How to make your Adium icon fiery

Here’s a fun tip on creating a fiery looking buddy icon in Adium for OSX.

1. Take picture in Photo Booth, or directly from Adium’s ImagePicker
2. Click spiral effect button, then choose the Color Invert filter
3. Click Set to apply filter
4. Click your buddy icon, click Choose Icon
5. Repeat steps 2 – 4 and apply the filters False Color, then Concert
6. Voila – your buddy icon is red hot!

Typically I’ll take my photos using Photo Booth so I can keep the original, and sometimes I may even use that picture for my dailymugshot.  When you walk through these filters, you’ll notice some filters won’t work as well for some photos, so play around with what you use.  Sometimes I’ll replace Color Invert with X-Ray, or Concert with Gamma Adjust.  It all depends on the picture I choose for a buddy icon.  Sometimes I’ll just keep layering until I create some crazy looking buddy icon, go crazy!

Here’s a photo step by step so you can see the final product.

1.The Original

2.Color Invert

3.False Color

4.Concert

I can finally slap-a-da bass

Here’s my new 5 string Carvin Icon bass ( IC5WP ).  Not the best photo shoot, but good enough.  I’m in love with this bass.  It took me almost two years of waiting, and now my precious is in my possession.  While I doubt this will be my last bass, this is the Carvin I’ve been waiting for.

When the bass arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find the new HC8 bass case.  When I placed my order, I decided to get the ABS Hardshell Bass Case since I had the vintage tweed last time.  The ABS is the fatter rocker case.  This HC8N case is hot.  Tight and slim just like the tweed case which I had with my previous bass.  Thank you for sending me the hot case Carvin

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

Here are the specs of my new funk machine :

• 5 string Carvin Icon ( IC5WP  – Walnut with Piezo pickups )
• FW4 – Bookmatched Figured Claro Walnut Top
• NWAL – Walnut Neck & Body
• CS – Satin Matte Finish
• 5WM – Walnut Neck w/ 2 Maple Stripes
• 5W – Asymetrical Wide 5 String Neck
• CSN – Clear Satin Finish Back Of Neck
• BMF – Birdseye Maple Fingerboard
• ABD – Abalone Dot Inlays
• STF – Stainless Med-Jumbo Frets
• R14 – 14in Fretboard Radius (Standard)
• SP2 – 2 Soapbar Pickups
• BC – Black Hardware
• WL – White Logo
• SL – Dunlop Straplocks
• HC8N Tolex Bass Case

Use Excel to help shortcut forms development

If you have MS Excel installed, and you do any sort of form based programming, this trick is right up your alley.   Excel’s drag to auto-number is one of my all time favorite features.  Often times I end up working on large form based applications and love firing up TextPad and Excel to help shortcut the time it takes to write my form handling code.

This video shows this trick in action.  Unfortunately the code is barely legible due to the zoom level, but the concept should still come through.

http://www.screentoaster.com/swf/STPlayer.swf

This was made using Screentoaster.com