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.