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What I call bad shape is drawing something that really fits well and contributes, but falls short because of weak shape.

Your plants. If I add a green plant to my room, I will make it big, healthy, and so it really adds some green to the room. Both on background for eye candy and also as really somehow picked a plant to make his room greener. You wouldn't keep a dead tree or flower in your room, wouldn't you? But that's pretty much how your plants look: dead. They fit here, but have very little effect due small size. It's believable in a tiny apartment,   or if it was a banzai tree... but a big corridor?

http://aquafit-usa.com/sunroom.jpg

Now that's a healthy plant that really adds greenery to the room.

Of course it doesn't have to be so big, just well-placed, like this:
http://artificialtreesplants.com/files/artficial_tree_plant_living_room_2.jpg

It's matter of taste actually... I don't suggest turning your corridor into greenhouse.
But from artistical viewpoint, your plants won't contribute enough and with most of the room being red/yellow/beige, more green would be reasonable to balance colors out. Plants could have done this, but didn't.

Table is also bad shape. It looks like it was made using stone age tools. Yet everything else looks classy and advanced/luxurious.

EDIT: also noticed that perspective on light switch is wrong. Make it's upper edge horisontal!

It is pretty good-looking and well-detailed background indeed. And 100% functional already.

What you SHOULD learn is to critic your rooms by yourself - I mean, spot all the problems we commented on here. This way, you don't have to wait ages and changes until you can finally call your BG done - be your own critics lounge! Also, it won't stop development so much then. Nobody likes to spend a week on his background if there's a whole game to make!

Being a long-time CL visitor (5 years!), I can say that there's about 20 "default" responses you get to a background C&C. Those are most common mistakes and shortcomings newbies make, and this list starts from bad perspective (like your table), too much plain/empty areas (like your ceiling/floor) and  bad shapes (like your plants). Coloring problems are common also (over- or undersaturated, overs. in your case). Those are very basic things you should learn to spot and correct yourself.

Stuffing BG with simple, but numerous details is a good way to make a good background, so you're on right track. When you decide to move on (not with this project, I assume), try to move forward from mspaint-looks and start using light & shadow.

Simplest (though far from optically correct, nor as good-looking) way to start with light is to cover whole screen with black layer and cutting holes into black. Then make black layer transparent so it only darkens. Like this:


Also upped contrast, desaturated alot and added yellow color to everything

But this is soft brush techniques and you aren't using those yet.

Yes.

You could try to make table less blocky and simple. Some ornaments and shape to table legs, etc. Google for some furniture photos and see how tables look in such houses.

Green stuff could be brighter and more... thick, wide... roomy. Those plants look like dead, unhealthy moss...

Add a bar of decoration to ceiling edge also, as it is with wall/floor edge.
You could try to break boredom of the ceiling by turning it into wooden panels instead of pale brown area.

Colors on painting could be much less saturated than colors of rest of the room.

Move top edge (highest on picture) a bit down. So only half of the top would be seen.

He looks like a loser. Give him more evil eyebrows, long and strong neck, higher raised collar, lift pants up a bit and make shoulders wider. Wouldn't hurt to make hand more muscular and longer aswell.
And overall height is out of porportions. Use a photo of standing man as reference to correct it.
Also, remove random lines from pants. They resemble nothin like real shading/wrinkles.

2 colors? Take a photo and apply threshold filter.
Then draw his face accordingly. Like my avatar. You will get much more serious, realistic look.

perspective on little photo frames on table looks awfully wrong. I think that upper edge on angled photos should be fully horizontal, since they are as close to vanishing point as possible. There's too much tabletop seen also, i'd cut it into half of what's visible, and correct photo frame lower edges accordingly also.

I bought a fairly cheap, no-brand graphics tablet on eBay. It didn't really work. It's probably worth dishing out a little extra for something you can actually use.

Same here.

I originally started out with a Trust (yeah, I know: we don't trust Trust...but it was actually quite a good tablet to be honest)...

Not really what I remember.
Don't trust Trust.
Made a good dust collector, anyways.

[Forced]

Forced image-smooth-scaling sucked ass.
Agreed?
Agreed.
What's to debate?

Make sure the camera's white balance setting isn't set to some auto option.

Oh.
There's the devil.
If camera was aimed at house or trees, thus having more of darker area in view, camera probably automatically adjusted WB. I used full auto so I wouldn't worry about focus and blur.
That's how things got messy, I think. It's apparent from both panoramas too...

Smarter next time!

Well, not really. Mixing non-similar images into one panorama makes any balancing it absolutely impossible instead. Auto Color, Contrast etc works on whole image, not portions of it, I think. If it fixes one portion, other one which was right becomes wrong, etc.

Em, just a thought but wouldn't this all work better if I convert them all to grayscale, make grayscale images match in terms of contrast/brightness, and then somehow apply this to RGB also? How to do such thing? Maybe shoot RAW images?

I imagine I need something like this:
I define sky on initial picture and somehow tell Photoshop to adjust all blues on other pictures so their sky would be same color. Then grass, and adjust greens, etc.
Would it work and make everything else right too? How to do it?

I spent last weekend on trying out my new tripod and shooting some panorama photos.

This is how it turned out..
www.increator.pri.ee/pano/
(enable Javascript to view 360-degree photos)

Problem is, they all vary too much, thus resulting a crappy panorama. Now, I don't have an eye of photographer yet nor good skills at photoshop...

Is there a way to easily make sets of photos (8-10) match in terms of tone, contrast and brightness? Some macro or something? I tried to do this by eye, but even if I get first few about similar, first and last vary like day and night... Three PS auto-adjusters don't work neither... I want to adjust ALL photos to same properties. Or some other program to do this? Plugin?

Or some tips to photograph better maybe?

Ah, and I have PS CS4.

I shall not feel dumb for having a system that works.

Sounds like helluva price for a working system.
I have a system too... that works. The magic formula is...
Windows 7 + Firefox 3 + NoScript addon + sane browsing. Last two provide 99% of security.
AVG for crisis situations, though I haven't encountered one yet.

Had same setup for XP.
Average 2 names of not-dangerous pests (such as tracking cookies) per 3 months or so. I wouldn't call this infested or "not working" any way. I couldn't imagine resources and speed I would have sacrificed with insane setup you suggested...

Then again, for learning grandma, porn-hungry teenager or average dumb housewife looking for a free diet, your suggestion isn't even half of the need.

Ad-Aware + Spyware Termintaor + Spybot S&D + Malwarebytes AntiMallware (all fully free, no shareware crap), and yeah AVG if you want (I didn't use it that much).

Use them all and...

You are crazy. I takes total dumbuser for need of this much protection. Might aswell turn off the computer, just to be "safe".

Yea, Blood did beat all records with cool weapon selection in a Build game... or FPS game overall.

Pity that Build engine has aged so badly. What looked awesome in mid-90's is totally unacceptable today.
I tried hard, but cannot play those games due ugly graphics and auto-aim keyboard movement.
Only a milestone (and few months)  later after Duke3D, Quake nailed keyboard & mouse usage and functioning standard in fps games. Build games have some crazy, useless way mouse & keyboard combo works and it doesn't work as it should (or could) anyway.

I don't really see how they actually tested moving mouse up to move forward in their studios and found it good or usable... Then again, nowadays, people play fps games(!) with gamepads(!) on their stupid consoles... so who knows? Maybe someone really liked and mastered it back then.

I still liked Shadow Warrior more. Why isn't sequel announced to this one? This would be a game I really cried if sequel was cancelled.

Same one-liners, but actually funny ones, not macho bullshit.
And much cooler weapons... like nuke launcher?

"Lo Wang do super kung fu jump!"

Well, I don't get it.
Duke nukem 3D was simply a first person shooter. FPS games can and are developed in less than 2 years today. Even good ones.

What possibly in the world took over a decade and still still got unfinished?

A group of experienced enthusiasts (or official team) could make new Duke3d, in all its glory, coolness and success on Source or Unreal 3 engine and that stupid "Forever/Never" story would be done and over with.

It was never about graphics, wasn't it? I mean, BUILD engine looked slightly better over others in 1996, but it was nowhere THAT good to rely on eye candy only. Also, Quake engine was out already, giving true 3D over 2D sprites BUILD did. All BUILD engine was good at, was hosting array of really cool games, like Blood, Shadow Warrior, Redneck Rampage...

I remember playing D3D because how cool it was to waste pig cops with shotgun, the awesome multiplayer, flying around and exotic maps, such as space station and submarine and weapons, from shrinker to laser trip bombs.

It was still the gameplay, level design, weapons array and atmosphere that made it popular. Why waste decade on rewriting a graphics engine?

The sub-title of the course is "Physics for future presidents" which means that political students who can't even spell MATH can take this course and get some benefit. 

I didn't confuse it with nuclear physics major anyway--
It was simply an opportunity to bitch about chemistry one again and express admiration towards professor's approach at teaching. Especially considering in so difficult topic versus "political students who can't even spell MATH".

I cannot balance simplest chemical formula, but if I had teachers like this, I probably could.

But nukes were actually one of more boring of the videos (though I haven't watched em all yet), being a crazy individual with mastermind syndrome (also classified so by Myers-briggs/Jung personality test), admiration towards destructive power of Man and sick idea of "if death really becomes unavoidable and my seconds are counted, seeing nuke exploding as my last sight would be cool"... I know about nukes enough, even with (otherwise) limited understanding about chemistry. If I were in that class, I could even add something

Actually, I had no idea that educational value of Youtube could be higher than crazies with conspiracy theories and low-quality teen experiment videos with flammable household liquids...

I don't. But even if my course STARTED with introduction like this, I would liked it better.

We got right into chemical formulas and numbers. Loads of them. Pity I don't have my textbook around (300 pages!), I would scan that crazy shit we had to dig into.

Actually, after thorough search wiki has a tiny example of our "explanation" at it's best.

"1. A uranium-235 atom absorbs a neutron and fissions into two new atoms (fission fragments), releasing three new neutrons and some binding energy. 2. One of those neutrons is absorbed by an atom of uranium-238 and does not continue the reaction. Another neutron is simply lost and does not collide with anything, also not continuing the reaction. However one neutron does collide with an atom of uranium-235, which then fissions and releases two neutrons and some binding energy. 3. Both of those neutrons collide with uranium-235 atoms, each of which fissions and releases between one and three neutrons, which can then continue the reaction."

Read, understand. Ask if something was unclear, and "what?!" is not proper question. That's it. From there, numbers only.

Of course, if you grab chemistry easily, it's proper and simple explanation of nuclear fission. But if you don't so well...
Kind of differs from professor drawing circles onto blackboard, doesn't it?

God I hated chemistry. There's even a thread around here about my chemistry problems.

I find those lectures pretty cool: It's easy to understand and interesting topics too!

Thanks for the link!

EDIT: Interesting that US university lecture is LOT less technical, more dumbed down (and well, simpler to understand) than exact same stuff I learned in 10th grade. We got formulaic, mathematical/physical and much more boring version of this, with load of exercises (like "find the critical mass of this and that if you have so much isotopes") and stuff. Then again, we got much deeper into this than simple mosquito examples and circles on blackboard.

[ONLY]

Google checkout isn't used widely yet:

"Google Checkout is available to U.S. and U.K. merchants"

Does that mean US/UK ONLY?
In this case, 

Still, what would be checklist to start selling something easily? I got the webpage/room, I got the digital merchandise. Now what?