inkbluesky

if vincent van gogh had sketched naomi campbell

Click photo for other sizes, you really can't see the texture and detail at this size. I found a photo of M's Campbell on the web, it wasn't the best quality, but I thought her poise along with the contrast was striking. So I used a program called Gertrudis and experimented with the photo by blending some sketch and water color effects (similar to van gogh's brush strokes). Then I took the result into Photoshop where I did so many little things I lost track; one of them was to create a new layer, apply the watercolor filter then setting the layer transparency to about 50%. I purposely left the little white specks as it gave it a more authentic sketch look. Gertrudis is not a perfect program; if you try it you'll need to play around with the settings to get something professional looking.

Speaking of Photoshop effects I came across this post today, Photoshop Tutorial: Making Sin City style pictures

Some commenters noted that there are other ways to achieve the Sin City effect, but I think that is part of the fun for the serious amateurs, to play with different techniques.

Salary Negotiation

Salary negotiation is one of the most delicate parts of the whole job search process, and it is at this stage that many candidates inadvertently disqualify themselves. At some point in the interview process, you will be asked, “How much do you want?” What they are, in effect, asking you is, “What do you think you are WORTH?” Or, put another way, “Do you have delusions of grandeur (or no self-confidence), are you going to be impossible to control, or are you a total wimp that I can micro-manage into an early grave?”

If you should start to work for someone that is a "micro-manage" type, if you can afford to, run like hell to find another job. Life is too short to work with people who's controlling nature is dead set on making your life miserable.

Building the Secrecy Wall higher and higher

There are multiple investigative efforts underway — Congressional, judicial, journalistic — seeking to uncover the Bush administration's illegal warrantless eavesdropping activities aimed at Americans, and the administration, in order to keep its conduct concealed, has doggedly sought to impede each of these investigations. The administration's cover up of its behavior has become so severe that the usually meek Arlen Specter actually threatened this week to introduce legislation to cut off funding for the NSA program unless the administration ceased its stonewalling of the Judiciary Committee's investigation.

The latest such obstruction is the administration's invocation of what, prior to the Bush administration, was the rarely invoked "State Secrets Privilege" in order to demand that a federal judge dismiss the lawsuit brought by the libertarian privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T. That lawsuit alleges that AT&T secretly diverts electronic communications to the NSA in order to allow the NSA to monitor those communications without warrants, i.e., in violation of the law.

More at the link and well worth the read if you have the time.

ashlee simpson shades of ink

Click= much bigger. I'm not especially a fan or detractor of M's Simpson, but I found a photo of her on the web that I thought was well composed though was a little plain for my tastes so I played around with Flaming Pears' India Ink plug-in and this was the result. 

Next: A Nonprofit IPO?

When former Goldman Sachs banker Chuck Harris stepped in temporarily two years ago as director of development for College Summit, he became the rare nonprofit executive to commute to work by private jet. But he also brought insights gleaned from a career raising capital for businesses. As College Summit, a 13-year-old organization that helps low-income students get into universities, contemplated an expansion plan, Harris asked, Why don't we structure this deal like a for-profit investment?

The resulting "private placement," completed in November 2005, netted College Summit $15 million total from 10 investors to fund a four-year growth plan. While the deal offered no equity or monetary return, it appealed to donors interested in helping a proven idea grow: They get to be the nonprofit equivalent of venture funders who made the right bet on the Palm Pilot. Says George Overholser, a former venture capitalist who is now an executive at NFF Capital Partners, an investment bank for nonprofits: "The opportunity here is helping build an organization that accomplishes an amazing amount of good in the world into a household name brand."

The private-placement concept is a breakthrough in funding nonprofit growth.

People and their talent as an investmant. Not a completely new idea, but that venture capitalists would start to see altruism in terms of both doing good and making a profit at this level is pretty inspiring, especially for those of us that are a little cynical about how the culture of business should work versus how it does work.

What do I mean by hinting that the system is a little broken down, Co-conspirator's possible links to prostitutes eyed

 Federal prosecutors are reviewing records of two Washington, D.C., hotels where Poway defense contractor Brent Wilkes rented suites as part of their investigation into whether prostitutes were involved as he tried to curry favor with lawmakers and CIA officials.

Wilkes, whom federal prosecutors have identified as a co-conspirator in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, rented hospitality suites in the capital on behalf of his flagship company, ADCS Inc.

As The San Diego Union-Tribune  reported in December, the suites – first at the Watergate Hotel and then at the Westin Grand Hotel – had several bedrooms where lawmakers and other guests could relax.

Federal investigators are trying to determine whether Cunningham and other legislators brought prostitutes to the hotels or prostitutes were provided for them there, according to a report in yesterday's Wall Street Journal  and confirmed by the Union-Tribune.

A source close to the bribery case, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation, told the Union-Tribune  that Mitchell Wade, who pleaded guilty in February to bribing Cunningham, told federal prosecutors that he periodically helped arrange for a prostitute for the then-congressman.

A limousine would pick up Cunningham and a prostitute and take them to the ADCS hospitality suite, Wade reportedly told investigators. Federal agents are investigating whether other legislators had similar arrangements with Wilkes or Wade, a business associate of Wilkes who ran his own defense contracting company, MZM Inc.

Josh Marshall has been following the story and the possible links to CIA administrators appointed by Porter Goss, who was a Bush appointee.

horse that doesn't buck

British Museum Shows Works Michelangelo Wanted to Hide

LONDON — The British Museum's acclaimed new show of Michelangelo drawings is an invitation to voyeurism, albeit not, as may be supposed, because of the Florentine master's undisguised worship of the naked male body. Rather, it is because Michelangelo never intended his drawings to be seen by eyes other than his own or those of his family and pupils.

Shortly before his death in Rome in 1564 at 88, he ordered many of his drawings and other papers destroyed in two bonfires. The record shows that he also burned some drawings in 1518. And in between, surviving letters indicate, he chastised his father for permitting works on paper to be seen by outsiders and ignored a nobleman's repeated pleas to be allowed to buy a drawing.

Why such reticence?

Michelangelo believed sculpture to be the supreme art, followed by painting and architecture. And he proved his genius in all three art forms — with the marble masterpieces "Pietà" and "David," with the Sistine Chapel and with the dome of St. Peter's in Rome. In contrast, drawings served him merely as tools for preparing these and other monumental works.

He had two good reasons not to share these "notes," although it is not known which — if either — was the real motive for his secrecy: he may have wanted to hide evidence of the considerable effort that went into his art, or he may have feared that the revolutionary ideas in his drawings would be plagiarized. Certainly, Michelangelo was determined to preserve his aura.

The link is to an NYT article and may evntually disappear into their archives. Unfortunately there is only one drawing illustrated, maybe over time there will be more reproductiions available on the net.

The article's author ask's, Why such reticence? and gives some good reasons, but the other reason that Michelangelo may have wanted to keep some of his work private is the speculation that he was gay. This hidden work may shed more light on that speculation. What is ultimately most interesting, to me anyway, is that he was so protective of his work even from his family and that such a large body of work has stayed hidden for so long.

An Interview With Julieanne Jost

Adobe Senior Digital Imaging Evangelist Julieanne Kost has just published Window Seat, an engaging work in three parts based on the thousands of images she has photographed as she traveled all over the world.

The book is pictured as part of the article and as you'd expect from a photo enthusiast that also works for Adobe, it is extremely well executed.

anne hathaway and blues. ( updated 05-18-06) Sorry, I finally got around to sorting out the link problem. click here for large version.

8 People & Trends To Watch

3.The Diesel Governor
Montana’s coal fields hold the equivalent of 240 billion barrels of clean diesel, which almost makes the state another Saudi Arabia. Governor Brian Schweitzer has been hustling GE, Shell, South African Sasol, and the US military to invest in converting that coal into diesel; with oil at more than $40 a barrel (the price at which coal-to-diesel conversion becomes cost-efficient), they’re interested. Schweitzer also wants to jump-start a US biofuels industry by adding farm subsidies to alt-energy-producing crops like soybean, safflower, camelina, and canola. Schweitzer, a Democrat, picked up his agricultural self-reliance in Saudi Arabia, where he helped design the irrigation system that turned the kingdom from a wheat importer into a net exporter of wheat in the ’80s. The US, he says, can do the same for fuel. - L.M.

There are some interesting people at the jump, but I choose Schweitzer because he did what few thought he could do in a hard purple state like Montana, he put together a regular guy message that appealled to folks who’s interests are better served by Democrats. It didn’t hurt that Montana conservatives had plenty of power for years and got pretty corrupt and arrogant. They were ready for a change, a pro small business big D Democrat, a pro environment guy that showed the hunters and fishers of Montana that Big business didn’t care about their western heritage.

I’m just going to put up part of this, but if you care about open access to the internet you should read the whole article, Tim Wu on Internet Freedom and Net Neutrality

The problem faced here is actually not new at all–it is a familiar problem of market power on networks that government has grappled with since the days of the telegraph. What I want to make clear is the central economic tradeoff involved in these kinds of cases. Letting the internet or any infrastructure become discriminatory may offer marginally more profit for operators. But it does so at the cost of a tax on network competition and innovation. Whether it’s a nation’s ports, roads, canals, or information networks, discrimination comes at a price to the activities that depend on the infrastructure.

That’s why at nearly every stage in the history, governments have maintained at least a basic anti-discrimination rule to block the worst forms of anti-competitive behavior. And today, that’s all that’s needed - a simple ban on the worst kinds of behavior; a basic rule whose goal is simply to guarantee basic consumer rights and let the free market work.

Network Discrimination Problems in History and Today

Problems of network discrimination are nothing new. Network owners with market power have always been tempted to use their gatekeeper position to discriminate between favored and disfavored uses.

The history, in fact, goes as far back as the 1860s, when Western Union, the telegraph monopolist, signed an exclusive deal with the Associated Press. Other wire services were priced-off the network - not blocked, but discriminated against.2 The result was to build Associated Press into a news monopoly that was not just dangerous for business, but dangerous for American democracy. As telecommunications historian Paul Starr writes “Western Union had exclusive contracts with the railroads; AP had exclusive contracts with Western Union; and individual newspapers had exclusive contracts with AP. These linkages made it difficult for rival news services to break in.”3 The AP monopoly had an agenda: it didn’t just favor Google or Yahoo - it went as far as to chose politicians it liked and those it didn’t. As Historian Menahem Blondheim has documented, AP used its Western Union-backed monopoly to influence politics in the late 19th century, even going so far as to exercise censorship on behalf of the State. The method was simple: when faced with messages from disfavored politicians, the wires simply didn’t carry them.

Don’t Let Congress and the telcos Ruin the Internet

Don’t Let Congress Ruin the Internet
Right now Congress is pushing a law that would abandon the First Amendment of the Internet — a principle called “network neutrality” that preserves the free and open Internet. Congress needs to hear from you today or they will hand over control of what you do online to companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

Politicians are trading favors for campaign donations from these companies. They’re being wooed by people like AT&T’s CEO, who says “the Internet can’t be free.” Sign this petition to tell your elected representatives to protect Internet freedom now. When you fill out the information and push submit, we will automatically send it to your Members of Congress.

There’s an e-petition at the link.