EA: The Human Story

If true, this shocking story from the spouce of an Electronic Arts employee is terrible! They’re expected to work up to 11 hours a day, 6 days a week, and not just at the end of a project either!
I knew that the game industry was tough but that’s crazy and illegal too as they’re not being compensated for the extra hours worked. There’s 15 pages of comments too so it touched a nerve with lots of people.
Slashdot has more.

WordPress Multiuser, Nov. 10 Snapshot

You can now download the November 10th snapshot of WordPress MU. Go check the download page for links to tarballs and zip files!
Changes:

  • Added Kitten’s Spaminator plugin.
  • Added “Hide internal links” and “Hide direct links” options to referer listing.
  • Added Inline comments. You’ll need to add “blog-comments.html” to your template directory to enable it though.
  • Fixed paging of categories.
  • Misc bug fixes and WP upgrades.

Levels Tool – white, black and grey to the rescue!

Everyone who’s done any processing of photos will know about the Auto button of their Colour Level tool. It’s something that probably appears in every decent photo manipulation application and it’s invaluable for correcting colour casts on photos. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work very well.
The GIMP offers 3 buttons next to the Auto function and with these three buttons it’s possible to pick out elements of the image under examination that are either black, white, or grey! Click the white button, then click an area of the photo that should be white. Do the same for grey and black if needs be.
I only (re?)discovered how useful these were this evening when I was trying to colour correct a photo taken indoors, but with the white-balance set to "cloudy". The picture appeared too rich, Auto levels made it green but by clicking the white button and then on a fridge in the background the photo was suddenly almost perfect! I’m not going to post that image but here are two I made earlier…

Local History, Global Reach

Iniscarra Cemetery, just a few miles from where I work, holds the remains of one "Mary William, daughter of John Stewart of Belfast. Wife of the very reverend Theophilius Blakely, Dean of Down". She’s also the mother of Captain Theophilus Alexander Blakely, a prolific designer of rifled cannon and the inscription on the side of his mother’s tomb bears witness to that:

Mother of Captain Blakely Royal Artillery. Original inventor of improvements in cannon and the greatest artillerist of the age.

A quick search proved useful and it was sobering to find a connection between my locality and the American Civil War!

The Digital Journalist – November 2004

The latest issue of the excellent The Digital Journalist is out now! There’s a feature presentation on body painting and tatoos, South Africa plus an opinion piece by James Colburn entitled, “Don’t Ask”.

I hate to tell you this, but we’re screwed. By “we” I don’t just mean photojournalists but journalists in general. And not just the select few that cover the White House but journalists all over the country. You are going to see less, hear less and be able to report less.