I can just hear the chu-chu-CHUK of those old carbon-copy machines.

MMmmm…… Saaaaallllsssaaa……….

I wonder who’s lucky enough to be a SPAM taste-tester for Hormel.

Corporate executive accountability

It kills me that CEO’s can totally screw up their company and still get their golden parachute. Just yesterday I read an article about a Countrywide exec who’s getting a multi-million-dollar perk while the firm is chaos due to poor lending policies. I’m no Adam Smith scholar, but I think he’d be turning over in his grave if he knew. From what I understand, Smith approved of the possibility of great reward for those who took great personal risk. The “Hey, screw us over and we’ll still give you a bonus,” policies upheld by corporate boards remove that element of risk and encourage power players to mismanage their respective institutions.

Quick aside: Even pirate captains normally only took a double share of the loot. Granted, the men and women at the top of huge corporations know way more about business than I’ll ever learn. But still, I kinda’ doubt that–based on comparative salaries– the typical CEO is a million times more intelligent or productive than the front-line customer service operator taking flak from dissatisfied clients all day.

“Sweded” version of Die Hard

Loved it! My favorite trick’s at the end. Check it out!

Animal talk

We know that animals communicate with each other. At least animals of the same species. But I wonder how complex or how abstract those ideas can be. Like, can one nesting partner somehow tell another, “Hey, we’ve really got to move the nest.”?

Do some animals have the capacity for concepts that are on a higher level than their physical ability to relate those thoughts? Apes who have been taught sign language seem to have some pretty high-order ideas. But can apes still communicate their most abstract thoughts to other apes without using sign?

A productivity hack I actually like!

See the (10+2)*5 hack from 43 Folders.

LifeClever’s Chanpory Rith has an interesting thought. No, the author doesn’t really think it’s this easy. But it’s a neat idea to help get would-be designers on track. Click the image for more info.

Healthy, fresh lunch. Yum!

Photoshop actions overused?

I was playing around yesterday with a photo I had to take for work. We don’t do enough photo processing to justify the expense of Photoshop. So I usually rely on a combination of Gimp and Picasa to do my editing. The photo I took was very “on the fly”. ‘Course, that’s a nice way of saying I didn’t put much thought into it. As a result, it came out very plain and boring. So I was playing around with lighting effects, etc. to try and make up (somewhat) for poor quality of the original pic.

Then it occurred to me. The results I was getting are pretty much like a lot of photos I’ve seen that are *obviously* Photoshopped. Often, the base photo itself isn’t very interesting at all. It’s just the saturation changes, blurs, curve adjustments that make the photo stand out.

This isn’t to say that I’m above cheap tricks to make a photo look nice. But if I’m going to use .atn’s, I’ll try and do so with the full knowledge of, “Yeah, my photo kinda’ sucked to begin with,” and try harder next time to grab a decent pic.