Van Gogh

Google's rendition of their logo in Van Gogh style.

Today, March 30, is Vincent Willem van Gogh's birthday. Born in 1853 and died in 1890, Van Gogh was, without a doubt, the best Dutch and one of the best European painters in art history. Van Gogh produced over 2000 works before his suicidal death in 1890.

Portrait of Doctor Gachet and Irises are two of his most famous and expensive paintings.

Van Gogh painted his works in Belgium, Amsterdam, Drenthe, Nuenen, North Brabant, and finally Montmarte in Paris.

Pencils

Back after a long time :). Before I was sick (I had a 103 fever last week, which also happened to be March Break) and didn't feel like sitting on the computer.

Also, walagata, which is my image hosting service, just increased their hosting size for a Free Account to be 3 MB from 2 MB, which means I just used about half ofthe total.

This is a picture of yellow true HB #2 pencils. Click to enlarge.

Charsadda

This is an image from Charsadda, somewhere north in Pakistan. Taken by I dont know who...

Lots of other things too:
-I got accepted into McMaster and York Univ's
-I came home from work after just an hour yesterday; I was feeling very bad:(
-I had Chinese food at a Thai restaurant two days ago.
-We just had a Majalis at our house on Saturday. There was biryani for lunch.
-I went to visit the University of Toronto at Mississauga on Sunday and saw/sat-in for one of their mini lectures in biology. Pretty rough stuff that was. Dr/Prof said stuff with more substance in 30 mins than I had done in all my Bio classes so far in life.

Im sick

im sick:( I have a fever...


Copyright (c) 1996 Steven J. Dunlop, Nerstrand, MN; released under GFDL; all other rights reserved.

Drive

This is what the Disk Defragger shows when run on a brand new drive. A 160 GB hard drive, completely brand new with only Windows XP, Office 2003 and Lotus installed on it. Click on the image for a larger version.

Sharpening Images

This is my Corel Photopaint tutorial on sharpening images. There are around 500 different tutorials on sharpening images on the net, and I use this one, which I find works best.

1. Open your photo
2. Copy the background layer twice, into Object 1 and Object 2
3. Select middle object, and click Effects à Sharpen à Unsharp Mask
4. Choose Percentage 200, Radius 3 and Threshold 4.
5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4.
6. Make the MERGE MODE for object on the VERY TOP to be IF LIGHTER
7. Make the MERGE MODE for object in the MIDDLE to be IF DARKER
8. Select the OPACITY for the top layer to be 32%, middle layer to be 41 percent.

For a sample, I sharpened this photo:

This is the result:

Click on the images to see a larger version.

French

I was reading over some French homework for my brother, when this occured to me. I realized that there are three expressions in French that are better than their English counterparts:
"Il y a" is better sounding than 'there is' or 'there are'
"Interdit" is way better of a word than 'prohibited' or 'not allowed'; it sounds much better.
"mise en place" is such a good expression compared to 'set up' or 'install'.

Just some randomness ;)

Bored III

The three pictures are from grade 11 english, which was really boring...
The third is from the book cover for Frankenstein.

Bored, Part Deux

The next set of bored pictures. I drew these when I was bored in English class, in the margins of my notes on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the first picture, it's possible to see the notes on chapter five and how Victor was acting at that time in the book.