Hi,
I am looking for a forum where photographers hang out and discuss techniques. I am particularly interested in one that gives out monthly assignments or topics of research so I can read and participate in. Is there such a place?
Hi,
I am looking for a forum where photographers hang out and discuss techniques. I am particularly interested in one that gives out monthly assignments or topics of research so I can read and participate in. Is there such a place?
I know that blogging will create these type of confrontation eventually, but actually going through the ordeal sucks.
To put things in perspective, I wrote a bad review on a prestigious restaurant here. And a furious long time customer of the restaurant decided to contact my current employer about the review. Long story short, the whole Marketing department is then made aware of this and I had to spend approximately half a day with them to clear things up. It is a personal site and does not express the opinion of my employer, yet the person persisted with contacting them directly. Needless to say, I am just caught in the middle wondering "WTF" (A bit of a history. I negligently forgot to erase one our company logo from one of the pictures because I was focusing on making the food look good)
It has been dealt with and I hope the person doesn't raise any other waves, but it made me wonder. How do other bloggers deal with this?
The question came up on which tool to use for linux GUI development. So I figured I'd ask 9 rules in hope that there are some linux people lurking around.
So far, I've looked into QT, GTK WxWorks. They each have their pros and cons, but what I worry most is in popularity in the installed base. I want to use a took kit that others also understand so it can be easily passed on to the next programmer for development for whatever reason.
What do you use?
Since October 2007, I've begun a series of tweaks to my life that streamlined and reduced my spending on several front. I looked at my bills and started with the biggest spending that I can do something about. The idea is to optimize without affecting the comfort of living.
I've since reduced my monthly spending as follows:
Gas from $145 down to $93 (Timing pump price drops, optimized route)
Electricity from $198 to $120 (Shorter more efficient showers, reduced temperature in rooms I am not using, hang dry cloths instead of using dryer)
Groceries from $311 to $282 (Going natural)
I can't, for the life of me do much about the groceries no matter how hard I try. What are some of your monthly spendings and have you been able to reduce the grocery bill at all? What have you done to adjust to the possible recession?
darkmotion: Thanks for that suggestion. I didn't know that space balance can have effects like that. Will try it during the next design phase
dbme: The design was done about a year ago and it was never released because I was still grappling with organization and navigation. Aside from the layout, V2 is mainly focused on friendly navigation for readers. And thank you for noticing the modernism I thought I totally flopped on conveying that feeling.
taylor: I think Bauhaus design suits me better. Kandinsky is too chaotic for me. I'd say I want about 80% Bauhaus and 20% Kandinsky. I can only find architecture design pictures from Bauhaus style though. Do you have any images or links to images based on that style?
Yeah, I pretty much got phobias for all sort of communication because of my job. There was a time where I get yelled and swore at at least 5 times a day whether in email or phone.
My work blocks all forms of internet communication except email and even then, attachments are filtered out.
Due to the nature of our own corporate spam filter, I often get misdirect emails as well as having client's email end up being in the junk filter. If I have to count, it'll be 1 missed email per 1000 real emails received.
Junk email to real email ratio is around 1:1.
Our solution? We get on a conference call at a specific time of every week with the important clients and at the end of the call, ask them whether or not they received certain important emails we sent. Vice versa from their side.
Sure it's low tech, sure it's been done to death, but it's the only way to make sure.
Hi I am Causa, I've been known as Causalien online since 1996
I am 27, single, male and I was born in between Gemini and Cancer (as in, contraction around midnight and pop out around 1AM, unfortunately, no one had a stop watch with them to get a more accurate time). In Asia, I am a Metal Monkey.
I write a personal blog: Ultracrepidate and help maintain/host two of my friend's blog. One about food: 9to5ers and one about the art of luck and Feng Shui here.
Trades:
I am an embedded/intergrated/vision systems Engineer by trade
I am a part time Ballroom dance competitor/showman for hire
I trade stocks for the adrenaline rush and emotional roller coaster
Hobbies:
I cook gourmet meals to impress girls
I bake bread to reduce groceries cost
I try to do some newbie hacks to better understand computers, but these are more in the hardware department.
Sports:
Running, swimming, biking, your typical wanna-be iron man stuff.
Only reached orange belt in Jujitsu.
Citizenship:
Currently Canadian, but has two others declared abroad for now.
I guess that about sums it up. I am surprised that I can be described pretty well like this.
I use anchoring in addition to something similar to psychological training. To reduce the emotional impacts of possible setbacks (when it does happen) so that it is easier to pick myself up and get right back into the game. I am not really sure of the benefits of going through the positives outcomes and dissecting my own strengths in order to get out of the glut. It feels ignorant to deny the reality of the fact that I suffered a blow or I am injured.
Anchoring is placed as a last resort shortcut, unexpected events or stressful situations.
Geeks only.
I deal with real time systems daily so my favorite is C, perl and verilog.
If I must choose a web2.0 language, then it will have to be PHP.
I usually don't realize that something is a goal until I've achieved them. So I will attempt to list what I think I am trying to achieve by interpreting what I am already participating in.
1. Work as a chef
2. Work as a baker
3. Engineer a product that receives public acceptance
4. Live in Australia
5. Live in Europe
6. Live in Africa
7. Live in South America
8. Live in Russia
9. Become a millionaire
10. Win gold in a north america open amateur dancesport competition
11. Startup my own company
12. Work as a Janitor.
My bank account number, cat, my glasses and my pet sourdough starter.
You can actually see the red fading in after a rip.... on to the chest!
trevorlee_nc : Yeah I agree. I thought it might just be me who's seeing the optical illusion.
Pjotter : Haha, now I see... but that is everywhere!!! Could it be the reason why it projects seriousness as well?
matehat : Thanks, these sounds very reasonable.
What I learned from this that didn't even cross my mind before:
- Imbalances with spaces
Overall, there are a few comments that echoed some of my suspicions during design time, but since I never received formal training, it didn't really get attention. This is great.
Taken during a ballroom dancing competition
http://twitter.com//causalien
From a business stand point. If I am the ISP, I'd rather not take the risk and use the clearly defined: No boobs, no genitals rule. The risk of getting sued for millions out-weights the benefit of a few more clients that uses the hosting.
Now, to the actual debate of whether or not it is pornographic. I think it is not up to us to decide. Whoever views the art will interpret it the way they want. Have you wondered why people get arrest for humping nude statues in the park? While you don't think it's erotic, it certainly is at that time, for that person who humped the statue.
Hi frshbook,
It's definitely new and stands out from the normal 2D feels of webpages. It'll definitely encourage new visitors to at least click on a few books to see what happens.
However, I find that some navigation aid is required since this is a novel design. For example, it took me a few seconds to figure out how to zoom back out after I clicked on a book. The icon isn't very intuitive because it looks like the refresh icon of firefox and actually opens up the book instead.
Another annoyance is that if yo have links (The one that's supposed to be at the top left corner?) in other parts of the page the book case gets tilted too much for readers to see some of the books in the opposite corner. Maybe a border around this where the tilting effect will go back to neutral if the mouse moves outside?
This might be a bug. In firefox, I am not able to click on the other tabs once I opened up your page.
If the flash animation doesn't take too long to load, I'd say go for it.
I see, you guys confirmed my own suspicion. The gray theme is in general, depressive.
Oli: Your reason for why the content should be high contrast really hit me. Thinking back, I did put more emphasis on the related posts during design and it unconsciously comes out as the highlight. I will have to reconsider if I want to put focus on the content or the different attractive titles that exists.
tervor: It has come to my attention that my monitor (Dell 2005FPW) overall is brighter than normal when I checked my site from work. So it probably explains why I don't get the same distractiion as you. Does the white line distract you from reading the content? Or is it physically uncomfortable to the eye?
Pjotter: Can you extrapolate on how it reminded you of a church site? It is important because it was the last thing on my mind when I designed it.
Thanks for all the great inputs so far. Wish me luck on the colored layout on version III
I believe that it will be a cell phone based internet. Or it could end up like the current traditional media. A few companies output the content from around the world to users.
We are already seeing some signs of this, where RSS feeds are aggregated together for a specific topic... say cooking. It won't take long until targeted ad serving as well as improvements in content suggestion algorithm mature to combine with RSS feeds.
It'll end up being targeted RSS feeds to each users based on their life and web browsing histories. Since it's hard for two people in a garage to take this to maturity due to bandwidth and web crawler research, I think the big media are going to end up controlling the few well made outlets.
Hi everyone,
I just put in a lot of effort into the new layout. I would appreciate those of you experienced in web design take a look and do some constructive cricitism. Let me know what you like, what you don't like and why you don't like them. Thanks for helping me out.
Link
UltraCrepidate
Hi,
I've been reading blogs that reveal secrets of trades and started wondering about the effect that this will have on business. Do you read these type of blogs and apply their knowledge to your life? What do you think will happen when a once high margin sector suddenly come face to face with a consumer base that demand the margins to be reduced to what some information website says.
If you have a business yourself, have you encountered these type of consumers?
Causalien
I prefer acting the image of the person you want to become.
The question has be rephrased as requested to reflect the right question. My wordings are extreme and I agree. I apologize for the offense. My native language tend to be very direct and doesn't have politically correct way to convey every offensive word.
As some of you have raised the question. I used IQ as a measure because that's the only thing measurable in human. Thus giving a possibility to show a statistical trend.
@Peroty, so do you think it's only a matter of hard working? I've contributed to other discussions before and I don't mean for this to be firestorm material. If you know of some other forum I can go and ask this type of question in hopes for a logical dissection of the question, please let me know.
@Ozone: That makes sense to me too. Which is why I suggested the immigrant study. So we can control for the possibility of lifestyle and genes.
@Jessalyn: I agree and they didn't have air conditioning back then. Makes you wonder if there's a constant supply of ice to the room of the architect who designed it.
The words matter only because it shows how much the person I am communicating with is different from me. Being multilingual, I understand that what might be a "dumb" person in english is actually a phD professor at some foreign university. Yet even if I know this, I still felt that the person is stupid.
Overtime, my conscious was able to override that emotion, but I still feel it.
What I didn't understand back then, is that language is used to communicate. A good conversationalist is someone who can understand the way the language needs to be used for the other to understand.
A good example is when the VP of an American company tried to convey, with very proper English, a message to an R&D manager at a foreign country and failed consistently. While another person who understood the culture used simpler English words and drawings was met with success.
Is the R&D manager dumb? Dude, he's in R&D. Is the VP dumb? He can probably buy a Corvette every day and still have more money than you. Is that other person dumb? She's just an accountant.
I've been warming up to this eventual question slowly with two previous questions, seeing, how the north American culture are sensitive to these type of accusations. First with the simple every day query of Can you work without AC, then on to Effect of temperature on human intelligence.
Now I would like to bring this to the original query: Are people dumber in the tropical countries? I, by no means have any concrete answer, but here's my take.
PUBLIC CONSENSUS:
By feeling and past experiences. People generally feel that they perform better in colder weather and that the heat makes us more sleepy. Some suggest that in extreme cases of cold and heat, both are detrimental to proper decision making. What needs to be done to actually prove this, is to have IQ tests done in rooms that are only 15 degress off from the medium comfort temperature.
COUNTRIES:
If cold proves to facilitate intelligence, then the colder countries in the world should be leading in technological improvements and IQ testings. But looking at performances in different countries, the results are inconsistent. China and India are two examples of societies with High IQ that defies the heat = dumber debate. At the same time, the Eskimos living at the north most part of Canada, are still using primitive technologies.
CONTROLLED STUDY IDEA:
Using children of immigrants 5~6 years of age. Perform experiments on learning with 3 control groups at different temperature. Thus taking into account genetics while eliminating the potential for inconsistent results due to differences in education background.
Any thoughts, suggestions? corrections?
I am skeptical about the fact that cold is better than heat. Through my triphasic sleep experiment and reading researches on sleep. I found one striking fact and that is. Cold makes people sleepy. What's the threshold you have to cross to induce the sleepy effect? I don't have the specifics, but I think most of us say we work better in cold because we are usually wrapped in layers of cloth.
What if you are half naked, can everyone still claim the same?
Kamigoroshi:
Can you remember any specific info about that research which will eventually link to the data? Logically speaking, deviation from the average body temperature, whether hot or cold, will affect intelligence, but people's experience here is disagreeing with that.
Following my previous query. I got to ask myself. Are human smarter when it is cooler or when it is hotter than the comfortable 25 degree celcius?
What do you think? My personal observation on my own life is that colder weather tend to facilitate the mind while numbing the body while the reverse is true for hotter weather.
----Edit-----
Forgive me for posting in the wrong community.
Thanks all. I will have to try out both. Now that the electricity bill is purely mine, I can monitor the cost.
Scrivs: Even though I can't work on the computer. There are options of working on other projects that involves physical labor. I can always leave the computer work till the god awful winter with -40 degrees.
At least, I know now that people can come home from work and not veg on the couch.
I was debating the pros and cons of not having an AC and decided to ask how everyone fare without it?
As we stand now. I am sitting here in my chair half naked and still sweating like a pig. The humidity and the heat is mind boggling enough that I can't motivate myself enough to do any work on a computer.
Which in turn forces me to be outside enjoying sports. This was ok for a while until I acquired some property recently. Now that I have to buy everything, the decision of whether or not I should get an air conditioner comes into play again.
For those of you who've been through both lifestyles does AC equals more productivity? Or are we doomed to procrastinate the moment we enter the door of our house? More specifically, what's the energy saving vs opportunity cost of not finishing personal projects.
Auburn, you can never be too careful with your money. (Except when you are sick)
The reason I want more money is so that I can have a peace of mind not worrying about whether I have enough to eat. My motivation is to have less worry. So if keeping the money generates more worry, then that defeats the purpose.
A way to reduce that stress is to have it in several markets and with different financial institutions. It's harder to track, but that's what excel spread sheets are for.
The concept of alone is just that. A concept.
» How to handle online people who wants to make your life miserable ... Last Reply: 5 months ago by Tyme.
Thank you Tyme for the advices. Much appreciated.
Scrivs, my lifestyle leads me to ignore these most of the time until there are actions to be taken like them contacting my work. It seems like I will not be let off the hook that easily though.
Today I just tracked a suspicious traffic spike to a law firm in Ontario who got referred to my site by email. I feel some roller coaster ride coming up.