Sarah Has a Blog

I’m really disappointed the Cardinals didn’t win the Super Bowl, but at least the commercials were entertaining. Of course, they couldn’t match the excitement of the last few minutes of the game. Below, I talk about a few of the commercials I noticed – some good, some bad.

And thanks to Hulu, which has posted all the Super Bowl commercials.

Bridgestone Tires

Though I’m not crazy about the stereotypical complaining wife, I thought this commercial for Bridgestone Tires featuring Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head was clever. I especially liked Mrs. Potato Head’s switch to angry eyes at the end.

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The Stranger, an alternative paper from Seattle, recently ran a list of its corrections/regrets for 2008. Among my favorites:

Dan Savage, the editorial director of The Stranger, does not regret a single word he wrote in the wake of Proposition 8. He does regret the dismal state of reading comprehension today, as evidenced by the confused reaction to some of what he wrote. Mr. Savage would like to state for the record: “Your inability to read isn’t evidence that I’m racist.”

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I watched “Hogfather” for the first time this weekend, and I forgot how much I love Death. I can’t think of another Discworld character I like better – though I love the City Watch. Guess I need to go get ‘Guards! Guards!‘ – I’m still making my way through the older books (I read several of the newer ones then started over at the beginning).

Anyway, I really enjoyed Death’s reaction to the socio-economic rules of holiday gifts – I’ve always wondered how poor kids feel when they hear their well-off classmates talk about the bikes and video game systems Santa leaves.

I don’t have Photoshop on my computer at work, but I’m constantly needing to edit photos. Our IT guy installed a copy of Gimp, but I don’t really like it at all, and it’s never worked properly on my machine, so I’ve been looking for another option.

Luckily, I’ve found one I like a lot.

Picnik is a Flash-based online photo editor that has both free and paid plans. I’ve been using it for about a week and have been so impressed that even though I have Photoshop at home, I’m thinking about spending the $25 for a year’s worth of premium access.

Why? The program is simple, seems stable and has a lot of features. I think I’ll be using it a lot when I’m away from my home computer, and $25 seems like a small amount for the convenience of the extra features, which include connecting to multiple social sites like Flickr and Facebook, full screen editing, no ads and unlimited upload storage.

But the free access is more than enough for most folks. You can upload a photo, then do basic edits like resizing, cropping, rotating, red eye, etc. Plus, there are several filters you can apply and shape “stamps” if you feel like goofing off. You don’t even have to register to use Picnik.

Also, there are several handy tools, like a bookmark applet, Firefox and Internet Explorer extensions and a Yahoo widget. The Firefox extension even lets you take a snapshot of your browser window and edit it in Picnik.

Really, if all you need to do with photos is some cropping and removing red-eye, you don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars on Photoshop or even $100 on Photoshop Elements. Just use Picnik.

So Gizmodo has a list of 50 skills that every geek should have. Apparently, I’m only 10 percent geek because I can do only five of the things they list. My geek skills:

• 14. Design a webpage in HTML by hand that features a picture of your cat
• 15. Use Photoshop to imperceptibly doctor a photo 27. Watch TV shows on the internet for free
• 18. Fix your parents’ computer over the phone without looking at a computer (I can usually do this)
• 50. Talk about things that aren’t tech related

Want to see the whole list? Click here