Some weeks ago a needle was thrust through my neck in order to obtain a sample of my thyroid for a biopsy. This post describes that experience. My purpose for doing so is to provide insight to others who are about to experience the same. If you are such a person, then you have probably already read about the procedure, so I won’t cover the technical details, just the experience
Many years ago I was identified as a possible Public Service leader of the future. Well, it didn’t pan out, but for a year the government did pay for me to have a personal mentor. This man taught me a lot about leadership and motivating people. One of the big lessons revolved around “why?”. Why should your staff care? Why should your bosses care? Why should your customers give a
My life is a myriad of experiences, as I am sure that you are all aware. Last weekend was my daughter Rhiannon’s dance concert. Rhiannon learns at the Miss Patricia Yvonne Studio, part of the EDTA Association. So this post is a bit of a recount for anyone interested in the various aspects of my life (yawn) and also a bit about life in New South Wales, Australia. Our story
I have Adobe Creative Cloud but rarely make the full use of it. I mean, I use the obvious stuff like PhotoShop, LightRoom and Premier and to a lesser extent Illustrator and InDesign, but that is about it. What a waste! Anyway I thought that I would have a go a Portfolio. Essentially Portfolio takes a selected collection of images from LightRoom and turns it into a web site which
Disclaimer: David (the author of the novel) and I interact in a friendly manner online. This said, my review is entirely objective. Key take-aways It reads like a Louis L’Amour novel crossed with Anne Rice novel (with some X-Files thrown in) Initially feels like a series of connected short stories but transforms into a fast-paced action story I enjoyed reading it Blurb on Amazon Vampires of the Scarlet Order is
Hi all, (this is a bit of a feeling-sorry-for-myself post) Some of you may have noticed my absence recently. Some of this has to do with work obligations and some with the rapid decline of a family member. As any regular readers will know I secured myself a job in November following two years of unemployment. I’m enjoying it thoroughly. The downside is that it takes me 95 minutes to
This 2015 trip was our second visit to Rome. Our first had been in 2002 with Globus. Back then we had stayed in a hotel not far from the Colosseum. The room had been small and the hotel staff arrogant. We wondered how our Trafalgar Costsaver experience would differ. The question was quickly answered when we reached our hotel, the Ergife Palace Hotel, at around 4 pm. It was spectacular.
A long time ago I was a teacher. Besides the normal three Rs (reading, writing and arithmetic), I always followed with a second three –
Hi folks, This post will be very similar to my post about making an opacity map. So if you have read that post then you only need to skim this for salient differences. Just to make it slightly different I have also added an incredibly small flaw into the hair by way of a slight wave. I did this because nothing is truly straight in nature. So our goal is
In my last post (about an hour ago), I commented that while occlusion maps were good, I wondered what the hair would be like if I used a texture that already had transparency. So I quickly cobbled one together in Photoshop that was based on the same two textures that I used in the last post. Here is the node set-up that I used in Blender: Note that it is
