Author: RagManX

Photoshop disasters

I’m always amazed at how much a bunch of small changes can really change an image. I mean, yes I know that it’s not that hard to change the images, and yes I know that I should expect big changes from a bunch of small changes. But the results still impress me.

However, on the other side of the photochopping craze we find the chops that just didn’t quite go as intended. The site Photoshop Disasters highlights these erroneous photochop jobs. For example, clips from a very funny pair of pics put up there where the DVD case claims to reveal the real star in question:

miley1_clip.jpg miley2_clip.jpg

So real, except for values of not-real where we felt it appropriate to change things a teeny tiny bit.   Or something.

And apologies to Photoship Disasters for cutting out the watermark – I didn’t want to give away the full story just from the pics, so I clipped them down to the part that hopefully will push my visitors to click away via the site link.

[tags]Photoshop, Photochop, Photoshop disasters[/tags]

Techies: MBA for big money

Hey, good news if you are thinking about heading back to school for further degree studies.  It seems that techies who get business degrees are better able to overcome the communication gap between managers and worker-grunts.  The end result?  An MBA nearly doubles IT Pros’ salaries.

For years, IT professionals looking to increase their job security, expand their career horizons and potentially climb a couple pay grades have been told to take business courses or get an MBA, but the evidence to support these assertions has been little more than anecdotal.

Now, however, a study published in the March issue of “Management Science” from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business finds that an IT professional with an MBA degree earns 46 percent more than one with only a bachelor’s degree, and 37 percent more than an IT professional with any other type of master’s degree.

Of course, that nearly doubles salaries thing doesn’t sound quite right when you read that the IT professional with MBA earns 46 percent more, does it?  So according to this study, the MBA nearly doubles IT Pros’ salaries, when 46% means 100%.  Still – a near 50% earnings benefit sounds pretty solid justification for the higher degree.

[tags]IT, Salaries, MBA, When +50% equals double?!?[/tags]

Australian robbery Phailure!

Here’s what happens when you assume that having a gun in a gun-free state is all you need to successfully rob a bar.  It’s a Phail so bad, we had to spell it with 5 letters.

[liveleak b0b_1204280299]

Note for future robbers – when there are 50+ motorcycles in the parking lot, you might want to check adjoining rooms to see if tonight is the monthly meeting night for the local biker gang.

[tags]Phail, Failure, Gun control, Biker gang, Robbery, Australia[/tags]

Record-setting high-intensity laser beam

You’ve got your laser.  You’ve got your high intensity.  You’ve got your awesome name – HERCULES.  What missing?

If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.

That’s the instantaneous intensity we can produce,” said Karl Krushelnick, a physics and engineering professor. “I don’t know of another place in the universe that would have this intensity of light. We believe this is a record.”

. . .

The record-setting beam measures 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter. It contains 300 terawatts of power. That’s 300 times the capacity of the entire U.S. electricity grid. The laser beam’s power is concentrated to a 1.3-micron speck about 100th the diameter of a human hair. A human hair is about 100 microns wide.

Sadly, no mention is made of strapping these suckers to the frikkin’ heads of any frikkin’ sharks.  Nor is there any word on the available ramp-up possible with a whole mess of these (say, perhaps, an ocean full of frikkin’ sharks, with, well, you know) and harnessing the power of a Dyson sphere.  But some mad-genius will make it happen some day, I am certain (sans popcorn, most likely).

A paper on this research, “Ultra-high intensity 300-TW laser at 0.1 Hz repetition rate,” is published online in the journal Optics Express. The full text is available at http://www.opticsinfobase.org/abstract.cfm?URI=oe-16-3-2109. Yanovsky and Krushelnick are authors of the paper.

Yup – 300 Terra-Watts.  Make’s ol’ Doc Brown’s Flux Capacitor look pretty miserly with the power, doesn’t it?

[tags]HERCULES, Laser, Frikkin’ sharks, 300 Terra-watts, 1.21 Giga-watts[/tags]

Dismissed!

Let go from work today – just about 90 minutes ago. Was just told things weren’t working out, and the boss didn’t have anything else to say to me after he told me that. What brought this about? Well, I never understood my job, and did it wrong more often that I did it right. I got to the point where I was scared to work on things, which obviously greatly hampered my ability to perform well and hurt my chances of ever understanding the job and doing it right. When the boss days to respond to emails on projects that I was behind on or didn’t respond at all, I pretty much knew it was about the happen. I couldn’t work the way the group I was assigned to worked, and I failed to figure out how to get the help I needed to learn the job correctly within the framework of how others in the group worked.

I’m trying to be careful, because I don’t want to blame my employer. I feel a little shafted, because I never got the support I needed to do the job right. But still, I know responsibility for doing the job ultimately was up to me. I clearly didn’t ask enough questions, or ask the right people, when I was lost and struggling with understanding my responsibilities. I have always been one to work on my own to try to figure out problems, even in instances when I need to ask questions. So rather than asking up front for clarification when I was lost, I would read, re-read, and look back at similar work done by others. And ultimately, what I figured out was usually not right.

In the end, it would have been foolish for my previous employer to keep me, because I wasn’t able to do the job they needed. I just wish I could have found one person in the group who could understand how I work and have that one person available to answer my questions and help me in a manner that matched my work style. I tried to work in their way, but failed, and never found someone who worked the way I do.

[tags]Let go, Unemployment, What’s wrong with me[/tags]