By now, everyone is, of course, quite sick of seeing the buxom ads deployed to entice new players for Evony. Being rather burnt out on everything else available on the market, I've been giving it a try. No, there isn't any comely wench in-game, of any sort, that I've found. But, it is free, after all, right..? Right?

Except they nerfed medals...

You can play for free until you get out of newbie-mode by trying to advance beyond Knight, which requires these medals, see?

I found an incredibly cool graph illustrating the anticipated future trend of computing, gaming, movies and artificial intelligence. They graph things between Best, Worst and Base Case scenarios, showing a range of just how pleasant or unpleasant things could become. Regardless, it is all inspiring from a technology perspective. Some truly great ideas are listed across the graph; things that I had not previously considered and that the industries affected may not have either. Virtual cinema attendance was one idea that struck me as obvious in retrospect, but predicting the last human produced film and game on such short notice (10 years from now?) is not something that ever occurred to me.

No matter who you are, there is bound to be a few things that spark your interest. I will be using the graph as a repeated inspirational exercise going forward; it's just that cool.

That's right; it's my fault. All of it. Every last thing.

Stub your toe? Get a speeding ticket? Lose your job? Your wife? Your car? It's my fault.

You can rest assured that the misfortune life has seen fit to dump on your life is through no fault of your own. Point that finger squarely in this direction.

It's my fault.

And it will continue to be my fault until Sunday, at which point everything is Karo's fault, and you can blame him.

Some time soon, however, you have to take your turn; a whole week of being the cause of all our problems. You will be responsible for my network connection going on the blink, for spilling my coffee, and for preventing me from catching and fixing that bug.

Until then, you can blame it all on me.

What does it mean to get "Slashdotted"?

If you have been online for a decent amount of time, you probably know about the news site for geeks called Slashdot.

From this, you may surmise that getting "Slashdotted" involves getting your site linked to in an article on Slashdot, resulting in a significant increase in your site traffic.

You would be correct. Very correct.

You may also surmise that this increase in traffic results in a corresponding increase in sales/leads/etc.

I recently had the pleasure of witnessing, first hand, someone "level up" in Photoshop. I have always been a firm believer in the learning process consisting of a series of "plateaus", much like the leveling system for characters in just about ever computer game available these days.

As the ad hoc resident guru on all things computer related, I began with a brief discussion of their current level of understanding. After that, I simply began to demonstrate casual use of the application. By merely watching the way that I worked, she was able to deduce several new abilities and add them to her design repertoire.

It was fascinating to witness, I must say. What I take for granted as habitual casual use of a program contains years of learned responses that can each be correlated to various "abilities" associated with it.

Just like that, after months of struggling to learn the intricacies of Photoshop, she earned a new "plateau" of skills associated with Magic Wands...

Lesson? Don't neglect to stop in and check with your class trainer periodically, else you wind up missing the fundamentals necessary to ply your trade successfully.

Keep reading for a breakdown of the Magic Wand skillset under the Photoshop path specialization of the Designer class. ahem.