"Who Gave the Gun to the Baby?"

This was a triumph.

I've just returned to the office from two days of Adobe PhotoShop class and -- damn -- this is one powerful and fun application. I've learned a lot of software in my time as an IT geek, but Adobe PhotoShop by far allows me to cause the most damage. Already, three people have looked at my "work" then looked at me and said, "You're dangerous."

The picture above was something I slapped together very quickly, but achieved some great laughs around the office. That gentleman under the cow there is Nick. Nick's one of our help desk guys. When he posed for this picture, he was working on a rack mounted switch in our server room. Though he's not afraid of a little hard work, I think he was a bit surprised at the visual job reclassification to which he has been subjected.

My boss is already cringing to think of what picture he might end up in. Heck, a few months ago he hung his head at the graphical transformation I put him through using nothing but MS Paint. (In four sequential panels, I morphed him into Billy Joe Armstrong from Green Day. It really didn't take much, the two of them pass as brothers.) I'm already pondering what embarrassments to subject him to with this new weapon in my arsenal.

It's astonishing how far we've come in the realm of computer graphics. The movie Avatar is a great example of the blending of real life with computer animation to a degree where it's obvious that very shortly we won't be able to tell the difference between the two. We've seen commercials where long deceased actors have been "Shopped" in to appear as though they had returned from retirement to make a cameo appearance in the ads. How long will it be before the highest paid "actors" in Hollywood don't even exist in real life?

And will the government some day create fictional news stories that they disseminate with video "proof"?