Two Decades Of Transplanted Heads

Since I have fallen into weird a custom of recognizing geeky website birthdays, I might as well go ahead and add software to the mix and wish Photoshop a very happy 20th birthday!! I can't begin to describe how much this program has changed the art of photography, for better and worse.

Photoshop 1.0 was released on February 18th, 1990 and was in its early years, a Mac-only program. Over the last 20 years it has become the defacto standard for digital photographic editing.

Thanks to Photoshop you can do anything to a photograph that your imagination permits, and it's the main reason you can no longer trust an image to be real.

Happy Pixels, Photoshop.


Photoshop 1.0 (1990) and CS4 (2009) interfaces:

Plastic Pixels

...and because everything that can be made can be made better in LEGO, here is the LEGO version of Adams' "Moon And Half Dome".

Blu Ray Blues

So, I got a couple of Blu-Ray movies. In case you don't read Gizmodo as often as I do, Blu-Ray is the proposed replacement for DVD. It's got brilliant 1080p high-definition video and up to 8 channels of uncompressed audio. It is to DVD just about what DVD was to VHS, a giant leap ahead in terms of quality.

But...you may be wondering why I ordered movies for a player I don't have, and probably won't have anytime soon. Well, I had CDs well before I owned a CD player. I also possessed several DVDs before I got my first DVD player.

I guess I don't want to come home the day I finally get the device and not have anything to watch :)

I only buy the flicks I really love and want to watch over and over. Movies like The Seven Samurai, and Unforgiven and The Big Lebowski. And I'll only buy a movie on Blu-Ray of it is significantly superior to the DVD version.

Yesterday I saw a sale on Amazon and ordered one of our favorite "Holiday" movies, The Nightmare Before Christmas, on Blu. My trusted reviewer at Digital Bits says it looks incredible. And also the brand-spanking-new digital restoration of Sleeping Beauty, which by all accounts looks better than the original prints shown in theaters in 1959. The 6-million dollar movie that Walt himself was most proud of.

So, one day when we do get the player, we'll be ready to go.

Until then...well...um...they'll just sit here looking shiny and cool and inert.