citizen of the planet

This banner was an interesting one to create.  The original picture was taken by me back in November 2007.  While visiting relatives in Phoenix suburb they decided that it would a good thing for us to have a look at the Grand Canyon.  So, we spend a couple of hours travelling north and eventually made it to the South Rim.  I don’t recall why I didn’t have a camera on me at the time, so I ended up shooting some pictures with my cell phone.  Here’s the picture:

So, first of all you’ll notice how the colours are quite different.  The original looks kind of washed out, no?  Well, the colours in the canyon were amazing, but not quite vivid–at least, not like what I saw in Sedona.  For the banner, I cropped the image, then changed the white balance to tend toward cooler hues.  I then cranked the saturation way up, making the colours more vivid.  I then made the red hues a lot stronger.  Lastly, I turned down the brightness a notch while raising the contrast level.  The banner above is the end result.  Big difference, no?

Most of my thoughts over the past few days have been dominated by the race and all of the necessary preparations.  However, that wasn’t the only interesting thing that happened over the weekend.  On Saturday I actually attended a small get together of some other bloggers in the Toronto area belonging to the 20SB group.  That group is a community of sorts for twenty-somethings that blog.  I joined that group a while back and over time it’s put me in contact with a group of people that I would likely have never have known about otherwise.

It’s really fascinating how a group of relative strangers can get to know each other and feel slightly familiar without ever having met.  For the most part, reading the thoughts that these people have put online as well as having a look at the occasional photo have brought life into the words.  Part of me knows that there is a living, breathing, angsting 20-something on the other end typing away and crafting their own niche of the Internet.  Even so, the image that’s most often generated in my mind is pretty much limited to an avatar and a generic voice.  In the end, even if we’re in the same region, there’s a tendency to just draw a line and note the separation.  It’s like: I’m doing my own thing, and they’re doing their own thing…and there’s the vast wasteland of the Internet that separates us.  And so, this is where the meet up comes in.  Bloggers tend to share personal thoughts and feelings, right?  All of that is still impersonal to some extent.  It really only becomes truly personal and engaging when your mind can make the connection between the words you see and an actual person that you’ve met.  And that’s why I’m thankful to have had this weekend to meet some these people.

Now, I suppose I won’t go into too much detail over what I saw and what happened because, really, Erin already wrote about the night and put a good amount of detail into it.  At this point I don’t think there’s all that much to add, if I’m being honest.  Yes, it’s possible to meet a couple of crazies on the Internet, but immediately I knew that this wasn’t one of those times.  From first impressions it seemed like everyone had a good head on their shoulders, which made me feel a bit relieved.  If everyone was completely out to lunch I would have been running for the hills.  Luckily, we all had a good time.  I think there’s a great related point that Erin brought up in her post.  We were kind of taught early on about the perils of meeting people online.  Well this time nothing went wrong.

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little worried about how I’d be received.  I think I came off well.  Prior to the event I told myself that if I just acted like my usual self I’d be fine.  In the end, I really was fine.  Then again, I think the fact that this wasn’t the first time I had met people from the Internet helped me keep things in perspective.  Prior to this, there was that cross-Japan tour that I did with a guy from Connecticut that I knew through a forum.  Two years before that there was the Tokyo tour with nine others whom I hadn’t met at all.  Interesting to note that I’m good friends now with one of those people.  And before that there was a small group I met at what must have been the 2005 Fan Expo.  So no, meeting people from the online world isn’t too new to me at all.  Don’t get me wrong, the results can still be a bit too wacky for my tastes, but overall it’s been all right.

Hear that everyone?  You’re aaaaaaaall right.

OK, so I’ve fallen asleep on the couch again while writing this so I’m ending this entry right here.

Just a few words on the new banner up top.  Prior to selecting an image I decided that I’d pick out the theme’s blue scheme for the month.  Having decided on that bit, I set out to pick a picture that suited that hue.  Going through my photos I found a picture of Niagara Falls that I had archived.  I have a lot of pictures of the Horseshoe Falls, but for composition I decided to pick this one of the American side.

So, the first thing I did was resize and crop it to an eye-catching portion.  I then adjusted the white balance.  For outside photos, the white balance tends more toward bluer light.  After that I used an automatic saturation balancing tool, which cranked up the blue saturation even more.  The result is the image in the banner, which really does look like a painting; the blueness of the Niagara river is rather striking.

The original image can be found below for reference.

Yes, it’s late. I just spent the last one or two hours creating some new header images for the theme to randomly pick from. It’s been an interesting process because it allowed me a chance to scour through my hard drive of photos to find some candidates for header images. Some of the older pictures from years ago were pretty low-res. You can tell from the results. In other cases, the picture was actually taken with my cell phone creating for weird colouration. There were some photos that looked pretty cool on their own, but lost their impact when limited to a window of 226 pixels. I added descriptions to the pictures I chose. I’m not sure if I’m liking the pixel font I chose. The font is meant to be 7 pixels high, but that was far too small for my liking. As such, there’s some heavy duty anti-aliasing going on.

Right now there are 11 images:

• Niagara Falls, Ontario
• Seafort Square, Tokyo, JP
• Chinatown, Yokohama, JP
• Big Buddha, Kamakura, JP
• Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
• Fairmont Royal York, Toronto, Ontario
• Old City Hall, Toronto, Ontario
• Wall Street, New York, New York
• Air Canada Centre, Toronto, Ontario
• Yonge St., Toronto, Ontario
• Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario

Let me know if there’s a particular one that’s pretty cool, or if there’s one that just doesn’t work. Any opinion would be helpful. Thanks!

ETA: OK, so after sitting with it for a day or so, I’m realizing that not all images work that well as a header. As well, having a random header can be distracting. So I’m going to pick one header image and stick with it for a month or whatever time period. The first one I’m choosing will be Seafort Square. If you see fire above it’s because I still haven’t uploaded it. Keep an eye out!