Then I fell in love again, and when once again I had to go, I just kept on loving. And because of that I know the love was true.

I believe that to love in the truest sense of the word, then we must be willing to give it up for the greater good, even if it causes us great pain. In doing so we can allow the love to endure when otherwise is might whither and die under pressure. By setting love free, it can take wing on the breeze of life. Now it is no longer up to us, love is free to make it’s choice, whether that choice is to catch a gust of wind and seed itself elsewhere, or be blown back to us.

Love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and one is rarely far away from the other. I cannot remember a time when I have hated someone I did not also love. I believe to fully feel one emotion we must also have felt it’s opposite. I can’t think of anyone I have gone from "kind of liking" to passionately hating, at worst I might begin to really dislike them, but passively and without intensity. When we lose love, the temptation is to fall into hatred. This is a coping mechanism, if we can focus on a person’s flaws, or how they wronged us, then we do not have to feel so bad about losing their positive influence in our life, and the way that the righted us. As Carrie Fischer once said, "resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die". It serves no one, and hurts everyone, but mostly yourself.

The idea of lost love is an illusion anyway. Love is never lost, only changed. Once we have loved a person, we never stop, if we do, we usually discover we did not truly love them in the first place. It form, intensity and focus will evolve, but it never truly goes away.

Love hates to be controlled. Have you ever tried to pick up a cat and hold on to it, and had it claw at you until you let it down, only to return and sit on your lap, purring, moments later. Love, like our feline friends, want to have a choice. When it feels restrained it tries to break free, and when it is free, it wants to be needed and so it settles down and nests.

Love wants to be trusted, so have faith in love. If you find yourself starting to doubt the love you are receiving, stop and question instead the love you are giving. If you have stopped feeling loved, perhaps it is because you have stopped being loving. If you are feeling shortchanged by love, the temptation is to hang on to everything you have, or even start restricting the amount of love you give. This is an almost completely automatic reaction, but fight it! Love is a giving emotion, the more you give to others, the more they will want to give back to you, the more love you receive the more you will want to give. But the more you try to take, the more it will elude you.

So when you feel that you are losing love, do not hang on and let it turn to hate, set it free on the winds of change, and if it is meant to be it will come back to you stronger than ever, and if it isn’t, then a still greater love will find it’s way to you instead.

Click the images to view full size.

Click here to learn more about Lucy Starkiller and to download your copy today.

Well the bad news is that it is done with a plug-in that sells for an astounding $595.00. Now if you’re like me you probably think that’s a little ridiculous, since you can buy Photoshop itself for less than that. I said to myself, “Self, there must be a way to get this effect in Photoshop without any silly plug-ins”. And so I embarked on a quest to figure it out.

And quest I did, to the ends of the earth and back, from the caves of Moria to the woods of Lothlorien, I searched for a way! Well, actually, I sat in front of my computer until I went bug eyed and then… …Eureka!

Presenting Lucy Starkiller! (If you get the joke in the name, you are probably even geekier than me.) Lucy Starkiller is an action for Photoshop that will give your photos the “Lucis look” without any extra software. It is also available as a script for Paint Shop Pro. It produces identical results in both programs.

Lucy Starkiller has several advantages over the LucisArt plug-in:

• Available for both Photoshop CS3 and Paint Shop Pro X2 (it has not been tested, and is not guaranteed to work in older versions).
• Works on all versions of Windows and Macintosh that can run Photoshop CS3 or Paint Shop Pro X2.
• One click operation, no guess work!
• Lucy Starkiller Automatically creates the result on a new layer, leaving the original image untouched. You can then blend it with the original to control the intensity of the effect. (The default blend is 75%.)
• Six versions of the action/script are provided. Advanced users can enable the dialogs for even greater control.
• It’s much much cheaper!

Original Image:

Processed with Lucy Starkiller Silky:

Processed with Lucy Starkiller Sharp:

Processed with Lucy Starkiller Silky Double Whammy:

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SAMPLE IMAGES

What people are saying about Lucy Starkiller:

• Photographer Albert Goodman has posted his assement of Lucy Starkiller here.

Some notes on operation:

• Have you heard the saying, “garbage in, garbage out”? Well, it applies here too. For best results, start with the best quality, noise free, image you can.
• Lucy Starkiller actually works on small images too. The image on the right is the result of the the Lucy Starkiller action being applied after it was resized to 300 pixels wide.
• You should perform all of your other image adjustments prior to running Lucy Starkiller.

Click here to Purchase and Download Lucy Starkiller instantly now. You’ll get versions for Photoshop CS3 and Paint Shop Pro X2. It’s only $15.95! That’s 1/30th of the cost of Lucis Art. Sure Lucis can do other effects too, but you and I both know this is the only one you actually want.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SAMPLE IMAGES

Bonus! Join the Lucy Starkiller affiliate program and make Lucy Starkiller pay for itself. As an affiliate, you’ll earn 50% of every sale! That means you only need to make two sales to earn your money back.

Lucy Starkiller is copyrighted. I spent a lot of time perfecting it and making it what it is. I am offering it for sale at a very reasonable price, and I am sure you will be pleased with what it can do. Please do not re-distribute it. Your cooperation is very much appreciated.

So when you read what I am about to write you may be inclined to believe I am contradicting myself.

Fair Enough.

But keep this in mind: Bill Gates has donated 58% of his fortune to charitable causes. The Walton family has donated less than 1%.

Yes, I believe Wal-Mart is an evil company. I define evil as having a wanton and blatant disregard for the greater good and the well being of others. If any person or company can fit that description it’s Wal-Mart. While Microsoft was being diabolically evil by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Wal-Mart has been destroying communities, families and the economy at a record pace, flooding the market with cheaply made Chinese goods.

Don’t be quick to blame the Chinese, they are Wal-Mart’s victims too, working fifteen hour days in it’s factories for three dollars a day, while being forced to live in filthy dorms, because rent and utilities are deducted from their pay even if they choose to live elsewhere.

Wal-Mart’s greed has been enriching the Chinese communist dictatorship while doing nothing for it’s people. Wal-Mart could be doing noble work and creating better lives for Chinese people by paying them a fair wage, but instead chooses to use and abuse it’s workers in China in exactly the same way it abuses it’s workers at home, while lining the pocket of the Chinese government so that they can further oppress the populace and destroy Tibet.

Wal-Mart coerces it employees into working overtime than it then cheats them out of by creating a culture of fear. Wal-Mart engages in illegal union busting practices. At the first hint of any union talks among employees the store manager is required to file a report with his superiors who then send out a dedicated team who take control of the store until the movement is defeated. The only store to ever successfully unionize was in Jonquierre, Quebec. The company’s response was to close down the store, a move which was found to be a reprisal after an investigation by the Quebec Labour Board.

Wal-Mart’s labour law violations range from illegally firing workers who attempt to organize a union to unlawful surveillance, threats, and intimidation of employees who dare to speak out.

“Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay for Wal-Mart,” A Report by the Democratic Staff of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, 2/16/04

Those little American (or Canadian) flags Wal-Mart displays on its shelves are a blatant lie to fool you into believe you are buying domestic product. All it means is they purchased that item through a domestic supply channel. The chances of it actually being North American made are very slim.

A pair of pants at Wal-Mart that sells for $19.97 costs the company only a few cents to make. But cost on society is much higher. Statistically, accounting for inflation, the average family actually makes considerably less now than they did in the 1980’s. It doesn’t take a genius to see the Wal-Mart effect at work here.

This is just a small sampling of the many sins of Wal-Mart. If You are a person with conscience, and you care about the future of your country and the world, you owe it to yourself to become informed. Don’t take my word for it, read all you can, decide for yourself.

But I’ll tell you what I think: Don’t shop at Wal-Mart. Don’t contribute to the abuse of the middle class.

That’s not what I think, but a lot of people do. In fact the level of vitriol directed towards Bill Gates and Microsoft is really quite mind boggling considering that the man has given away tens of millions of dollars of his own money to charities funding AIDS prevention, agriculture in third world countries, college scholarships, and other causes, mostly through his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which as an organization donates over 1.5 billion dollars a year to charitable causes. What’s more, the organization has a shelf life, it will close within 50 years after Bill and Melinda die, thereby ensuring it does not become a monster that eats up funds just to maintain it’s existence. As a result of all this, he was TIME magazine’s person of the year in 2005.

But despite the fact that Bill Gates has recently retired from Microsoft in order to devote more time to running the foundation and philanthropic work, people still think he’s an asshole. Or, more accurately, unsuccessful people with negative attitudes think he’s an asshole.

I use Windows. I like Windows. Windows does everything a Macintosh computer does, and it does it cheaper. Windows can be installed and will run on any PC, even one you build yourself. As a result dozens of companies build windows PC’s which has lead to increased competition and cheaper prices. If Apple had won the war, there would only be one computer company and we would all be paying an arm and a leg for them. Actually more likely, Apple would have been the subject of anti-trust lawsuits instead of Microsoft, and would have been forced to license it’s OS to other computer makers in the same way that Microsoft did voluntarily.

Is Microsoft perfect? Hell no. But they are far less evil than a certain search engine with a candy coloured logo.

So all in all I respect Microsoft and respect Bill gates, and applaud his success and what he has done with it. I see him as a shining example of what one can create from nothing.

Others resent Bill Gates. They see him as greedy, and a “taker”. They resent that he’s rich, and they are not. They have such a biased attitude towards the man, they they would wilfully ignore anything he had to say on principle. Well my friends, the cold hard truth is that you have to be a taker before you can be a giver, or else you will have nothing to give.

Sure you can donate a dollar a day to sponsor a child in Africa, which is an admirable thing to do, but would it’s be nice to be able to sponsor ten children, or a hundred? Or maybe even be able to stop working entirely and travel to Africa yourself and build some homes for them?

You can’t do that unless you have money first, and if you resent people that have money, you will NEVER be able to develop the correct mind-set for making it yourself. You can only attract what you believe in. If your belief is that successful, rich people are greedy and evil and selfish, and you feel that you are a good person, then how will you ever be able to become wealthy and still feel that you are a good person?

The next time you notice yourself have negative feelings towards someone who is more successful than you (and this can be anyone from Donald Trump to your next door neighbour), why not stop as ask yourself why? Is it because you have genuine evidence that they are a bad person, or is it just simple jealousy? If it’s the latter then you owe it to yourself to stop being jealous and instead ask yourself,”what can I learn from them?”

It was the sort of general malaise that only genius possess and the insane lament. And this may seem like a little too much information, but the coffee hadn’t agreed with me so I was… …but I digress.

Anyway, I wasn’t feeling too great. A little discontent, a little anxious, and really craving Starbucks, and a little excitement. So when an Australian fellow by the name of Devin Sturdy stopped by the desk in search of some English Breakfast tea, I didn’t really expect it to change my mood for the day.

But Devin struck up a conversation with me, and we started chatting about travel, and various miscellany, he happened to tell me about his new writing job in Calgary. Since he was Australian I was curious about how he landed it, and when I asked, he directed me to this video on YouTube:

It’s not mentioned in the video, but Devin’s new job was offered to him as a direct result of someone seeing his TV appearances. Those TV appearances came about because of a simple photograph that was thrown away by it’s owner because he thought it was goofy, but  provided the perfect inspiration for someone else.

It’s reminded me that there is opportunity all around us, every day, and that one must always keep their mind open and there senses alert. And if you’re ever feeling down, just think about happy guy, and remember that there is always something to be happy about. You never know what’s around the corner on this long and winding road. (Yes, The Beatles are playing right now).