Little Boots

Hesketh was born in Blackpool on the Fylde coast in Lancashire and now lives in London. Her father is a businessman and her mother is an author of children’s books. She has three younger brothers. She attended Elmslie Girls’ School[citation needed], Rossall School, Blackpool Sixth Form College and then the University of Leeds, where she gained a first-class honours degree in Cultural Studies, with a dissertation on the concept of originality in jazz, which referenced Jamie Cullum amongst others.

Via: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_boots

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mmmm Fully Loaded Tea

For the past few months I have been enjoying this tea I found, Fully loaded Tea. I was attracted to it first by the packaging then the name. i Guessed Fully loaded meant extra caffeine.

It turns out that it actually means fully loaded with flavor. I have had all sorts of tea’s from bags to loose, Cheep to expensive. This tea is honestly one of my favorites. The first tea i tried was the Goji Force Green Tea containing green tea leaves, natural flavors, goji berries, lingonberries, rose petals, blue mallow flowers. It was smooth and required no sugar or honey. Some Green teas have a slight grassy taste, this is not the case, every flavor is identifiable.

I also tried the Citrus Spiked Black Tea containing black tea leaves, orange peel, orange flowers, safflowers, blue mallow flowers, natural flavors. Again this tea was very tasty, i like this one better with a small amount of honey.

Production has finally started, but not without a couple of snags. Regular teabags couldn’t hold the huge pieces of fruits, berries, and tealeaves in our blends. Luckily, we found finely woven pyramid-shaped bags to hold all the ingredients. And we discovered that running the packing machine twice as slow gave it more time to pack in all the ingredients. After facing all these problems, it seemed quite fitting to call our company “Fully Loaded Tea”.

http://fullyloadedtea.com/story/

Oh and they are Canadian! Go out find some, steep it and enjoy!

Visit - http://www.fullyloadedtea.com/

My New Rear End

Its that time of year when my bike starts to act funny and has become unreliable under load. Chain skips, gears are not working so well. I finally had some time to fix my bike and install some new toys on my bike.

Chris King Gold with Heavy Duty Axe on Mavic 721 with DT Swiss Alpine 3 spokes, SRAM DH 11-26 Cassette and SRAM X.O 20th anniversary Carbon Fiber Black Box Medium Derailleur with X.0 Shifters.

I hope to get a Rockshox Pike from a friend by trading some bike parts. Nothing beats the barter system.

Raw – Black and White Conversion Process

Not to long ago i made a tutorial on how to Creating Black and White Images in Photoshop CS3. This tutorial though centered around JPG was will an nondestructive method and has worked well for me in the past. But there are many methods in creating black and white images. Some involve a bit more understanding of colour and manipulating the colour channels in Photoshop. The method i have been using lately is done with RAW photos in Adobe Camera Raw 4.4.1.

Read on..

The Pretty and Pink

Seams as thought almost every manufacture of bikes and bike components now realize that women like pink. And what better way to lour women into cycling?

Pink parts! Any why not make them some of the best parts money can buy? a Chris King wheel set can set you back over a grand, and the pink Hope brake set could set you back $500 or $600.

Speedgoat, an online bike shop last year held an raffle for a pink bike and the proceeds went to help breast cancer. Not to mention they build a sweet pink bike.

Other companies like Chris King continue to donate a portion of there Pink components to Cancer research.

You don’t have to be a Lady to enjoy some pink on your bike. Pink seams to be the new black for a lot of guys riding there burly Down Hill bikes.

Read on..

Using Words

I thought this was an interesting example of how you can describe a bad situation, and give it a positive spin using some clever words.

The children of a prominent family chose to give the patriarch a book of their family’s history. The biographer they hired was warned of one problem.

Uncle Willie, the “Black Sheep,” had gone to Sing Sing’s Electric chair for murder. The writer carefully handled the situation in the following way: Uncle Willie occupied a chair of applied electronics at one of our nation’s leading institutions. He was attached to his position by the strongest of ties. His death came as a true shock.” – from Ka Pupa Nihonih (Mayflower Quarterly – Nov 1990)

Alberta Legislative Building

It seams like its almost a photo a day, or every other day. This was shot from the back side of the Alberta Legislative Building. The colour version looked great, but black the architecture pops more in the black and white.

Creating Black and White Images in Photoshop CS3

This tutorial will show you how to create amazing black and white images using the new CS3 Black and White Adjustment Layer in Photoshop. This is relatively simple to do, and depending on what you want the final product to look like you wont need to mess around with layers and levels.

Black and white seams to capture more emotion and can give a lot to the viewer. It also helps show the subtle details that might be lost in colour photos.

Read on..

Punchy Black and whites.

I took some time at lunch today and with a little Photoshoping (removing the background and converting to Black and white) i was left with the pleasing results.

I’m going to create a non-destructive black and white tutorial shortly explaining more about the work flow.