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Lazy Saturday afternoon, so what did I do. Well, I finally solved my Rubik’s Cube.

Ok, so I had a little help from this guy, but I still solved it.

I can’t stand insurance companies. They are all a bunch of crooks. For the last couple of months my wife has been having allergy problems. She has taking all kinds of stuff including Claritin and nothing seemed to work. Then her doctor gave her a sample of Zyertec and it cleared up in a week. So since she found something that worked she got a prescription for it. Of course insurance won’t cover it. You pay and pay into insurance companies for noting, but when you actually need it do you think they would pay out? No way! They want you to keep using the stuff that doesn’t work. Probably trying to by some time until winter when the allergies would go away. What a joke.

I don’t believe that a person can be either a morning person or a night person. I think everybody can be a morning person if they want to be. It’s all about getting into a routine. WIth my work schedule I switch from working nights to working days every month. I am working days now, so I am up at 4:30 every morning. Some mornings I sleep in until 5:00, but I am always up by 5:30. I enjoy getting up with a cup of coffee and the internets, and I found it much easier to get up on the days I have to work if it’s my normal time to get up anyways. They when I switch to the night shift, I say up until 6:00 AM every night. I stay up late with my coffee and internet just like I am getting up early with it now. I keep the same routines and just switch back and forth between them.

Last week I saw a link on Lifehacker to a site that has 15 tips on waking up early.

1. Have a good reason to get up.
2. Be productive in the mornings.
3. Get enough sleep.
4. Go to bed earlier.
5. Sleep more effectively.
6. No more another 10 mins.
7. Jump out of bed.
8. Use an alarm clock, just not the snooze.
9. Establish a stable routine.
10. Have something to look forward to.
11. Be aware of the consequences.
12. Remove the option completely.
13. Have a similarly motivated buddy.
14. Keep track of your times.
15. Review all the things you got done.

I agree with all of them, and use most of them. Now you have no reason to hate getting up early. Go check out the site for more explanations.

Ok, I saw this on three blog posts in a row as I was reading my feeds. I thought it was hilarious, so here it is again:

Big ass table. lol.

Ok, maybe it’s only funny for people that have been on Second Life.

Last night they had the stupidest myth on Mythbusters. They were trying to see if your tongue really sticks to a cold metal pole. WTF? Hasn’t this happened to everybody as a kid? Guess what? Your wet fingers also stick to cold metal. It happens to me every winter. I learned my lesson when I was a kid to keep my tongue off of cold metal in the winter though.

Here in Fargo we have a 10 commandments monument in front of our city hall. For the past three years there has been a big debate about it. The other day our city commissioners voted to have it moved to private land. I thought that was a great idea. All the monument supporters are all up in arms now. They are all wondering what is so offensive about the monument. They don’t really get it. It’s not that the monument is offensive, it’s that it is just inappropriate. It doesn’t belong on public property. I am not a fan of religion, but what other people do and believe is none of my business. Having the 10 commandments monument on public property to me is kind of disgraceful. I always try to be respectful to the people around me. Having a monument on public property where people walk past and then realize their beliefs aren’t the same as the majority isn’t right. I am an Atheist and from time to time I have to go to church for family events. I try to be as respectful of others beliefs as I would hope they would be of mine. I don’t wear a hat in church. I stand when they tell me to stand. I sit when they tell me to sit, and I pretend to pray when they pray. I think moving the monument to private property would be the respectful thing to do.

There was a big debate about this at work today. Everybody thinks it is stupid to move it. I just bit my lip and didn’t say anything. I hate being the only person on one side of an argument. I guess I don’t understand how people can’t see the issue from both sides. It’s not that I am against religion. Although I think an Atheist monument would be cool, I would be against one on public property also. It’s just not the right place.

I have yet to understand social networks. I was on MySpace very briefly just to check it out. I didn’t get the point, and the sites were fugly as hell. None of my offline friends were on it, and if I wanted to keep up on my online friends they all have blog anyways. MySpace is good for one thing. It is good for Bands. I am subscribed to many many MySpace blog feeds from bands I like. I get updates on what they are up too, and I can check out new songs as they put them on MySpace.

Today I gave Facebook a second look, and I still don’t get it. Facebook just seems like an unfugly MySpace. I couldn’t find any of my offline friends on it, and why do I need a site to collect my online friends on?

Twitter on the other had I got right away. It is a simple way to find out what people are up too. I keep Twitterrific running all the time and enjoy everybody’s updates.

I spent most of the day yesterday working on the wedding pictures I took Friday night. I had a lot of cropping and red eye removal to do. I am no Photoshop expert, but I can usually get what I need done eventually with time. Redeye removal can be tricky. There are a bunch of ways to remove redeye, many of them are very complex. The redeye removal tool built into photoshop doesn’t work very well. It works well in extreme redeye cases, but many time there is just a slight redeye.

Here is my three step process that works every time:

1. Zoom in on the eyes.
2. Use the magic wand tool to select the red areas of the eye. You may have to adjusted the tolerance to make sure you are only selecting the red areas.

3. Create a new adjustment layer. Go to Layer/New Adjustment/Channel Mixer. That will bring up your Channel Mixer. The Output Channel should be set on red. Then it is just a matter up adjusting the Red, Green, and Blue sliders until you get your desired look. For my pictures I just had to lower the Red and add some Green. It my not look realistic when you are zoomed in, but if you zoom back out you will see the magic has been done.

Whew, the weekend is over. I am glad I still have two more days off.
My wife’s cousin got married this past weekend. Since we live in the same town, and actually only a mile from the reception site, we had a house full of people and helped out quite a bit with things.

We helped decorate the church and reception hall. Then their photographer backed out. They were trying to save money by having a friend shoot the pictures, but then something came up and their friend couldn’t make it. So then I ended up being the photographer too.

I wish I had a better camera. I just have a couple year old Canon point and shoot, but the pictures turned out pretty good. I was actually surprised how good they turned out. My wife was great at putting everybody in their poses, and then I just snapped away. I took 253 pictures. I knew if I took a shit-ton of pictures, some of them would turn out alright. I was then able to make a quick slideshow for then next morning when they were opening gifts. I brought my laptop and everybody was able to view the pictures, and I had a few extra CDs to give to the parents and grandparents to make prints.

Now today my project is to make a DVD slideshows for people. That’s the bad part about being a geek. I get put to work all the time. I don’t mind dealing with these pictures. I am happy to do it and I actually enjoy it. It’s much better than my usual job of cleaning viruses and spyware off of computers.