Month: December 2009

Going Retro — A Photoshop Photo Tutorial

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone out there.  I hope your Christmas (for those of you who celebrate it) was blessed and you had a good time with family and friends.  I know we did.

One of the big things everyone does each Christmas is send out Christmas cards, and more recently, Christmas photos neatly printed out at Costco with some canned template and some nice wishes on the card. This year we decided to do something different by sending off a nice card with a family photo in it, that our friends and family could keep or frame or whatever, being appropriate all year long vs. the one month.

I mentioned in past post that my wife was finally letting us do the interior design of our house more in the mid-century modern style. For the past 10 years here, she had it decorated more in the country/shabby chic look. As much as I appreciate antiques, and I do think they can play a nice juxtaposition with mid-century modern, all shabby chic and cluttery stuff got to be too much. My wife Lisa saw that too, and decided it was time to go for a more clean, less is more look. So, we’ve been working on that in the house as time and money could afford. Anyone who has a set of Barcelona chairs they’d like to give to a good cause (us getting rid of bad design..), please drop me a line anytime…

For our Christmas decorating, we decided to use as our main tree a mid-60’s aluminum tinsel tree with some retro looking ornaments, some lights, and that was about it. For our family photo, we decided to dress semi-retro, all wearing our Converse Chucks. To add to the realism of the photo, I took the image into Photoshop to make it look like it was shot on an instamatic camera.

If this is something you’d like to try sometime, here’s what I did.

The original image looked like this:

The first step is load it into Photoshop and duplicate the layer 3 times.

The first layer you make into a black and white image using the desaturate selection under image/adjustments/desaturate.

The next step is take the next layer up, and but it 2 or so pixels, depending on your own taste, then change the transparency to 50%.

On the final top color layer, set the transparency to 25%. This brings some sharpness back to the image without losing the slight blurring.

And that’s pretty much it.

Below is a full before and after. Hope all of you have a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Before
After

Random Thoughts — The Wireless Mobile Web

We’ve been pretty much accustomed to having web access the past number of  years now on laptops, tablet PC’s or home computers thanks to WiFi, and even more so since the introduction of Apple’s iPhone.

Since the iPhone came out, and gave people true web access from anywhere without having to carry multiple devices, letting us view the web the way it was designed (anyone who had a Blackberry device and tried web surfing pre-iPhone knows what I’m talking about), it now seems all the phone makers have followed suit with their smartphones, hoping to be the ultimate iPhone killer.

This post is not so much about the iPhone, or other smartphones, but something I wrote about nearly 8 years ago. While at Stellcom, I was pretty hot about where we’d be in less than 10 years with technology and devices we could carry in our pockets that would let us surf the web, see movie previews as we drove past a theatre, and even buy tickets. This was before the advent of 3G. There wasn’t a 3G network, and we were still pretty much in what was the first generation phone or data network – eg it was very slow for any data transfers.

So, I present to you a white paper I wrote on what I called the wireless video world, though I do talk about how wireless devices would allow us to do so much more. I focused on video because I was really into video production and streaming, knowing someday soon people would be able to watch real time video on handheld wireless devices (FloTV anyone?).

Qualcomm hadn’t even begun to work on it yet, but a small company in San Diego called Packet Video had, though what they offered could be considered at the time something similar to the very early days of Apple’s QuickTIme — 5 frames per second video sent in packets to one’s handheld device. Note that only some phones allowed this as well as some early handheld devices, tethered via WiFi. The Blackberry could not – it was merely a portable email device when it first hit the streets.

So, I give to you the white paper I wrote. Keep in mind this was written about 8 years ago. Though my writing has improved over the years (whose doesn’t?), you should get the gist of what I was getting at at the time. I don’t consider myself any kind of futurist or Svengali of Technology. At the time I was just a senior designer, but I  wanted to take my best guess as where technology should be heading.  I think I came pretty close, but I’ll let you decide.

Although the paper was in it’s second draft (I never got to finish it), I challenge you to look at what I predict in it, and then look at what we have available today, less than 10 years later.

Wireless_Video_World(v2)

Random Thought — Waiting on God

For the last few weeks I’ll admit I’ve been feeling pretty down. After having lost my job back in August due to a layoff, and the company my wife worked for went out of business a little over a year ago, things as they were before my layoff were tight.

Having been involved in web design since the “pioneer days” of the early 90’s, plus having had a background previously in animation, multimedia development, and video production and even some experience in video game production, I thought it would be a very short period from the layoff to a soft landing in a new job. Not to mention I thought I was trusting God completely this time vs. a layoff I had 9 years ago that nearly lasted a year.

Since then, I’ve learned to become more faithful to Him, and trust that He has something great in store for me. When you have your friends, family and own wife speaking this, and that they feel He’s going to open a number of doors for me, then one’s spirit is raised, we bring on a very positive attitude, and feel almost invincible…ahhh. Yes, and there’s the problem.

God doesn’t want us to feel invincible. Why? Because we are not. He is. We aren’t. He wants us to need Him. That’s why He made us. Yes, He wants us to experience joy (note: He doesn’t promise us happiness though). And He wants us to have a servant’s heart, plus the attitude of honoring Him in whatever job He blesses us with.

Yes, I know He’ll bless me with the opportunity of a few doors opening which each one, no matter which I choose,  I can bless Him back with. He wants us to succeed and prosper (Jeremiah 29:11). But being human, we start to worry, esp. when weeks become months. I’m learning that the perfect job for me, that He wants to bless me with so I can bless Him, doesn’t happen in the snap of a finger (though that would be nice).

He has to prepare it, move people around, give them new jobs, relocate them, make sure they’re taken care of too in order to make room for me to come into that new job. Our Pastor (Miles McPherson of the Rock Church in San Diego — awesome Pastor…) is constantly telling us that God has a specific plan and purpose for each of us. I know that, but wish He’d hurry up already. But what can seem like a long time for me is indeed hurrying up for Him.

So,  first off if my last couple posts came across negative, I humbly apologize. I know the market is tough, there are only so many jobs, and recruiters have a very tough time wading through the hundreds if not thousands of resumés coming in their doors. I believe LinkedIn has the possibility of being a good tool, and I hope that as I apply for the jobs I can see myself in, they will look at my profile and recommendations from past employers and colleagues.

But what I want and desire in a job may not be what the Lord wants and desires for me, and I’m okay with that. Because He knows me far better than I could ever hope to know myself. I just ask and desire to serve Him however He wants to use me next.

Hopefully this post will encourage any of you who are finding tough times right now, aren’t getting the jobs you want, or are feeling like you can’t provide the way you want to. I know. I’ve been there, and God blessed me with an awesome job for the past 8 years. But now He needs me somewhere else (and maybe not even here in sunny San Diego…), and I know it’s going to be more awesome than my last job.

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”  Amen to that.

Random Thought — The LinkedIn Thing Again

In my last post I spoke about LinkedIn, how one can get lots of “connections” and how one’s network can grow exponentially from people you’re connected to. In it I asked “How Good is LinkedIn”, and went on to mention that although my list of connections, or first level (or degree) network of 184 people, which “links” me to 2,521,000 people, thus supposedly making my “network” that much bigger.

Since then, I have received a few emails from good friends/past colleagues who said LinkedIn could serve me well, and they did make an effort or recommendation for different jobs to me (none of which I was suited for), but nevertheless, my “network” was doing it’s job. I even followed the advice of one good friend, and still nothing.

As much as I truly appreciate the efforts of some past colleagues who are really great people, I still don’t quite get LinkedIn, and here’s why. Before the intraweb thing, back in the day my dad (and probably most of yours too), networks were done by meeting people at professional gatherings, charity events, or at the local bar (or pub).

People exchanged business cards, good talk, and pretty much had a good example of who the other person was, especially at those fundraisers or charity events where everyone had a drink in one hand and talked business, family, sports, etc.  Then people would decide whether that other person was worth adding to their network, and in most cases kept a long business, and sometimes personal, relationship or friendship with that person and or people. That’s pretty much how things worked back in the day.

So, if someone lost their job back then, they could call their friends, who knew them well, then they’d call some of their buddies, and someone would vouch for them, and so on. Next thing you know that someone had a job — unless the economy sucked completely. Like now, though I think things are starting to turn around slowly.

In other words, networks worked. I feel that I must be missing something here in regards to LinkedIn. It says I have a huge network. I post in the updates section, that all of my first degree connections can see (and anyone that sees my profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregschumsky)that I’m looking for a job.

Also, there are people in my first degree connections that are recruiters for some companies I’d really like to work for, who happen to be hiring, which I believe I mentioned in my last post. When I email them or attempt to contact them through LinkedIn, shouldn’t they make some sort of effort to get back to me within a reasonable amount of time, since I passed the secret handshake test?

So, again, I ask those of you who think Linkedin is all that, or maybe I’m expecting too much, then show me what I’m doing wrong.  Meanwhile I’ll keep adding connections, because there’s really nothing better to do for now, and maybe one may hold the key to my new job.