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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.

Global warming is one of those topics that is very controversial. One side says humans are destroying the word and are a major cause and catastrophe in eminent. The other side says what us humans are doing has little to do with global warming and it’s all natural.

I have always stood somewhere in the middle. The world hasn’t warmed up enough yet to show any signs yet. It bugs me when people say they notice global warming. The average temperatures have increased less than a degree over the last hundred years. Very unnoticeable, and it could be happening naturally. In fact there is a lot of natural global warming that we have no control over.

That being said, we do live pretty wasteful lives. If we are doing anything to help the natural warming increase, our part is going to increase exponential. people are living longer, and other parts of the world are getting more industrialized. Image in China was as wasteful as us? Their 1.3 billion people compared to our measly 0.3 billion.

I have always been on the side of trying to conserve. Sure, it might cost more money and add a few hardships, but it’s the only thing we control. With all the technology we have these days, we should be relying of fossil fuels a lot less. We should be generating more power by the sun and the wind, and nuclear.

This guy explains my view much better.

There was also an episode of Penn & Teller’s : Bullshit! about the energy crises that was very good and can be found on youtube in three parts.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I like a good latte or cappuccino as much as the next person. Now with my new coffee pot I got at home I make them all the time. I hardly ever buy them at a Starbucks or Caribou Coffee. They are just too expensive. Yeah, I am a tight wad. I don’t like to pay $4 for a cup of coffee.

Today I was out running errands and the wife wanted me to stop off at her work and bring her a latte from Caribou. So of course I did. It was almost $6 for a latte and a biscotti. What a rip off. I could have gotten a fast food meal for that price.

Oh well, it made her happy, and if she is happy I am happy.

I just set the Tivo to record the Price is Right tomorrow. I figure I should watch Bob Barker’s last episode. Two of my childhood memories ended this week. First Mr. Wizard passes away, and the Bob Barker retires. I grew up watching both. Just another sign that I am getting old.

I have been playing around with Google Adsense for the past few days. I just started using Adsense ads, so I am by no means an expert, but there are a few things that I think can optimize clicks.

First, put the ads in your content. I know my eyes ignore ads in headers and sidebars. I am sure others do too.

Second, make the ads blend into your page. Make the link color the same color as your link color and make the backgrounds the same color too.

Third, use the box format rather than the banner. My eyes are also trained to skip over banners too. I am sure mine aren’t the only ones.

Fourth, ads can look like more content. If your ads are blended into your site, and Google is showing relevant ads, the ads can actually be helpful for your readers.

Those are a few things that I think will increase your clicks. I am still trying to make my ads more relevant though. Google has some tips to make your ads more relevant. I just implemented them. We will see how they work.

I have never really gotten into calendar software. I have checked out iCal, 30 Boxes, Google Calendar and many others. My life just isn’t really busy enough to use one. I may start using Google Calendar a little more now. They now have a Netflix release public calendar. Now I can check my calendar to find the top new releases from Netflix each week. Pretty cool. I may have to look into more of these public calendars. I might have a use for Google Calendar after all.

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