Month: March 2009

At the bottom of our stairs we have a big blank wall. We used to have a copy of the Declaration of Independence there– mostly because we bought it on a trip to Washington, D.C. years ago and didn’t really have a place to put it, and the big blank wall suggested itself. But in a tragic accident yesterday, the Declaration was destroyed and now we’re left with a big blank wall again.

So we’ve been talking about what to put there, and at dinner the idea came: create a huge photo montage of thousands of our family pictures, arranged to make up a larger image. I think these are called “photomosaics”.

Anyway, a few minutes of hunting around and a bit of configuration work on my laptop, and I have the software I need to generate these cool pictures.

First, scan and index all 14,000 digital photos in our archive. Unfortunately not all of them are family shots: there are pictures of house projects, computer parts, random photos the kids took, and so on. But I’ll worry about cleaning that up later.

Second, pick a good candidate photo. I grabbed one at random from our album:

Third, run the software against the photo using the index data. The result is pretty sweet:

Although it’s hard to see at this resolution, the end result is a huge image made up of thousands of smaller photos. Here’s a zoom on one area of the mosaic (the bottom of the cookie, to be precise):

All of this in about thirty minutes. Now I can get serious and do some better indexing, and find a master photo that would be really fun.

Today’s my anniversary. Thirteen years, wow.

Being married is awesome.

Remember that scene in Return of the Jedi where Han Solo gets thawed out of the carbonite after being locked up in there for a couple of years, and he falls to the ground and as he slowly sits up he says with a groan, “I feel terrible”?

Well, that’s pretty much been the past four days for me. I laid in bed all day Friday, only moving to lurch to the bathroom now and again. Saturday was another day in bed– man, I got sick of that bed. Sunday I was feeling a little better so I moved to the family room couch for a change of scenery. And now it’s Monday, and I thought I’d be better and the week would start all happy, and instead I’m doing my best to get some work done in between a few naps because I feel so lousy.

And I’m eating a bowl of chicken soup, longing for a big slice of greasy pepperoni pizza. Sigh.

Maybe tomorrow.

So this morning my old friend Aron wrote to me and a couple other people:

This smelled a lot like ballot-stuffing to me, but I’m always one to play political games. So I went to the web site:

It looks like Greg is holding onto a tight lead in the straw poll, probably because I voted for him several times. I was going to look into hacking the system and placing ten thousand votes for Greg via a web script, but the poll is running on Blogspot, which is owned by Google and locked down pretty well. In a few minutes of poking I wasn’t able to find a quick way to game the system.

Still, I couldn’t resist adding a few comments to the blog. Most of the comments already in there were really boring things like

Yeah, yeah. Yawn. It’s time the heavyweights came to the party:

I’m shopping for some RAM for a few servers I administer, and came across this awesome customer review:

That’s certainly a drawback. Pesky computer stores.

Just got back from a one-day business trip to Los Angeles.

When I left Denver it was 15 degrees and snowing; the interstate was a twenty-mile stretch of ice, and we had to wait 45 minutes to de-ice the plane before takeoff.

When I arrived in Los Angeles it was crystal clear, sunny, and 65 degrees. Perfect.

Ahh, California… love to visit, wouldn’t want to live there.

“I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking up something and finding something else on the way.”

— Franklin P. Adams

Laralee is awesome. For the past three days she’s been doing some spring cleaning, including crazy things like dusting the baseboards and even shampooing the carpets. Without her I’m sure those things would never happen, and our house would be a disaster.

I was reading the New York Times and saw a graphic showing the current national unemployment level, which is 8.1%.

What the heck kind of graph is this? Without an x-axis there’s no way to tell if this is over the course of the last year, the last month, or maybe even since lunch. And without a y-axis we don’t know where it started– was there zero unemployment sometime recently that I didn’t know about?

Come on guys, I know not everyone is a mathematician like me, but really, can’t you do a little better than this?

I just heard Leonard Nimoy’s rendition of “If I Had a Hammer”. It’s not quite as bad as “The Bilbo Baggins Song” but wow, it’s so awful it’s going to leave a scar.

What has been heard… cannot be un-heard.