Ally Bank wants its customers to invent their own personal secret questions and answers; the idea is that an operator will read the question over the phone and listen for an answer. Ignoring for the moment the problem of the operator now knowing the question/answer pair, what are some good pairs? Some suggestions:
Q: Do you know why I think you're so sexy?
A: Probably because you're totally in love with me.Q: Need any weed? Grass? Kind bud? Shrooms?
A: No thanks hippie, I'd just like to do some banking.Q: The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men.
A: Go forth, and kill. Zardoz has spoken.Q: What the hell is your fucking problem, sir?
A: This is completely inappropriate and I'd like to speak to your supervisor.Q: I've been embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from my employer, and I don't care who knows it.
A: It's a good thing they're recording this call, because I'm going to have to report you.Q: Are you really who you say you are?
A: No, I am a Russian identity thief.
Okay, now it's your turn.
Schneier on Security: Fun with Secret Questions
- Jeremy Zawodnyhhahahaa...
- Jeremy ZawodnySchneirer refers to an LJ post! funny :)
- 9000The Iterative Web App: Redesign of the Compose Page
- Rob Diana
What is My Dog Dreaming Of? is a post from Chris Pirillo
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Pixie is a lot of fun to watch when she’s sleeping. She seems to have extremely vivid dreams. I can’t help but wonder at times what’s running through her mind when she’s asleep and reacting to her dreams this way.
Maybe she’s dreaming of more tasty treats? Perhaps she’s thinking about a nice, fresh lawn (since the grass in the backyard was just replaced with new sod). I bet she’s tossing around a new toy, though. Just look at those hind legs move!
What dreams do you think are in Pixie’s head?
Carnegie apparently said, "Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors......Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory."
Is there a typical large corporation working today that still believes this?
Most organizations now have it backwards. The factory, the infrastructure, the systems, the patents, the process, the manual... that's king. In fact, shareholders demand it.
It turns out that success is coming from the atypical organizations, the ones that can get back to embracing irreplaceable people, the linchpins, the ones that make a difference. Anything else can be replicated cheaper by someone else.
Sharing: Losing Andrew Carnegie http://bit.ly/aoHXQN
- Rob DianaLosing Andrew Carnegie
- Chris BroganLosing Andrew Carnegie
- Ted LouieLosing Andrew Carnegie http://goo.gl/KAm8
- Ryan SingerLosing Andrew Carnegie
- Ryan Singer
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mark Upfield - www.MUphotographic.com
In short, bracketing is taking the same photo more than once using different settings for different exposures. Why would you do this? Say you’re photographing a mountain landscape. The grass would require one setting to be properly exposed, the mountains would require another and the sky yet another. But you can only choose one setting for one photo. Shoot! Now what? Try bracketing!
If you know about exposure, you’ll know the different ways to adjust your camera settings to manipulate your exposure. One is to change the aperture, another is the shutter speed and the third is ISO.
What I’ve just suggested poses a problem. How are you going to take three different photos exactly the same if you’re moving your camera to change your settings? A tripod? Yea, but what if it’s your kids on the beach and you want to bracket to get your kids, the sand, the sea and the sky all exposed properly? Your DSLR has the answer!
Automatic Exposure Bracketing is a function most DSLRs have to take three photos with only one click of the shutter, each in different exposures. The result will be one photo a bit too bright, one just right (depending on which part you’re looking to expose properly) and one a bit darker.
You will have to consult your camera’s manual (or just Google it exe: “AEB Canon 7D”) to discover how to access this function.
So now you have three of the same photo. What do you do with it? Well, you may just discover that one of them was just right even though it wasn’t the settings you would have normally used and you’re thankful that you used AEB to help you out. Another way is to do something like in this tutorial for PS where the author shows you how to combine more than one photo to use the best bits from each one to create a perfectly exposed shot. Btw – for us PSE users, a little tweaking of the method will be required since we don’t have layer masks but that’s really not a problem here.
Another method for using bracketed images is called ‘exposure fusing‘ . It’s really unfortunate that this is such a new technique that there isn’t yet a very easy way of doing it but keep your eye out because I think it’s going to be big news very soon.
A very popular method for blending bracketed photos is called HDR and it’s all the rage. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and it’s purpose is to take an image where there are extreme lights and extreme darks and properly blend the two together to create an image with a…well…high dynamic range! But HDR doesn’t come without a bit of controversy. There’s a bigger battle over whether HDR is good or bad than the argument over Canon vs. Nikon. Why the controversy? Well, mostly (and simply) because many people who practise HDR overdo it to create images which are quickly identifiable as HDR images and many photographers judge that this is a cheap trick.
Sure, lots of HDR is ‘overdone’ and bizarre, but if that’s the photographer’s vision and goal, then it doesn’t matter. I feel very strongly that photography can only be liked or disliked but cannot be judged in the ways people try to judge it.
The most popular way to combine three or more bracketed images in the HDR style is a cheap program called Photomatix and this tutorial will show you more about how to do it.
Post from: Digital Photography School - Photography Tips.
Bracketing – What Is It and What to do with the Images?
"In short, bracketing is taking the same photo more than once using different settings for different exposures. Why would you do this? Say you’re photographing a mountain landscape. The grass would require one setting to be properly exposed, the mountains would require another and the sky yet another. But you can only choose one setting for one photo. Shoot! Now what? Try bracketing!"
- Kol Tregaskes
