A Random Assortment

A quick collection of things today: Some of you (most of you?) probably know I am a big fan of the Atlanta Braves. I got to catch the last few innings of the game today after the usual frisbee game, and got to see Chipper Jones break an Atlanta record: all-time home runs while playing for the Braves, which was previously held by Dale Murphy. I wonder if mom or dad remember how much I liked Dale Murphy when I was a kid, I remember I had a bunch of his baseball cards and always cheered for him and the Braves. Though I maybe wasn't so good with statistics then, I have a very faint recollection of thinking he had a .200 or so batting average one season and thinking that was great. In any case, he had 371 homers while with Atlanta, and I got to see Chipper Jones hit homers number 371 and 372 today. Another interesting thing about the home runs today was that they were hit while batting with different handedness: the first was while batting right-handed, and the second left-handed. And for a final interesting note about this, apparently Hank Aaron only hit 335 of his 755 homers while with Atlanta, and had 22 with the Milwaukee Brewers in his final two seasons. The interesting part is that the rest were with the Milwaukee Braves, and he holds the Braves franchise record with 733 homers. This was very confusing when I was looking up all the various statistics here, but I think it works out if you think of the franchise records and the Atlanta records as being seperate.

Ok, now, I know I was going to post about something else. Oh yeah! So, based on the interesting edge-detect photo editing a few days back, I was experimenting with some other similar things - I want to use the edge detection to create a layer which has a rough approximation of a rat's outline, and use that layer to make it look like there's a fuzzy brightness/halo around the rat. Some preliminary experiments sort of worked - they brighten up the area at the edge of Cao Cao's fur, but since he is already pretty bright, it doesn't show up too well. I found a decent solution by using the layer on the "only brighten" mode with some opacity, but it still doesn't quite achieve what I wanted. So going to mess with this some more, if anyone has suggestions, or other interesting effects to try, let me know.

Finally, I started writing a short story, because I had a decent opening line which led to the rest of the idea. But I have only gotten to write a line or two beyond that as I've been busy tonight. So maybe that will be posted later.