The Lava Bot

Well it looks as if we need to make some serious choices with our government, as they just will not stop spending will they? They just keep blowing money on all sorts of crap, none of really relevant to anything in the Constitution, except the military expenditures perhaps.

Nevertheless it is time to downsize and cut costs right? Sure and how are we going to do that? Well we can do what corporations do when they have had enough of the BS of over regulation, class action lawsuits and government fines. Move your corporate offices offshore and outsource your factories to another nation. That is what they do.

Well it is time to cut costs and save the taxpayers some money so it looks as if we should outsource our government to India. You see all the government produces in excuses and shuffles paper work. It produces stuff like a modern day factory, as our government produces bureaucracy.

Surely in India they can do the same but much cheaper and therefore we can save taxpayers money and reduce the National Debt before the government spends us into oblivion and it is too late. We must Outsource our Government to India and Save Taxpayers Money! Consider this in 2006 and vote for Lance.

Filed by admin at 11:08 pm under Geek Stuff Center
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Several years ago I spent a nice summer in Europe, visiting great countries like Spain, France and Netherlands. I brought a huge collection of digital photos from this trip and wanted to share them with my friends and relatives. I started to look for the software that can generate photo albums to upload them to my homepage and was quite dissapointed with the quality of the thumbnails pages - even though the pages themselves looked fine - the small pictures were just resized originals, rectangles, the one-pixel frame around them was the best that I could found those times. What I wanted is something like bevel effect or frame effect around the thumbnail and a shadow to make it look more 3D, alive and fancy.

Then I thought that it could be easily done just saving a script in Paint Shop Pro with bevel, frame and shadow effects, and then running batch on all my gallery photos. But I figured out that I can’t create HTML pages along with my generated thumbnails.

So I decided that we might develop that kind of software ourselves. At that times we were a team of software developers that were working on projects for the offshore business. I talked to guys and after some planning we started on this project.

Picture Frame: The main goal was to create nice looking, stylish thumbnails, so we started with a picture frame. The frame looks like a conventional picture frame, so you can specify frame thickness, give it round edges, specify the frame height, light direction, overlay any texture - for example any wood or marble and give it 3D shape. But if you want - you can create all sorts of fancy frames with acid textures and irregular borders - it depends on what style do you want!

Bevel: Another effect I always wanted was Bevel - it is an effect that makes your picture look three dimentional, thus more effective and striking. Also - rounded edges together with bevel give us nice and extreemly good-looking thumbnails. Almost what I wanted…

Mask: But what about other shapes? Rounded rectangle was not enough for me, so here is where the masks come out! I was really amazed, I remember, how effective the masked thumbnail looks together with beveled edges, just pick a mask and bevel does the rest. Or create a frame and apply a mask to make irregular shape for the frame.

Also we created many other features like HTML gallery templates, e-mail sending, batch processing and others, here I just wanted to point out why we started this project - we wanted our galleries to look unique, stylish and fancy, and we think we did it! You can try it yourself - the program is called Photo Shaman.

Mark Loumbert - Communication Director and CEO, Brave Orange. http://www.photoshaman.com

Filed by admin at 6:35 am under Geek Stuff Center
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