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It’s as though the museum exploded from the ground, and the house was too close to avoid its gruesome, and humorous, fate.

Picture by: baobee

It’s February 2, 2007.

And it’s finally flippin’ snowing.

Here’s the proof.

I’m the first to tell you that I know nothing about using a tool as powerful as The Gimp. I get Layers, but after that, there is a realm of madness that I have not yet reached.

I have learned a cool trick tonight. It’s building on a trick I learned a couple of weeks ago. It uses layers and the overlay method. Lifehacker pointed me to digital Photography School, and I learned the overlay Gaussian Blur method. I know use this a lot.

But once I figured out layers, I figured that I could really start stacking them up. As a result of my fiddling, I stumbled onto a really cool way to make those pictures leap at you.

Let’s start with a picture of the USB hub that sits next to me.

Sort of lame, with a distinct yellow hue.

Ok, create a duplicate layer. Then, INVERT the duplicate layer. You end up with something like this.

This, in and of itself, is pretty damn cool. But, there’s another layer under there. The original picture. So, what happens when you set the inverted layer to overlay mode?

Now, you may think there isn’t much difference between this and the original. So let’s put them side-by-side.

Pow! Instant Contrast! Things like the cable in the background, the cable in the foreground, and the front edge of the hub suddenly leap out at you.

Now, the true photogs out there are likely yawning. “Yeah, so what?”, they say. “I could of done that in 30 seconds.”

But hey, it’s new to me.

I truly have become addicted to Dwell, reading issues over and over again, trying to extract something new from them.

Yesterday, after a seemingly endless wait, March 2007 arrived.

Ahhhhhhhhh….mmmmmm….

Call me in a month.

I try and avoid the “me-too” factor that has dominated the land of blogs for most of the time I have been involved in it. Simply aping one persons comments with a slight variation, or personal interpretation doesn’t add much to the initial thrill of finding the original germ of an idea.

Kathy Sierra, someone who has been quoted and analyzed multiple times in this blog, has hit another double to the wall. She talks about the value of serendipity, randomness, in exposing us to new ideas and concepts, ones that we would not have run across in our siloed, standardized lives.

Yesterday was a great example of this for me. Something I read a post on Notebookism that spoke of outsider art or Art Brut. I looked it up on Wikipedia, and spiralled into a 90-minute voyage of discovery into this genre of expression, fueled not by training and ideology, but by a raw, unchecked need to express the world in an artistic way.

I would have never gone down this path unless I had read the Notebookism post, and would have been hard-pressed to find structured explanations (whatever you may think of them) of the topics without Wikipedia.

As I explore myself, and examine the foundations that support my cracked mental structure, I find that I appreciate the random explorations far more than a formal education process. I don’t learn the way that we have been taught.

I prefer to discover.

And when you get right down to the basics of Kathy’s post, that’s what she is saying. People are far more enthusiastic, receptive, and amazed when they discover something for themselves.

It may be an old idea to you. I may not interest you. But when a person gets that gleam in their eye, that rush in their mind, when they get the “WOW!“, then they are committed.

Personally, I am finding that I am having a lot more WOW! moments lately. The combination of therapy, and my medications, has forced me to look at the world that I live in, and the world that I have created, substantially different than I have for the last 15 years.

I am re-discovering the joy and awe of discovery. There is so much out there that gets left behind when your mind is absorbed, consumed, by a single devouring purpose. I am awakening from that period, and finding that my mental indigestion requires the soothing relief of the new and unexpected.

ZenWife says this one is the best one so far.

What do you think?

Some mornings, the world looks like this.

I love my medications.

Our colocation facility will be undergoing a power outage tonight/tomorrow morning. I apologize for this, but I’m not the only one it’s affecting, and no one is happy about it.

UPDATE: Power Outage has been re-scheduled. I will post another notice/banner when this date has been passed on to me.

A picture I took last night…