I was watching some old video of President Bush (cleaning up my YouTube favorites…don’t ask why President Bush was in my favorites, I don’t know; and Obama and Hillary Clinton were favorited, too). It was late at night, and you know how late-night surfing goes: one click led to another, and  somehow I ended up looking up my IP, and then seeing if the IP locators are really all that great at pinpointing locations.

At first, I was freaked out because, wow, it is pretty accurate, and any of you for whom I leave comments can track me down and demand a cup of tea and slice of cake without even warning me you’re coming! So, at first, I thought it had my location dead-on target. Then I zoomed in, and was so relieved, because it’s off by like a mile, and of course that will force you guys to twitter me for directions, meaning I’ll have time to, I don’t know, fill the sugar bowl or something.

Then I freaked out again, because I realized that it has me located in the local cemetery. That cemetery even happens to have a Muslim burial corner. I am not blogging from the cemetery! I am not Twittering from the cemetery! I am not surfing the web from the cemetery! I am not! in! the! cemetery!!!

It would have been better for the locator thingie to have been dead-on rather than have me considered dead altogether.

It’s time to say good-bye to my RSS reader. I know, that sounds like such a huge step backwards.

The thing is, while the RSS reader was supposed to increase efficiency in reading the blogs I like, it did the opposite. I ended up cluttering it up with a million blogs I don’t read all that often…and the primary reason for not reading them all that often is the blandness of the reader. Everything is all white in there, there are no visually distinguishing features between one blog and another, and this makes it way too boring for a visual person like myself. It also increases the strain on my brain: I have to make an effort to remember whose blog I am reading, and sometimes some people’s writing styles are so similar that I end up severely confused. In addition to all of that, it’s made me a horrible commenter: I read in the reader, and then keep reading down to the next post, and on and on and on…never managing to click on very many posts to comment on what I’ve read.

So, in a nutshell, RSS readers a) are bland; b) make bloggers sound the same in tone; and c) discourage me from being a sociable blogger. Oh, and the unread count (because I’ve been avoiding the reader due to those complications) is staggering, and every day it gets higher. The higher I know it’s getting, the more I stay away; the more I stay away, the less I read; the less I read, the less I even think about blogging on my own blog. This is one vicious circle called Technology Fail!

Hence, welcome, all of you, back into my world of bookmarks. Because Allah Knows, a girl can never have too many of those!

A special someone asked me about photo-editing tools, and I decided to make a post about it. It’s way too long for a comment box, after all! This one’s for all the photo enthusiasts amongst and within us.

I don’t like using online editing tools, such as Picnic and similar, because I think you’ll generally be at the mercy of your internet connection speed. Unless you’re on a super-fast internet connection, you’ll be spending a lot of time waiting for the tool to do it’s thing. So, the best thing do is turn to offline tools. If your computer is a bit older, some offline tools will still make you do a little bit of waiting, but that will generally be limited to when the application starts up. I’ve noticed both PhotoShop and Picasa can take up to 4 minutes to load. I can enjoy a lovely cup of icy chocolate milkshake in that time-frame, which is a lot nicer than having 10 cups waiting for Picnic to upload, edit, & save my pictures. So, the offline tools will generally be better for your blood pressure, your cholesterol levels, and your calorie count!

What tools are there that you can download as stand-alone applications? You can use PhotoShop, Picasa, Paint.NET, or pretty much anything that CNET recommends. I’ll quickly go through the pros and cons of each of these three software suites I’ve used or still do use; any more detail than this and you’ll probably fall asleep. Also, the best way to get a feel for an application is to use it, if at all possible.

PhotoShop: This is the Queen of photo editing software. As such, it’s royally expensive, too. This is a significant drawback. In addition to that, it can be a bit overwhelming to use. However, the learning curve is definitely worth suffering through. If one can get a copy of the Middle East version, then you’ll find adding Arabic text over your pictures a breeze. I love PhotoShop, although there was a time when I refused to use it for photo-editing and only stuck to making web graphics with it. Right now, I don’t have it on my current PC.

Picasa: This is probably the Fresh Prince of photo-editing software. So saying, it’s free to download and use. It fixes up your pictures very easily and quickly, and it’s quite good at organizing your pictures. When you launch it for the first time, it will pick out all the image files on your computer, and present it to you in an Explorer pane. Pretty cool, although it might take a while to complete this particular task, depending on how many pics you have and how scattered they are. The only significant drawback to Picasa is that you cannot (or I have not seen any way to) add a watermark to your pictures from the application directly. If you don’t care about that, then no big deal. If you do care about using a watermark, and are also set on using Picasa, then you could create and add the watermark with Microsoft Paint (standard in most PCs).

Paint.NET: I just downloaded this, and was very pleasantly surprised. I suspect that this is a great competition to PhotoShop, making it really the Crown Princess of photo editing software. Considering that it is free to download and quite easy to use, this should be really great news to the consumer who does not have spare cash lying around. As far as I can see so far, it can do everything that PhotoShop can do. It seems to have half (ok, maybe quarter) the amount of filters for special effects that PhotoShop does. So, if you tend to use filters a whole bunch, then this might be a drawback. I am not seeing a way to adjust the Exposure on pictures, so that makes me a bit unhappy. However, there is this inexplicable feature called Levels which seems to be doing the same thing for me as messing with Exposures in PhotoShop would. Consequently, I’m probably not going to bother installing PhotoShop on my computer for a while, if ever, as Paint.NET is satisfying the majority of my needs.

Here is a picture I touched up in Paint.NET, before and after, and a screenshot of the Paint.NET environment as I was working in it. ( Looking at the history box, you can see the things I like to do with a typical shot.)

What do you think about any or all of these software packages? Have you tried any other photo-editing suites? Any that you liked better?

Note: This was not a paid advertisement for any of the reviewed software. This is completely unscientific, and based purely on my own experiences and needs. And this is not exhaustively comprehensive in scope at all!

It’s been a while since I had a radical change of theme. Lately, changing the banner has been sufficient for me. But, I’ve been eyeing this new theme from WordPress for about a month now, wondering if I should or I shouldn’t. I really like the super-wide header space, so I decided to make the most of it by using an image for it from Hamad Darwish’s wallpaper collection. You can download some pretty nifty wallpapers for your computer if you follow that link. Enjoy!

The other day, I was browsing through Boston Big Picture, which is an excellent source for pictures that make you go, “hmmmm!” and they have a series on robots. Now, robots don’t really interest me in and of themselves; in fact, they kind of creep me out. There’s something about them that makes me cringe. But! These robots featured on Boston Big Picture really made me appreciate them. I’ll share my favorites with you here, and you can check out the rest of them on the BBP Robot page. At the very least, can you imagine how much brain-power it takes to make these things? And it’s just a fraction of what Allah has created. Amazing.

Lemur IIa is designed to inspect equipment in space.

Robot named da Vinci doing a hernia operation. Switzerland.

Robotic suit called HAL (Hybrid Assisstive Limb), can lift up to 30 kg. Japan

Robots in fire rescue during anti-terror exercise. Japan.

Playing music. Japan

Security robot T-34 tangles up mock intruder in a net. Japan.

Self-made robot pulls rickshaw on farm in Beijing.

Berti, robot built to imitate human gesturings, shaking hands with visitor. London.

Rollin' Justin prepares tea at high tech fair, CeBIT. Hanover, Germany.

Robotic baby seals named Paro, designed to sooth hospital patients. Coos, etc. Japan.

Hard at work in Samad auto plant. Iran.

Giving a walking tour of garden trail. His name is Rich. Japan.

I’m having the worst time finding the right browser. I love Firefox, but it’s a resource hog: it sucks up system resources, and doesn’t let them go till you close your window. I decided to switch browsers. I figured I’d give Google’s Chrome a try, and I must say that I loved Chrome. It was light, it was fast, and it did not eat up resources like a greedy little child. The removal of a title and menu bar, with the tabs way up top means more web page real estate. The downside of Chrome is that it makes me feel like Google is following me everywhere I go online. They looking at me buy things on Amazon. They’re raising their eyebrows at me for reading make-up reviews. They’re curiously watching me read the news. They’re puzzling over the political blogs I like to keep up with. They’re basically like my kid brother, hanging onto me, peering in glee over my shoulder. But I already have one kid brother! If I have to get another one, I might as well get the benefit of having someone to pick on every now and then!

So, I switched to Opera. And Opera is great. It’s fairly quick, eats up less resources than Firefox but more than Chrome. It’s got a very convenient Speed Dial feature that allows you to have nine sites of your choosing at your fingertips. You can skin it, color it, and widgetize it. The only problem is that there are quite a few sites that don’t seem to really support it, so those sites tend to look a bit wonky. Also, when I click on a link in my emails, it just sits there. It expects me to tell it to open the link in a new tab. These things bug me.

Then, I switched to Safari, which is in beta for version 4 right now. It’s supposed to have a Top Sites thing like Chrome does, but I can’t find it. No big deal, since those are not sites I can customize as in Opera. So I can live without the Top Sites. It’s supposed to be a speedy and light browser. Yeah, right. It’s just as resource hungry as Firefox, according to my Task Manager. They have done as Chrome did, by putting the tabs up top…this is really nice. Only thing about these tabs is that I can’t move them around. (I like to rearrange my tabs once in a while. Makes me feel more oraganized in my browsing. Don’t look at me like that!) I can’t really find too much about Safari that I like, except that it’s about as fast as Opera…not as slow as Firefox, not as fast as Chrome. There is no Refresh button in the tool bar, either, and their are a million other small things that seem to bug me. Sometimes, I open up a web site and Safari thinks I’m sending in a bug report. Very odd. Clicking a link doesn’t open a new tab, it opens a new window. If I wanted that, I’d tell you, fool! And my last gripe is that it doesn’t seem to be handling autoFill for multiple email accounts and the like very well. I like saving my passwords…help me out by filling them out appropriately! Well, Safari is still in beta, so I guess I could be patient for these little things to be ironed out. Except that the resource-hungry part will always bug me.

The bottom line is that there is no perfect browser…except for Little Brother Chrome. How do I go about making a browser of my own?!  What browser do you use and love, and why? Or is this something that only I am fixated on?

If you’re like me and have a computer that seems to hesitate every time you (try to) bully it around, then you have either adopted the patience of a saint, or you are routinely given to bouts of frustrating hysteria complete with fist-pounding screams that cause your family to look at you in alarm and consider getting you a room in a mental hospital. Guess which category I fall into? Yeah, I am no saint. The best thing for me would be get a new laptop, but not only am I insane, I am also reluctant to part with an excessive amount of cash. In this economy, you might be inclined to save your cash too, so what to do when you are plagued by the torture that is a slow computer?

The madness of a PC that takes 10 years to dredge up PhotoShop had to come to an end. And it gloriously did, when I decided to get more RAM for my laptop. What is RAM, you ask? RAM, in simplest terms (it not most accurate terms), is that thing that helps your computer retrieve data quickly…the more RAM you have, generally the better off you will be. A hyped-up processor on crack really helps too, but since that’s a little more difficult to replace in a laptop, I went for the RAM upgrade. RAM is easy to pop out and replace, so anyone who can follow simple directions can do it. I did, so trust me when I say that you can too. I had a puny 512 megabytes of RAM before (my laptop is over 5 years old!) and I am allowed a maximum capacity of 1 GB…so here I am, with my shiny new 1 GB of RAM and I is a happy woman! Happy, I tell you! And insane no longer!

If you wish to jazz up your RAM, turn to Kingston*  or Crucial*, look up your model and make of PC to find what your maximum RAM capacity is, pick out what the memory you need, and speed things up already! Unless you are sitting there smirking, about to tell me that you have 2 or 3 GB RAM. In which case, slow down so I catch up!

*Not paid for by either Kingston or Crucial. Please feel free to turn to the manufacturer of your choice. This blogger will not be responsible for anything you do with the free time you have on your hands after the RAM upgrade.

…Making us Stoopid? That was the title on the cover of The Atlantic Journal, which caught my attention while I was walking out of the library. It made me actually sit down and read the whole thing. You can read the article online, if you’re interested. I enjoyed reading it, because the author discusses how we are collectively loosing our abilities for deep reading.

Most interesting was how he presents the idea that our neural circuitry is being remapped due to the way we click rapidly through the Internet.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

I found this curious, and a bit disturbing. The convenience of rapid research is so attractive, the enormous volume of information (and disinformation) that is available is so impressive, but are we destroying our minds? Or are we merely rebuilding our minds to match the hectic world where information is flying at us from every direction? The thing that bothers me the most is that I have a difficult time these days in focusing on hobbies that I still love. I find myself missing doing the things that take intense concentration, but when I do tackle those things, my brain is really not all that into it. Is it time to pull the plug? I really am beginning to wonder.

We’ve heard of post-dated checks, and forward dating blog posts. Now, courtesy of Gmail, here it comes: The back-dated email. Haha. What kind of fools do they take us to be, anyway?

Ok. So the US of A is mired in a recession: people are losing their homes, their jobs, etc. Companies hate to hire recent graduates because they “don’t have the experience” (unless you’re Barack Obama, that is a fatal drawback), and yet…yet….companies want the quotas on H-1B visas (foreign worker visa) to be increased so that they can hire more international students who have been recently graduated. With no experience. Is this fair to citizens of our country? How is this fair? How is this right? Shouldn’t our jobs first be handed out to us first?

“This is an outsourcing visa,” said Kim Berry, president of the Programmers Guild, a Summit, N.J.-based advocacy group that opposes more H-1B visas. Berry said it’s cheaper for companies to hire new foreign college graduates than older U.S. workers.

Frustrated by the limited number of these so-called H-1B visas awarded each spring in a random lottery to highly skilled foreigners, U.S. technology executives have tried to find ways around the problem while lobbying aggressively to increase the annual cap.

Microsoft, Cisco Systems Inc., Intel Corp. and other large companies have opened or expanded research facilities outside the United States. And some companies have resorted to gaming the system: filing multiple applications, along with the $1,570 to $3,320 filing fee, for each potential hire to boost the odds of winning one of the coveted visas. The fee is higher for large companies and for expedited filings.

“You can imagine our frustration,” said Robert Hoffman, vice president of government affairs at Oracle Corp., which, like Microsoft, insisted it has not filed duplicate applications. “We have 1,000 job openings at Oracle we can’t fill because of the arbitrary nature of visas and the arbitrary way they are selected.”
[...]
California technology companies, as well as financial institutions, culinary institutes, and healthcare providers, have pushed Congress to raise the annual limit on the visas. Temporarily increased to as high as 195,000 during the Internet boom, the cap dropped to its original 65,000 level in 2004 as job demand declined. Companies apply for the visas for prospective employees who have at least a bachelor’s degree in a variety of specialized fields. The visas are good for three years and can be renewed for another three. Recipients often apply for permanent residency during that time.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. These companies want us to understand their frustration?! They could be hiring me, yet when I go in for an interview, being a citizen and all that jazz, they will tell me that I don’t have the experience…but the dude interviewed after me, who also has no experience? Well, they will file a $1,500+ application so that he can get the job instead. Sigh.