More fragments

* Anyone who knows me will be astonished that I managed to score 83.6% on “this test”:http://jakemandell.com/tonedeaf/ — it’s worth ten minutes of your time if you are interested in musical perception. Not safe for work, unless you have headphones or no one near you who is trying to concentrate.
* Happy thanksgivings, all you lot over there.
* I have discovered two excellent piece of free or cheap PC software for photo editing and printing. “Raw Shooter Essentials”:http://www.pixmantec.com/products/rawshooter_essentials.asp was recently bought by Adobe and will vanish from the market soon. But for the moment, it is free, legitimate, and excellent. Anyone who owns a PC and a camera that will save in RAW format should grab a copy while they they can. “Qimage”:http://www.ddisoftware.com/qimage/ is $50.00 and worth it. It does the editing that RSE doesn’t; in particular level balancing and cropping, and it makes a startling, visible difference to the quality of large prints by using its own interpolation routines. The interface is idiosyncratic, and the help very obviously written by a programmer. But he’s an excellent programmer and there is a helpful tutorial. If you want to print your photographs beautifully, you need this. You probably also need special colour calibration on both printer and monitor. But I am not yet prepared to spend another hundred pounds on that.
* The fundies haven’t got the memo yet: a local church pushed through my letterbox a newsletter with a story about an Iraqi called George Sada who is currently working the evangelical circuit in Washington: %(loony) “Religious freedom has finally arrived in the strife-torn nation of Iraq and an unprecedented number of Iraqi Muslims are becoming followers of Jesus Christ, says retired Iraqi general George Sada. Sada recently made this announcement at a private dinner just outside of Washington DC … A Sada associate said: Sada told me some 5,000 Iraqis have publicly identified themselves as new followers of Christ since Iraq was liberated, and that an estimated eight out of ten Iraqi believers say they converted because Jesus appeared to them in dreams or visions. Other reports suggest Saddam Hussein’s throne room in his main palace in Baghdad had been turned into an evangelical church after the war.” % It’s worth remembering that there are (a) millions of people who actually believe this kind of thing and (b) others who are funding its dissemination in England. The amount that we respectable religious correspondents don’t know about the loonies is really rather frightening.