In their known loud and powerful manner Disturbed has released a single with an extremely touching video for the song Another Way To Die. The video was directed by Robert Schober. The album Asylum has been released 4 days ago and according to MTV it’s selling perfectly.

Both song and video give attention to global warning and how we treat the world we live in, an important message, that Disturbed is not the first to deliver, but that is packed into this song wonderfully.

Disturbed – Another Way To Die:

The time bomb is ticking
and no one is listening
Our future is fading
Is there any hope we’ll survive?

Still, we ravage the world that we love
And the millions cry out to be saved
Our endless maniacal appetite
Left us with another way to die

Today we started using Photoshop and doing some simple tasks with it. It wasn’t that hard, but a little disturbing that my books have not arrived yet. Most people around had their troubles making the Mac do what they wanted it too pretty humorous. Wel also got our first assignment today, and I’m totally excited about realising it Really have to jump into the Adobe stuff to at least be able to do what I so far learned in Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender and various more. I’ll install Gimp, just in case something is bugging me too much. So far “how to do $keyword in Photoshop CS5″ is my favourite google query. The woman (actually it’s not to bring the gender up for discussion, just to give further details) teaching us in Design is really kind, she’s just very busy and I guess I came up with some very deep or tricky questions today, but she’s helping anyways. It’s her first year, so I hope I soon can assist helping the people not really into this right now.

I also got my tablet working with some drivers that actually shouldn’t be used with it. I use a Trust TB-6300 and got these drivers for a “Slimline Design Tablet for Mac”. Well, who am I to care, it works

The first day at NoMA actually was pretty nice. We all introduced ourselves and had some formal stuff organized.
We’re three groups of ca 20 students each. There’s two groups with danish student and an international group. We were told what we had to learn in the first semester and that we should complain or work on other skills if we already knew the topics. At 12:00 the ones who had ordered the MacBooks fetched them and signed the paper. One of the teachers sounded a lot like an Apple fan boy, describing this moment as life-changing. I was very close to telling, that I see it as a tool and it for me it is the lesser of two evils. I’ve just flapped it open and I am writing this in the main building.
I guess I’ll have plenty to do the next days, diving into the Adobe Creative Suite CS5 before we take off for camping with all of us on Thursday and Friday. I’m really looking forward to the lessons, because we were already told, that we would get heavier tasks if we were ahead on something. Awesome! Now everybody laugh at me, I bought a MacBook Pro, specs: 15” core i5, 2,4 ghz/4gb/320gb/hdg/geforce

It really is the LESSER of two evils, because I have not planned to go back to Windows after all these years, but the Creative Suite, which is industries standard, wont really run on Linux (thanks Adobe, you really really lazy, greedy people). I guess I’ll be happier on a Unix-like System, than on Redmonds ball of garbage It’s performing well so far, but I’m still looking for a Chromium build for MacOS and get used to the (ridiculous) key bindings



(If you don’t see something like this after clicking the image, please update your browser)

As I’ve mentioned I want to learn more JavaScript. Today I’ve played around a little with some chapters of JavaScript lessons and CSS3. What you see above is generated without any graphics. Just with JavaScript and CSS3. The gradient feature in CSS3 is really a charm. If you don’t want to get a headache over coding the gradients yourself, there are some generators for it around, like http://gradients.glrzad.com/.

See the JavaScript Demo here (or click the image).

Code for Clock:

<script type="text/javascript">
function clock(){
var now =  new Date();
var hour = now.getHours();
var minutes = now.getMinutes();
minutes = (minutes <; 10 ? "0" : "") + minutes;
hour = (hour <; 10 ? "0" : "") + hour;
var time = hour + ':' + minutes;
document.getElementById('block').innerHTML = time;
setTimeout('clock()','1000');
}
clock();
</script>

Code for background gradient (both for Webkit and Mozilla):

background: -webkit-gradient(
 linear,
 left bottom,
 left top,
 color-stop(0.5, rgb(0,0,0)),
 color-stop(0.98, rgb(77,77,77))
);
background: -moz-linear-gradient(
 center bottom,
 rgb(0,0,0) 50%,
 rgb(77,77,77) 98%
);
}

Code for rounded corners:

border-top-left-radius: 50px 80px;
border-top-right-radius: 50px 80px;
border-bottom-left-radius: 50px 80px;
border-bottom-right-radius: 50px 80px;

The full source code, as always, is available through CTRL+U ;)

As you can see on the image above, it’s shot in the rain, but how do you protect your loved camera in this shitty weather? How do you keep drops on your lense from ruining your pictures or forcing you to spend hours retouching them?

What you will need is a UV-Filter (like the hama you see here) fitting your lense. I bought one for my EOS 18-55mm Kit lense which has a 58mm diameter. UV-Filters are extremely handy for protecting your lense from dust, rain or other fluids, plus they are a lot easier to keep clean. You have to watch out for more reflections though. The prize of this one was about 13€, so it’s one of the cheap ones, but will do quite well. The second thing you need is a package of cleaning wipes for glasses, you probably know them if you wear glasses yourself. They are fairly cheap, so just stop by your local supermarket and see what they have.With your UV-Filter attached, out in the rain, you just wipe off drops with the cleaning wipes, it will dry in seconds! That is because of the chemicals used, leaving no marks behind.
Important: Don’t ever do that to your lense! You’ll risk scratching it or harming the coating!

About the rest of the camera: most DSLR bodies don’t bother much when they get a few drops of water, check your manual for further details.

After shooting, put your camera back into your bag, clean it later, if necessary. My camera bag isn’t waterproof, but it’s thick enough to keep the rain out for a good amount of time. In case of unplanned, longer stays in wet weather or really heavy rain, I keep a small plastic bag in there, I can pull over, which keeps it dry.
As you can see, this equiptment is very low budget (my camera bag was about 20€) so I guess it’s worth trying.
Thank you all for reading and I hope you can benefit a little from my experience