Little time ago I read PHOTOSHOP magazine for the first time. Polish edition of course. Articles inside maybe weren’t very exciting, but quite educating. Generally it was pretty good level overall. The main drawback is that the magazine is too small. There were articles and tutorials for every level of advancement, but only one or two for each. This way from an 80-page magazine I found only two articles that interested me.

I used to work a lot with Photoshop in the past, but it was usually simple photo editing. I never needed to get into advanced techniques and since I worked a lot - I didn’t. Now, when I have more time for myself, I can spare more time on things that interest me. And so I uses two tutorials to make the following work. One tutorial was about portrait editing, to get the effect as you see, and the second showed how to use zoomify plugin in PS CS3. Zoomify lets you zoom very large images fast, and I guess I will use it often now.

Unfortunately the original photo wasn’t too sharp, so the overall effect while zooming is not so spectacular as it should be.

I like to drink warm yerba mate sometimes, even though I am not such a hotspur like some of my friends or citizens of South America. Once I even bought a gourd - it is very nice to sip such infusion through a bombilla  on a lazy afternoon. Bombilla is a special metal pipe closed on one end, but with little holes. This way parts of the herb don’t go into the pipe.

If you don’t know what is yerba mate, then here I rush to explain. Simply it is a healthier replacement for the tea. Different taste, more vitamins and more stimulating. The main advantage for me is that you can pour water of any temperature onto the herbs and you will still get all the nice things out of it. If one doesn’t like its taste then you can even pour orange juice and then you will receive a drink called ‘mate russo’. Sweet.

Akira movie poster

Akira was the very first manga I saw, while I was aware that there is something called manga. I was a teenager then and the movie impressed me a lot. It was a time when Internet was available throught 5.6kb modems only and movies weren’t so easy to obtain back then. Almost prehistoric times, weren’t they? And it was only like what, 15 years ago?

But returning to Akira, as I said, it impressed me a lot. Even though it is pretty old anime, the aesthetic sphere of the anime stands very high. I guess it showed a specific way to all later cyber and s-f anime. In my feeleing Akira is to cybermanga same as 2001: Space Odyssei to all s-f movies.

In the recent days I found out that I’ve got some gallstones. They will make me a customer of a hospital in a near future, where I will take divorce with my gallbladder. It was nice to know you, you painful @$^#^&!.

The incoming cholecystectomy doesn’t bother me. The thing that I have to be on a special diet bothers me a lot. No chocolate. No eggs. Absolutely no fried food. No fresh bread(!?) …and the worst of all - no strong coffe! I can only drink very light coffe from now on. There is much more of what I cannot eat now, but the list is too long to put it here. Anyway…

…what am I supposed to eat now?! :-/

And here comes the idea. I wonder if a restaurant having special menus for all people who are on different kinds of diets would survive on market? I guess there are very many people who cannot eat different things but they would like to eat something tasty and yet they have to do everything themselves.

Imagine such a restaurant - for example you got diabetes, you simply ask for a special diabetes menu and you can choose anything you like without worrying that it will make you sick. And it tastes well (hopefully).

I wonder if there is such a restaurant somewhere there.

It’s been a while since I bought my Nokia E51 and it seems not so new and great anymore after iPhone and so many other mobile phones have been released. Well, I think it still kicks ass. When I was looking for a new cell phone I was mainly thinking of Internet browsing (using Wi-Fi), checking e-mails and reading ebooks. Nokia E51 does all these things and many more. Since it works on an open source Symbian S60 system, I can download and install (and I did) very many applications like movie player, mp3 player, internet radio (cool!), maps and whatever else comes to your mind.

To be honest, I almost don’t use mp3 player and movie player, I use internet radio from time to time, but I simply love the ebook reader I installed - MobiReader. When I tell people that I read books on my phone, they don’t believe and sometimes they laugh. In fact I find it much easier to read books on my mobile, because the screen is always well visible despite of the light in a room or wherever I am at that moment. It is also very light while big books tire my hand pretty fast. One may tell the screen is small (which is untrue) so the letters will be so little that reading them will tire one’s eyes, but you can amend the size of the letters. Let’s avoid too much talking. Look for yourself (click to enlarge).

What else? Nah, not much, so I will just throw some specifications:

Key Features are:

• HSDPA
• 100 Grams in weight
• 16 Million colours, 2 inches 240×320 pixels display
• WiFi with VOIP capabilities
• Symbian OS 9.1
• 2 Megapixel Camera