Trying out with the offline editor: ScribeFire

The name of this program sounds pleasant. Firey! C'mon, it is related to FireFox, just another of the add-ons.

I have been searching for free offline editors with Mac enabled for so long, and finally found this! Although I do not blog that often, but hey, you still need some 'nice' interfaced program to keep you having a good head-start.

Let's see if ScribeFire is able to capture my heart, to keep me constantly blogging more frequently. Till again, see you

Tags: ScribeFire, offline, Mac

My first pimp session

I stumbled onto this page in photokaki.com. where the post is titled: Pimp this leng lui!
I find this quite interesting. Hence I tried to do some pimping works with my novice skills in photoshop.

This is how the image looks like before the editing:

The image below is after some adjustments on the white balance, insertion of some light renderings, skewing and enlarging the eyes, distort the nose and smallen the mouth. Hmm, I'm kinda happy to achieve this end result, just that I can't do much on the puffy mouth! The photo frame and the watermarks for more of magazine-cover feel.

Remember that this is just the works of a very beginner Photoshop CS user. Imagine what the professional designers or users can do. Welcome to the wonders of digital age. I do hope that the real-life model will feel glad, knowing that she can be prettier with some 'touchup' works. Don't you think she has a bit of Jolin Chai's eyes?

Scuderias, time to prance your horses!

What an expected finale at the Sunday's Catalunya F1 Grand Prix. The Brawn GP have done it again, another 1-2 finish led by Jenson and Rubens. 4 wins out of 5 starts for the Briton is quite an achievements since the Schuey era.

Talking about Ferraris in which I still have some faith left in the team, they are not making huge progress since Melbourne. The only step they've taken, is the introduction to the KERS (Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems). Yet it doesn't seem to work too well for Kimi. He retired at lap 17 with hydraulics failures, in which is KERS related. It's quite disheartening looking at it, although knowing that Ferraris won't make huge leaps in such a short frame of time.

Another of the prancing horse, Massa had a better car than of Kimi's. The car was doing quite well, the strategy worked good for him (just that Webber's worked better!). But the problems came 6 or 7 laps from the checkered flag. Massa received a transmission from his technical engineer, ordered him to save fuel... a.k.a. not to push the car to the max, and to SLOW DOWN! Well, they cleverly 'miscalculated' on his fuel consumptions, or could it be Massa who had been pushing too hard since the previous pit stop, and to drain off his fuel?

What an error. Massa just had to give way to both Vettel and Alonso, in order to finish in points.. Pity pity pity. Wake up you horses! Time to start running! Only 4 points from 5 races?! Could it be the flop after Ross Brawn left the Scuderia team? Or was it Jean Todt? Something to ponder on.

Triumph over the mind, but not body

It's the time of the year again. The INFLUENZA spree! I was down with very bad flu since a week earlier. Yet, it dragged on and on, and I was hoping that I would get better. But not by a single chance. The flu made my body tired, sore my throat, pushed up my body temperature to 38. Not too high, but it's good enough to knock me out.

I had to revisit my doctor, getting heavier dosage of medication. Then I popped this question jokingly to the doctor. "My 10-day flu would not have any relation with the worldwide-pandemic-swine-flu eh?" Then she replied, "If you are the suspected ones, we need to do some tests, and the result will only be out in 2 weeks time"

I was thinking... 2 weeks! I could be dead-pork by then! Well, that's how efficient on how this lovely country deals with W.H.O.'s Level 6 worldwide outbreak. Thankfully there has yet to be any case of infection reported here.

What could I do next? Well, it's time to keep my mind alive. The body is sick, but just not let the mind be the same. With the iTunes running with 2670 songs, I really do not know what songs shall I listen to. Ended up with Air-Supply's. It brought back some wonderful memories back to the late 80s. Hopefully I will have more air in me, to guide me through this sickly period of time, and to finish this posting!

To be frank, I think my mind is only operating at 75% of it's capacity the most. Good enough to have few paragraphs for you readers to glance on. It's just an exercise in which I kept reminding myself... triumph over your mind, although the body lets you down sometimes.

Twitter vs. Blog, Snacks vs. Main dish

I wonder why it is easier to punch the keyboard, using short paragraphs, with limits of 140 characters and post it via twitter.com. As compared to sitting down with the proper mindset, proper issues/subjects to talk about, carefully selecting the proper usage of words, and to finally post it to the blog.

See the disparity for the two above? For me, I call it: Snacks vs Main dish. When you snack, you just grab whatever that is in front of you, regardless whether it suits your appetite. You just want to munch. You just want to move your mouth muscles and tendons.

But when you select the main dish, ahaa... this is where you take your brain out, carefully select and screen thru your head what you would like to meet to your palate's requirements.

Erm... I think I'm kinda snacking right now, just munch without thinking.