Obama visits the Star

Posted by Matthew on April 26, 2008 at 10:38 am

Yesterday candidate Barack Obama visited the building where I work in downtown Indianapolis, at The Indianapolis Star. He was there to meet with our editorial board. I didn’t get to see him unfortunately, since he came in through a back entrance and was quickly whisked away to the board room, and an internal memo asked us all not to crowd the hallways so he could quickly get in an out. But it was cool that he was there, and there was a live video stream of the meeting. I left work while he was still inside, and got to see his entourage and security force. They were everywhere…and yes, some of those secret service agents look absolutely scary. When the elevator doors opened on the ground floor, I looked up and saw a giant in a dark gray suit and an earpiece staring down at me through dark slitted eyes. I almost didn’t get out of the elevator.

Obama was visiting because for the first time in my memory, Indiana matters in this election. The primary is so close that both Democratic candidates need our electoral votes to seal a victory. Polls show Obama up slightly here, although Clinton is practically within the margin of error. Every poll ever conducted on the subject, though, shows that Obama provides much more competition for John McCain than Clinton would, so from a purely numbers standpoint I have to wonder why Democrats wouldn’t just choose the candidate that has the best chance against the other party. I guess we’ll find out soon enough — there’s not many primaries left.

Tags: Personal, Politics

1 comment »

The robots are out there…in your browser

Posted by Matthew on April 10, 2008 at 9:26 am

There’s a fun little easter egg in the latest version of the popular FireFox browser (currently in Beta 5 for version 3, final release due out very soon): if you type “about:robots” in the address bar, you get the above screen with some fun info about our mechanical friends. All the “facts” are references to various books, movies, and TV shows — The Day The Earth Stood Still, Asimov’s I, Robot, Blade Runner, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and my personal favorite at the end (”And they have a plan”) is an homage to the cylons in Battlestar Galactica.

Tags: Funny, Tech, Web

Comment on The robots are out there…in your browser »

Remove crowds with Photoshop

Posted by Matthew on April 9, 2008 at 8:42 am

How many times have you seen something that had the potential to be a really great picture, but there were just too many people in the way? More times than I can remember, personally. As it turns out, there’s a way to get that shot.

I came across this really cool Photoshop tip the other day while listening to the TWiP (This Week in Photography) podcast. One of the podcast regulars, Fred Johnson, put a little screencast up on his site about how to remove people (or any other non-stationary object) from a photograph. Well, technically, a series of photographs. Basically, take several shots of a scene with the camera in the same location (obviously a tripod would be best, but Photoshop can align the images if necessary), load them into a single layer, and then use Photoshop’s Layer > Smart Objects > Stack Mode > Median. This analyzes the image set and removes the delta pixels, leaving you with a people-less picture. Very cool technique, and something I’m sure a lot of people will find useful.

Screencast: Removing crowds with Photoshop

Tags: Design

Comment on Remove crowds with Photoshop »