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Showing posts from July 23, 2006

Walmart leaving Germany. At last.

Looks like Wal-Mart jut can't hack it in the real world. They're selling their underperforming German stores to the country's leading retail chain Metro. Apparently they've struggled to capture market share ever since entering the cut-throat German retail arena eight years ago, frustrated by razor-thin margins and tight labor and trade laws. In other words, their policy of piling up cheap overpriced shit and paying their workers next to nothing just didn't wash in Germany. So they've had a tantrum and left. Boohoo.

Doin' the tilt shift thang.

Image
It's always fun to learn something new. Today I learned about tilt-shift photography. Basically a technique using a bloody expensive lens on your camera to adjust the focal plane angle. Alternatively, some natty work in Photoshop can achieve similar results. Specifically, the ability to make a real city look like a toy city. This is a shot taken in Docklands that I found on google. After processing in photoshop, it closely resembles tilt-shift photography in that it looks more like a diorama with toy cars made for a modelling magazine than a real photo. Click the photos for bigger versions. Neato.

And so to reconstruction.

Well the time has come - time to finish the basement off again. The lads were here today cleaning up the edges of the walls and putting furring strips in for the new drywall. Th carpets are covered in sticky plastic again and once more the house is full of dust. I expect by the weekend we'll have the majority of the large panels up. One more inspection then we can mud, tape, texture and paint.

Joggers? Closed lanes? Must be the 24th again.

Eesh . Same as last year. UHP have closed two lanes either direction on Foothill this morning, and refuse to let anyone turn right to get into the research park. Fortunately I was on my bike this morning so I was able to ignore those goons, scoot through the cones and be on my merry way. Apparently, because it's a local holiday, they don't believe anyone should be allowed to go about their normal daily life. Instead we're plagued with joggers, ambulances full of heatstroked joggers, coned off lanes and idiot UHP officers every July 24th. You should see the traffic jam out of my window right now - it's classic....