This page features every post I write, and is dedicated to Andrew Ho.
I applied techniques covered in the Gimp Selective Colorization Tutorial. The green in the foreground is as captured by the camera, but the rest was run through Colors > Auto > Equalize and then I tweaked the curves a bit to get more dramatic colors on the sky.
The original thing that caught my eye, of course, being the workmen updating the sign.
You never forget your first computer. For Christmas of 1984, Grandpa gave us a Commodore 64. A couple years later we got a disk drive, and eventually we even had a printer. Before the disk drive we had to buy programs on cartridge, or type them in to the basic interpreter line by line. Mostly I just played cartridge games. Eventually we got a modem, and I could talk to BBSes at 300 baud in 40 glorious columns. (Most BBSes assumed 80-columns.) I was happier when I got a 1200 baud modem for my Amiga, which could display 80 columns of text. In my second year of college I discovered the joy of C programming on Unix workstations, which led to my present career as a Unix SysAdmin. I spend my days juggling multiple windows of text, generally at least 80x24. /djh
After reading about the brand new Commodore 64, I downloaded a font from style64.org and played around in my style sheet:
**** COMMODORE 64 BASIC V2 ****
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
READY.
Here is the stylesheet markup:
/* C= 64 */ @font-face { font-family: "C64_User_Mono"; src: url("C64_User_Mono_v1.0-STYLE.ttf") format("truetype"); } DIV.c64_screen { background-color: #75a1ec; color: #4137cd; min-height: 25ex; width: 40em; padding: 3ex 6em; margin: 0; } .c64 { font-family: "C64_User_Mono", monospace; background-color: #4137cd; color: #75a1ec; }
The text is wrapped in:
<div class=”c64_screen”><pre class=”c64″>
</pre></div>
Sheer Thin
B.L.A.C.K S.T.U.D.D.E.D
C O N D O M
STUDDED TEXTURED SURFACE
TO ENHANCE SENSATION
WITH THE MYSTIC OF
BLACK
1 PREMIUM LUBRICATED LATEX CONDOM
I was on my way home and saw these guys outside the Mountain View Post Office. I looked at the Obama-with-a-Hitler-moustache and figured the Tea Party had set up shop. I snapped a picture, and then this guy asked if I was worried about the solar flares.
Solar flares? Tea Party people don’t worry about solar flares . . . I smiled and approached: these guys were doing performance art! I told them solar flares are good for cooking.
“Obama isn’t doing anything to stop the solar flares,” he began to explain.
I saw the name LaRouche and realized these guys weren’t parodying the Tea Party: they were actually way further down the rabbit hole of crazy. “Well, he likes solar power,” I punted.
As the guy began to explain that we should be performing nuclear fusion ourselves I edged away. I am an impressionable young man with a sufficiently unconventional belief system: I don’t want to catch their crazy!
As I was walking home from the cafe I encountered a growing crowd of shouting, chanting, singing folks waving Indian flags. I googled “Indian Holidays” on my smart phone, then thought to google “India cricket” and it turns out India has just beaten Sri Lanka to win the World Cup.
In my Sophomore year of college I was paired with a roommate from India. Tarun was a very serious EE major who left the room for only three things: 1) classes, 2) meals and 3) the India-Pakistan cricket match. He was a nice guy but since he was always studying in the room he wasn’t an ideal roommate.
Indian ex-pats I meet tend to be really serious, smart, hard-working people, so it is nice to see a crowd of folks reveling in a collective emotional experience. This is a great moment for anyone who has moved so far from home to make their life.
See Also: Indian Spinning Wheel.