tasuki’s blog

I’ve just spent a wonderful week in Risoul (their web sucks big time, but I feel compelled to link it anyway).

It was a great trip, the weather was nice (mostly sunny but some clouds too, which was good because the snow usully kept bellow zero even in the afternoon).

Out of the six days of skiing, I fell three times:

The first one was classical – I was trying to do a left turn, but my left ski got stuck in a pile of snow. Subsequently, the binding let go and I fell in a magnificent way, providing entertainment for the few onlookers.

The second one was just plain stupid and boring. I was trying to brake by making a 180˚ turn at a very low speed (always a bad idea). Of course the heavy snow layer was a bit thicker than I expected, so I fell over.

The third one was nasty, I was just practicing carving skiing and was inspecting my last carved turn (carving turns usually throw you out at a fairly high speed). It was in the morning, the pistes were groomed and there weren’t many people. I thought it was all clear and easy, but apparently I missed the fact that the piste was going quite a bit uphill. As I approached this uphill at a fairly high speed and completely unaware, it cought me by surprise and threw me on my back. I managed to stand up without losing much speed, but after stopping, I noticed that my right thumb was really hurting.

After that, the thumb was growing for about an hour. It grew so much that removing my glove showed impossible (in the evening I somehow managed, but it took a lot of effort and it was rather painful). Now (after more than three days), I can move my thumb and use it for simple tasks that do not require much power.

I spent the first three days skiing the boring same style I’ve practiced for all my life. It’s quite elegant, but not quite as enjoyable. I just go down the hill, letting the ski slip vertically. I think I got quite good at it, but it requires quite a steep slope to reach a good speed, and I was always really bored on the less steep pistes, waiting for a place to gain some speed.

Carving style, on the other hand, is much more dynamical. You retain your speed, because by doing the turn using the edge of the ski, you effectively avoid skidding.

So I spent the other three days trying to learn carve turns and I think I succeeded. Because of the hurt thumb, I got rid of the poles and I found out that they were in fact quite useless.

Mhmm, this post is getting quite long, so I’d better stop it soon… anyways, if you have read this far — have a look at my photo gallery from Risoul!

Maybe you noticed the new cathegory in the sidebar – “tasuki elsewhere”.

It’s not like I publish anything on youtube or deviantart, but I do use the “favorite” feature.

My deviantart favourites contain a lot of pictures of nature (often landscapes), many nude chicks and some great vector art by celsojunior. All in all, if you have at least two minutes, have a look at it!

On youuutube, I have organized my favourites into playlists. These are in facts not playlists but just categories. Some of the videos are utterly hilarious, so if you have like, errrm, 5 hours, make sure you watch them all!

As a side note, I’m at my sister’s computer now (but running my X programs through ssh) because my LCD is being repaired, and I have to say that this is for sure the worst keyboard I have ever used.

Well… where to start?

The other day I read a complaint on Keoblog that all the wordpress blogs look the same: Kubrick theme. Well, I used to use it too. With that dark image in the header which didn’t fit there at all.

So I thought it was time to do a redesign… I did some search and found a template containing the functions that I need to call in proper loops. Needless to say, I’d hate it if I had to explore all the wordpress functions just to make a different design. I started writing the css from scratch and editing the template files. The design was created in the Chaotic Way ™. I had no idea what I was about to create, I just knew that I wanted the header image to stay where it was and that I would like to have some light green (CF0, more exactly) in it.

I couldn’t get the colours right (as usual). It was looking real awful, until I tried to make the whole background (which was previously white, black, and all kinds of grey) green. Suddenly, I got a surprisingly good looking contrast. The rest was a piece of cake… Well, in fact it all took me about 10 hours and that’s without the bubble strip (which I added today) and smilies.

Oh yeah, smilies… you know the gorgeous looking smilies I used to have here? They are gone (and I also broke the backward compatibility, so some of them will not be displayed and you will see text instead). They were way too big and broke the text flow, so I basically stopped using them in the text. And they were transparent gif’s. Ooops, as we all know, gif has no partial transparency, so the borders of the smiley are just fading to white. If you put such a smiley on a black background, it is ugly. So I took the small invision smilies (16×16 pixels) and had some fun with GIMP (normally I don’t link to such obvious things, but I think I should at least share a little bit of google love).

How to make full transparent images in GIMP? First, you have to convert the picture (if it is indexed) to RGB (use menu Image > Mode > RGB). Now you just choose Layer > Transparency > Color to alpha. Then you have to repaint (or copy from a backup that you had made) the places which really should be white (like eyes). There is one drawback to this method: the light parts are semi-transparent. You can either copy these parts from the original smiley or just let them be semi-transparent (it usually doesn’t hurt to have the smiley a bit darker on a dark background and it will look exactly the same as original on white background).

Oh well, that’s it… no more writing for me… now it’s your turn to write your remarks (noticed the “be the first to comment”? )

“Little Feather McAbony” (the Czech title is “Dál než východ slunce”) is the title of a book written by Eran Kroband.

I got this book for Christmas, back in high school, a few years ago. And now comes the queer part – I don’t know who gave it to me.

In high school, we used to give each other just very small presents (like funny pencil or something similar). This was a hardcover book, that in itself made it quite special. First I thought it was a kind of game, the person who gave it to me hiding and letting me guess. I read the book, and although I enjoyed it, I was not a bit closer to knowing whom I got it from. So then I went around asking people, but no one knew anything. Someone obviously had to put the book under the tree, right? It’s not like this was ever done ultra secretly…

I’ve had the book for several years, read it several times, and searched for any possible clues (in the storyline, something marked somewhere, etc) to no avail…