Photoshop Actions: sephia blur

This photoshop action will convert your images into a sephia blur image with outter shadow as shown below. This action can also be run with shortcut key F12.



Down load link:
http://www.esnips.com/web/ashPresentom

How to install:
Save the .atn file in the following directory.
C:\Program Files\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Presets\Actions

Or,
open actions pane in Photoshop> click actions menu, and select load new action and find where you saved the file.

FinAnalysis: OCF operating Cash flow

OCF stands for operating cash flow, simply meaning cash flow provided by operating activities of a firm.

Definitions from other sites:
Wikipedia:
"Operating cash flow = Cash generated from operations less taxation and interest paid, investment income received and less dividends paid gives rise to operating cash flows per International Financial Reporting Standards"

Investopedia:
"The cash generated from the operations of a company, generally defined as revenues less all operating expenses, but calculated through a series of adjustments to net income.

It's arguably a better measure of a business's profits than earnings because a company can show positive net earnings (on the income statement) and still not be able to pay its debts. It's cash flow that pays the bills!"

Equation:
OCF = EBIT - taxes + depreciation

Why interest not deducted in here?
Interest is considered financing expenses, and most of the time it is already included when calculating WACC.

ashPresentom half-year anniversary

Oh behalf of aP, it has been a pleasure sharing the knowledge and wisdom with the viewership of aP. The growth has been very encouraging to continue to grow this blog with more and more educational and entertaining material. Thank you all of you for visiting aP blog, hopefully you did take some wisdom out from this blog.


To celebrate this half-year anniversary we have updated the aP logo with a more organic and eye-catching logo. Enjoy! and dont forget to leave your feedback.

Election as it happened

This year (2008) as the US presidential election happened, there were several websites reporting the results in dashboard format real time. Among several are CBSnews and MSNBC, I found to be showing a very detailed and informative dashboard real-time.

But as I was observing the awaited election results, the election started with Mccain gaining the lead with first results went out, but I wondered how Obama will increase his votes and the gap as the time goes...Thats when the graph cames into place.

Below you find is how total votes for each candidates changes against time or as we moved into the election results. After 12:45a I stopped recording data and the last was the final results.


The graph below shows the percentage difference against time. Percentage difference was calculated as (Obama votes - Mccain votes/Total votes distributed among Obama and Mccain)*100. Once again I stopped recording after 12:45.



These graphs thoroughly shows how election went on against time. Enjoy!

Excel Template: WACC Calculator

In this post I am going go over WACC calculation and share with you a spreadsheet template I created to calculate WACC for a firm with given information.

WACC in other words, weighted average cost of capital. Or cost of capital in terms of weighted average calculation. Companies use debt or issue preferred stocks as a mean of generating capital for operations. WACC take into account the portions of these debt and equity financing and calculate the interest rate the company have to pay for every dollar it uses for financing activities.

This is also the rate company use as required rate of return in project management, capital budgeting, project evaluation, NPV calculations etc.

Investopedia.com says: "A calculation of a firm's cost of capital in which each category of capital is proportionately weighted. All capital sources - common stock, preferred stock, bonds and any other long-term debt - are included in a WACC calculation"

Here is a screen shot of the WACC calculator I designed.

You can download this spreadsheet free of charge and use it to calculate your required rate of return. (WACC calculator is copy right material of ashPresentom)

ashPresentom typography

Artistically organized typography is a type of graphic that I enjoy designing and looking at. Text tool in Photoshop can be used artistically to design extremely elegant banners and posters with the technique called typography.
This is a typographic design of categories I have discussed so far at ashPresentom.

What you see in this graphic is different sizes or font of the same face or type aligned in a gathered format. Font has also been rotated to 90degrees or -90 or 270 degrees to bring the text to a pack.

Enjoy!

Dont forget to change your clock

Tomorrow Sunday the November 2nd. Dont forget to change your clock.

At 2a.m. on local time you will be moving your clock back one hour to 1 a.m. Unless you live in Hawaii or Arizona. Fall daylight saving adjustment will cause you to have one hour extra sleep. So thats a good news for us right? to sleep an hour extra on the weenend and not have any effect on other things. Or simply sleep one more extra hour and get up and still see its the usual time you get up...

Any how, an interesting article I found this morning when I was reading Yahoo News.

Swidish researches have found out that time change done on monday morning in other words causing people to sleep extra hour on monday morning, when the week first start and people have to get up early and go to work; this has a high correlation with heart attacks. So doing the time change on sunday would be healthier for your heart.

I would think what the heck... how could a one hour of sleep cause me to have heart attack. Well the amount of sleep you get have a huge impact on how our body works. The immune system, the blood pressure, heart rate, and how we feel. So these things are effected by the amount of sleep we get. So it is done on sunday now to have a lesser effect on people's hearts.

That is your insight for the day... be sure to leave a comment in here.
Source: news.yahoo.com