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.

Original image.

Try to find a picture of yourself amidst these 4,800 (not necessarily distinct) thumbnails. This image is 6400×3600 and is 4.91Mb. Also, make sure your browser/viewer doesn’t resize it… it is a VERY large image.