his grandiloquence here.  Please be aware that all the mistakes are his…

THE KING OF WALES OR ANKH

• Jun 7, 2009 at 12:00 AM
• Post a comment
• Share

damm i hate liars and theifs,and the people of wales are both of these,along time ago in a land not so far away a kindly people came accross a people that had been kicked out of their own country for crimes against nature, they wandered the world looking for a new home, a new begining and these kindly people took them at their word and gave them a place to settle down and feel safe,the only thing the kindly people asked is that they would help to protect the land and remember who had saved them from a certain death.for many years this was a good arrangment ,and the kindly people were thanked for their genorosity.then as the years went on they saw that their neighbors were making demands of these kindly people,i believe they call themselves the irish,the scots,the picts and other wandering tribes.and they saw that their traiterous and forgetful attitudes were not punished but instead they were given the land they had been intrusted with to call there own,and called this freedom from a overbearing lord.but still the welsh said they would not betray the people who had given so much that they alone would keep their word to these kindly people who had been stewards of this land since before the last ice age.but they saw how much these false people enjoyed their false freedom and soon they decided that they would betray their oath and also demand their freedom from these kindly people,and so it came to pass that they broke their oath and the kindly people renamed them welcher's and it came to be known all through the world that these oath breakers were never to be trusted,for unlike the irish,the scot's and the picts they had sworn a  to always be grateful to the people who had saved their lives and to never betray them no matter what temptations were put before them…so be careful the next time you talk to a man from wales for they have no honor and their word isn't worth SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I really have no idea what he's going on about, I think he's trying to liken Wales to the Israelites, which is as far from the truth as is maddeningly possible.  If Our Ken had bothered to even take a minute or two just to look up any part of the history of my nation he would have found out that Wales and the Welsh people are among the oldest nations in Europe, the Welsh can trace their peoples as far back as 29,000 years, well into the Prehistoric era.  Our language as it stands now is based on the older language of Brythonic, developed around 500AD, which is mainly thought to have been a bastardisation of Roman Latin and indigenous languages of the area.  As an example, I as a fluent Welsh speaker for instance can understand Cornish and Breton, I have yet to hear anyone speak Cumbric or Pictish and I have not spoken to anyone from Patagonia, but I'm assured that I should be able to understand them as well.

I think what Our Ken has failed to take note of is that the Welsh were here before the Romans and/or Vikings invaded Britain, there is also strong evidence that the Irish and the Welsh were once of the same peoples and that over the millennia the geological shift of the tectonic plates has separated them.  For those of you who know of our folklore, Y Mabinogion, there is a story about a giant of a man being able to walk between Ireland and Wales, which suggests that the water was much shallower in times gone by.  Irish folklore also has similar tales.  The fact that we share so many traits, language, folk stories, place names etc. strongly suggests that the Celtic people of Britain were one nation and only after the Roman invasion of these isles did the eventual break up of the Celtic nation begin.

The Welsh have always been at odds with many invaders, in fact many of us still hold grudges against the Anglo-Saxons, a feud that has been running for centuries and is only now being resolved by allowing our nation to govern itself.  Over the last couple of generations the Welsh have bounced back stronger and there are around 2.5 million Welsh speakers in Wales alone, throughout Britain there is a further estimated 500,000, 10% of those in London.

Now back to the allegation that Welsh people are liars and thieves.  I don't think that the Welsh are any more untrustworthy than any other nation nor do they go out of their way to steal anything, let alone 8,000 sq miles of land which they have been living on for thousands of years.  

If the allegation is aimed at myself then I'd like to give Our Ken some assurances.  I try my best never to lie, I'm simply not intelligent enough to remember them and I hate being caught out, very much like Our Ken is being caught out each time he writes something. It's humiliating to find that you are misinformed, but I have always thought that it's disgraceful to be found to be lying about an issue that you know nothing about.

Stealing, I think everyone has stolen something, be it a grape from a greengrocer to a few pens from the office.  I think I'm guilty as charged there.  However, I have never stolen anything of real value, I simply couldn't live with the guilt, I like sleeping at nights, something I wouldn't be able to do if my conscience kept berating me.

And for the record, I don't believe I made an oath of any kind to break, to Our Ken or anybody else.  I am a man of my word, ask anybody.  So if my word is worth shit, then it would have to be a royal shit and worthy of the golden throne of majesty.  My shit would smell of roses, most likely be gold plated and lets face it Our Ken, it's worth a damn sight more than yours.  Nobody has had the benefaction to start a group in my name though, so I will bow down to you in that respect.

The gauntlet has now been dropped at your court Ken, try your best this time….

Read and post comments | Send to a friend