No, not crack cocaine nor your mother’s meatloaf. Just the taste of 60 years of seasoning in a can.

In 10 easy steps or less, PS Hero shows us how to turn an ordinary picture into a realistic photo.

Photoshop techniques used include: Layer Style (Stroke), Gradient tool, Gaussian Blur, and Transform (Warp).

This tutorial uses Photoshop CS2 or later, but I used Photoshop 7.0 with the pictures above. Photoshop 7.0 doesn’t have the Warp technique, so I used the Free Transform and did each corner one by one.

PSHERO - Adding Depth with Shadows

The photos were taken at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco, CA. If anyone knows who these women are suppose to be, please drop a note in the comments.

Sirius and XM radio have finally gotten the regulatory approve to abuse it’s customers with monopolistic monthly rates and shaft their artist with price pressure. Way to go. Now Cramer doesn’t have to get two cars to listen to Howard Stern (Sirius) and Major League Baseball (XM).

Cramer did admit that the length of the delay did destroy a big chunk of both companies’ value. But the chance to convince America to pay for something that was once free? Priceless.

Bert Ely, consultant, financial services industry

Kathleen Day, Center for Responsible Lending

James Leach, director, The Institute Of Politics At Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School Of Government; Former U.S. Congressman from Iowa (1977-2007)

Robert Hartheimer, special advisor, Promontory Financial Group, former director of the Division of Resolutions at the FDIC 1991-1995

Quotes from the show:

“In fact, Fannie and Freddie bought 1 out of every 3 dollars of this garbage sub-prime stuff… Someone should have questioned that.”

- Kathleen Day, Center for Responsible Lending

“6 out of 10 people who got these bad loans would have qualified for a cheaper conventional loan…You can’t have a free market without a free flow of information.”

- Kathleen Day

“When you do collections of statistics, you can take different models and some leads to one set of answers and some leads to other set of answers. It’s like Mark Twain’s famous comment that there’s three kinds of lies. Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.”

- James Leach talking about the Consumer Price index for inflation

“We’re not going to have half the banks fail. That’s just not in the cards.”

- Bert Ely

The Diane Rehm Show Podcast, July 17, 2008

This invention claims to prevent high heels from getting stuck in grass, pavement cracks, and sewer grates.

These two inventors are selling this stuff for $19.95 a pair online for the clear version while the black version is in the works.

EXCEPT this has already been invented!!! These are known widely as heel savers in the ballroom dance world. $6.00 a pair. Check it out at Strictly Ballroom Dance Apparel.

Don’t let Crave mislead you to a rip-off that’s worse than a sewer grate.

Awesome model over at VarietyAlley.com

Found some Wii in the wild at Target today 6/22/2008.

There’s three in the picture, but they had more in stock. At $249.99 without the need to buy a bundle of crap. Yeh!

If you sign up for their store card, you can get $25 off this Wii also. It’s like getting a free game, if games are $25.

Target.com

Or is it? Australia is a little chilly.

According to Agcononline “Summer in North America officially starts today at 4:59PM. But all week, Arizonans have already experienced extreme heat ranging from 110°F - 113°F. People are being advised to stay indoors between 10:00AM - 8:00PM.”

I guess it all depends on where you are standing.

Do you have this error? If you’ve tried to install XP onto an Eee PC through the USB stick/drive, you may have seen this error. I’ve personally seen this myself.

The reason for this seems to be that the Eee PC boots into the SSD hard drive even if you told it to boot into the USB drive first.

The Fix:

Press the ESC key when Windows XP setup reboots for the first time.

Then select your USB stick.

Then it will boot into a selection. Select GUI Mode Setup. This will continue Windows XP setup in the wonderful GUI we know and love. It’s the one where you enter your Key and Region Settings.

It took me awhile to figure that out but it does work.

• For Eee PC XP install instructions via a USB stick see: EEEguides.com, liliputing.com
• For nLite XP fat trimming (my install went down to 258MB) see: i64X.com, EeeUser.com
• For nLite: nLiteOS.com

Now how about one question from me. I used nLite to trim the fat, but get this error on every boot up. I’m suspecting I’ve checked a wrong box. Once I click this OK, that error goes away and I can login like normal. But on restart, this message comes back every time. Not critical, but annoying.

Tonight’s Episode: Wiegel’s Dad Returns

Wiegel’s estranged father returns from prison to connect with his daughter.

Original Air Date: 6/19/2008

Previous Episode: Strong Sister

Original Air Date: 6/12/2008