Month: April 2005

John Naughton on Photoshop

John Naughton writes excellently every week for the Observer newspaper. Here is his article from last weekend, which focussed on a Tory party candidate’s use of Photoshop on a campaign photo. He explains issues and techniques in a very clear and transparent way:

Ed Matts is the Tory candidate for Dorset South, a bucolic paradise with possibly more dairy cows than voters. Until last week, he was deservedly obscure. Now he is a global celebrity – and all because of a piece of software called Photoshop.
Photoshop, for those unfamiliar with such things, is a wonderful program for manipulating digital images. It is used by graphic artists everywhere. I doubt that there is a web designer alive who does not have a version of it on his or her computer.

Millions of digital camera users have been given a cut-down version when they bought their cameras. They can use it to touch up their photographs, eliminate the ‘red-eye’ effect caused by flash and generally tidy things up. If you have inadvertently snapped Aunt Ethel with a telegraph pole apparently growing out of her head, a few minutes with Photoshop will see you right.

Election 2005 Blogs

There are quite a few blogs popping up about the UK election on May 5. Many of them are used by news organisations to present more informal content. Here are a couple of links to the ones I look at.

Anyone read any others?

edit: Sitting as I do quite close to Democratic Services at the Council, there is a great deal of hustle and bustle to do with organising the election.

I reckon it will be a Labour victory with a majority of 60 odd seats.

Council sells abandoned cars on eBay

From The Guardian:

A council has come up with a new way of disposing of abandoned cars – selling them on the internet.
Westminster city council has auctioned a Range Rover on the UK online marketplace, eBay, with the vehicle fetching £6,600. It is now offering a 1962 Rover P5 which was owned by European aristocrat Countess Renee de Vismes and which has been in a car park for six years following her death.

“The countess’s son who lives in New York did not want the car so we have put it up for auction on eBay,” said a spokeswoman for the council.

She added: “We get a lot of cars left in car parks and we have now decided to see if internet auctioning is the best approach.

“We always try to track down the owners of these abandoned vehicles, but sometimes we are not successful.”

Around 200 cars are abandoned in London each day and the capital accounts for 40% of abandoned cars nationally.

E.E. Cummings

Fascinating article in Saturday’s Guardian about the poet E.E. Cummings:

EE Cummings became one of America’s most popular poets. But as a struggling young writer and artist, he was supported by a wealthy friend and soon found himself drawn to his patron’s wife. Their tangled relationship was to end in tragedy, reveals biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

Palimpsest

Palimpsest is the (mainly) books discussion site I founded with my friend Al Kitching a couple of years ago.

Essentially a phpBB forum, it now has around 30 regular members and over 15,000 posts. We don’t delete any, the forum acting as a repository for reviews and thoughts on books and things.

It costs a fair bit to run, however, and so we have decided to put into place a donation scheme, where members can contribute towards the running costs of the site. A recommendation of £5 per year was made. Fortunately, this has ben met with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it might mean that more can be done with the site.

One of the things I am interested in doing is converting the site to a new forum system. The one I am looking at is VBulletin – a paid service which costs $80 a year, which in real money is about £45-50. This includes all upgrades, of course. Part of the reason for this is that due to the popularity of phpBB, all sorts of ne’er-do-wells are targetting these sites and either spamming them or clogging up the sessions on the database so that no-one else can access the site. Using a more robust system, like VBulletin will mean that these problems will be no more.

What I have to do, and do right, will be importing the phpBB stuff into the new forum. I think people will be generally pretty upset if any of the previous posts got lost.

I also need to have a clear out of the server. There’s piles of crap in there which probably really doesn’t need to be.

Gah. So much to do, so little time…

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