MikeSpike.org » photography

The Crest Challenge

Michael — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 03:22:35 +0000

With so many different brands of toothpaste and different styles that they come in. I’ve always been drawn to the upright “less mess neat squeeze” dispenser. Although this avoids constantly curling up a tube, I’ve always wondered if there’s any toothpaste left once I’ve used all my might to squeeze the crap out of the crest “dispenser.” My main method of extracting every last bit of toothpaste was using the palm of my hand to press all my weight onto the toothpaste against corner of the sink. Enough prelude, on with the experiment.

My tools:

The sissors met the crest tube. History will be made!!

I truly didn’t expect what I found after cutting through the tube.

As you can see it’s just a simple aluminum bag filled with toothpaste…looks like there’s still some left in the tube but not as much as I thought would be left. Who knows…after this little experiment I my change to tubes, they cost left and have more. You know every cents counts especially with crazy high gas prices.

Trippy Photo plugin

Michael — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:52:48 +0000

So with the endless amount of new things that I get to encounter at my job I was shown the coolest photo plugin for firefox. A professor who is always scouring the infinite corners of the internet just to find things that students have not yet discovered stumbled across a plugin called Piclens. This little small 2MB plugin turns your facebook or google image search pages into a 3D frontrow like environment of picture bliss. The best thing about this clever plugin is that it’s totally free! What I’ve found particularly helpful is when I’m searching in google for a specific photo, using Piclens I can scroll into what seems an endless 3D wall of pictures. Find the one you want, just click on it and it immediately zooms into view. The picture’s resolution then becomes magically crisp. Brilliant!!

On thing I love about the way it interfaces with the broswer is that whenever you mouse over a picture on an approved site that it works with (google, facebook, myspace…and some more) it will show a small blue icon in the lower left corner of the image. So if you don’t want to view the picture(s) in Piclens, its so easy to bypass it. I definitely will put this on my list of favorite plugins for firefox. For Safari users, I believe at the current moment they are trying to work on making it compatible with the current version. Good luck..

What’s happening to the moon?!?!

Michael — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:49:34 +0000

At 7:40pm yesterday I received a call from my friend while I was chowing down on some good ole Elizabeth’s Pizza and watching a good movie. My friend announced that the lunar eclipse was happening. Being that this doesn’t happen very often I threw down my greasy piece of pizza and ran toward the door. (I get too excited sometimes about things) Running outside I looked eastward and indeed the moon had a shadow almost a pacmac look. I had to get a picture of this so I scrambled for my car to get the tripod out which I have readily available at all times….well not really. As I was getting the tripod set up I saw this flash coming from behind me which lit up the whole area. I first thought…there aren’t any storms around here….it couldn’t be lightning. What was it…oh well keep working. Flash!! It happened again…it was a neighbor trying to take a picture of the moon from inside their condo standing in-front of a window. Using flash!!!! ahhhhhhh I say no more.Needless to say I got some descent shoots of the moon while using a 200mm lense WITHOUT flash. =)

Actual Picture