We had a little bit of damage from the October 29th snow storm in Central MA. Just a few branches down here and there. Only about 7” of snow but just a little ways down the road they got over a foot.

Fry Day, Fry Day, Gotta get down on Fry Day. My favorite song to play every Friday.

Grndctrl is a dashboard that tells you where your money goes & helps you save via the medium of beautiful graphs. It is a nice simple and easy to use website that tells you how much money you should be saving a month based on your monthly income and monthly expenses.

After you put all of your information in you return to the dashboard and you are greeted by a couple of things. First at the top there is a blue bar and breaks down how much you are saving (if you are saving) per day, month, and year. Next there is a pie graph that shows you how much money you are spending on your expenses per year. The final is a bar graph that shows your estimated savings over the next year.

The final part is a rewards section where you enter in a item that you are saving up for (HDTV, Laptop, Car, etc.) and how much that item costs. The site will then display how much time it will take you to save up for that item.

This site is incredibly useful and after taking the ~10 minutes to set it up has shown me that I can trim my budget down and save up money to pay off my student loans as well as save up for some new things. One thing I wish it had was integration with Mint that pulled all my information and was able to accurately tell me how much I was saving per month in the past. Overall it is a great site that will always be helpful.

I have the unfortunate experience of running Firefox at work recently with AdBlock turned off. This is a horrible thing. I went and visited CNN the other day and the above image is what I was greeted with.

Yes, that is four, count them four Capitol One advertisements. They frame the all the news content and tossed in another advertisement for good measure. Incredibly annoying. Makes me not want to do business with Capital One and rethink visiting CNN, at least without AdBlock on. What is the point of running 4 big ads on one page? Do they care about the content of the ads or are they just hoping people will randomly click on them?

Meanwhile Amazon created amazing advertising without doing much. Recently someone posted on Reddit about their experience with Amazon support. What happened was that they lost a package, completely USPS fault and Amazon refunded the purchase and reordered the purchase for them. So this whole thing cost Amazon around $50 and generated a couple thousand hits on Reddit and 759,000+ hits on the imgur.com upload of the support chat.

So to recap CNN and Capital One advertising is a huge annoyance and likely cost them tons of money and only annoyed people. While Amazon was able to generate buzz, display amazing support for around $50.

I have been making text look like it’s a sticker for a little while at work and I thought that I would make a short tutorial on how I create the sticker quickly and easily. This is my first Adobe Photoshop tutorial so go easy on me! Hit the jump to see the tutorial and download the files.

Create a document with the correct size and transparent background.

Use the text tool select the typeface (I used Gill Sans MT) you and and type out your text you want as the sticker, for right now color doesn’t matter.

Using the layer style chose a gradient overlay and select the color you want. I downloaded a bunch of gradient swatches from here.

Next in the layer styles select Stroke and set it as outside the text around 5-8  px. I used a slightly white and gray on the outside to make it look a little dirty.

Next do a slight inner shadow from the top 111 degrees with a size of 2 px.

Then do a slight outer glow. Solid black color size of about 8px no spread.

Then your sticker is done! You can go back and play with the values a little to see how changing even a few pixels and change the depth of the sticker.

To make the sticker look like it is peeling away duplicate the layer (for backup) and rasterize the new layer. Take the polygon marquee and select the area you want to peel. Then right click and select “New Layer from Cut”

The select that and flip vertically and horizontal.

Next since the back of the sticker is usually just plain white your going to want to select the layer and fill the layer.

Once you have that filled it select the layer properties and give it a drop shadow and play with the gradient overlay to make it blend like it was folded.

Then you are done with your sticker! I hope that this has been helpful for you, if you have any questions or suggestions leave them in the comments!

The Baystate Championship Wrestling (BCW) website is currently offline at request of the owners. Its only temporary and the site will be back up at an undetermined date. Any question you can email me here and I will get back to you asap. Thank You.

I need to get back out there before it gets too cold and the snow starts falling. I haven’t been in over a month. My discs need some refreshing fresh air. PS. I am going to be launching a new site soon, Disc Golf Pictures, but I need some more pictures to put up, if you have any would you would like to send me you can email me at info@discgolfpictures.com. Thanks!