Month: August 2005

Up early.

Today the section leaders and drum majors had diversity training for five hours. This was not meant as a punishment but was a direct consequence of the whole Stanford Women’s Basketball heckling incident with the pep band last year. Evan came to pick up Todd at 8:30 and rang the door bell. It startled me awake enough so that I didn’t really want to go back to bed. So I stayed up… even though I had gone to sleep at 4:30. I saw it as a good way to get my sleeping schedule back on track. Seeing how it’s 2:00 a.m. maybe it didn’t work very well.

I decided to try my programming skills (or lack thereof) at creating a photo mosaic. This first involved taking each one of my 5,646 digital photos and creating thumbnails (80×60). This took a little while. I decided to start simple and just found the average color (R,G, and B) values for each one, find the norm of each color vector, and then sort by that value. Also for fun I decided to look up which photograph I’ve taken was the “brightest” and which was the “darkest.” My brightest photograph was taken at the Spokane International Airport in the Concourse when I accidentally overexposed a picture of that giant light thing they have on the ceiling. What was amazing is that my darkest photograph was the NEXT picture I took back at my friend Martin’s house of a glow in the dark Frisbee which, incidentally, was not glowing very brightly. Okay, so it’s not that exciting. Humor me.

Anyway, it wasn’t until after I got the program working did I realize that my thumbnails shouldn’t be 80×60 (not square), they should be more like 60×60 (square). The only problem is that I either get to have squished thumbnails or I’m going to have to crop each one. Anybody have any good tools (gui or not) that could help me? Well, I’ll give you a taste anyway if anyone is interested, even though the final product is stretched. Behind this lj-cut, you’ll find a linked-to 23 megapixel image.

Grrr

You know what I hate? 1) When creating some kind of account on a website and they don’t allow you to use non-alphanumeric characters, such as a “+” sign (which I use in my primary password), thus having to use some other password that I’m of course going to forget. 2) Using the “Forgot Password?” link on a website to have it tell you a temporary password has been sent to my email address… and waiting… and waiting… and waiting… and it never comes. I’ve waited five minutes now for my password to my account on tv.com. What the hell people?

Wenatchee and Camping

I went to Wenatchee this past weekend and hung out with Becky. We planned on going camping just west of Lake Chelan. We left on Saturday morning and stopped in Chelan for food and drove up to the campground. Unfortunately the lot was full but we were recommended to check out Alta Lake State Park, about four miles southwest of Pateros. We drove up there and were almost disgusted at what they considered a “camp” ground. Think of an open field with a random tree here and there and enough room per campsite to fit a four-man tent. Because of the poor conditions and the $15 per night fee we drove back to Chelan, ate and went swimming. Afterward we checked out Beebe Bridge Park which was also full. At this point we just said, “Screw it!” and drove home. We rented some movies: Trauma and Gone Fishing. I would not recommend the former, but if you’re looking for a silly comedy check out the latter. Think of Dumb and Dumber… but think more along the lines of just “Dumb and Dumb.”

Becky and I got a twenty-gallon fish tank (kit) about which we are both very excited. I bought a stand today and am going to Barnacle Bill’s and maybe Pet’s Are People Too tomorrow to get things ready to go. Does anyone have any suggestions involving the water here in Pullman? For example, is it too hard? You can probably expect pictures of our fishies!

I’m going to try to make a new (school) year’s resolution. I really had trouble last year controlling my temper when it came to minor inconveniences such as my upstairs neighbors stomping, or someone parking their car badly and I have to birth myself from my car just to get out. I would immediately dismiss the individual causing the inconvenience as the most unintelligent person on the face of the planet and that I couldn’t care less if they somehow didn’t wake up the next morning. I probably just needed to relax. Unfortunately, it’s probably too late to make amends with my neighbors considering they’ve probably heard me yell, “FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST! SHUT THE FUCK UP!” at the ceiling one too many times.

I caught up on DivXing all my TV. Hooray for me and the modern microprocessor. Speaking of the modern microprocessor, mine might be making me some money sometime in the near future. White Dog Media has contracted me to encode a large amount of video of which each hour encoded will put about $20 in my pocket. Also, any consulting work could be upwards of $35 an hour! Hooray for money. Not working this summer has really whittled down my bank account. Man, I’m lazy.

Hiking

Bryana and I went hiking yesterday. We planned to hit Kamiak Butte but got no closer to it than the “No Trespassing” barrier due to “extreme fire danger.” So we drove down to Klemgard park, ate lunch, and did a little hiking there… if you could even call it that. More like walking up a hill. The walk was full of wildlife of which I got several pictures. Click for cute fuzzy animals

Wishlist item

Sony released the Cyber-shot T5 today. Pending dpreview.com’s review on the camera I might just have to pick one up. I’d like to have a “in-and-out-of-your-pocket” camera. My F717 doesn’t exactly fit in my pocket… and it weighs 23.2 oz as opposed to the 4.8 oz of the T5.

In other news I edited some old footage of a 20-minute pillowfight between Mitch and Adam on the Holiday Bowl trip. It’s epic. It still needs to compress and be uploaded. I’ll share it tomorrow.