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Here’s a new picture of me, on this last day of 2006 (picture taken in the wee hours of the morning.) I know this picture is a bit bizarre, but it’s nothing compared to me as a muppet with orange hair. In fact, whenever I would pull up my blog and see myself as Beaker, it freaked me out a little. To protect my self-image and prevent a tragic descent into an alternate Muppet identity, I decided to post a merely normally-odd picture of myself. Here I am at home in Maple Grove, Minnesota.
This Christmas has been blissfully uneventful--a nice break and time to relax. I got a bunch of awesome presents. Nothing excessive, but just what I needed. I read a lot, a luxury. I usually am able to afford only about 10 pages every evening, but managed to work through a couple of books over the past 10 days. I took time to indulge my addiction to P.G. Wodehouse, which I originally got from my father at an early age. (”I learned it by watching you!”) I can’t think of another author so expertly skilled in the use of the English language purely in the pursuit of mirth and frivolity. Perfect.
I’ve also started a project to gather together all of my old emails from various programs, accounts, periods of my life. I want to put them all together and print them out on actual paper. I have an idea that I periodically like to look at my old correspondence in a nostalgic way. Even if I did migrate all of these emails to a new email program, it’s really not the nicest way to walk down memory lane. Also, I can see the writing on the wall--anything that you really want to be able to see for years to come should be on paper, not on a computer. I already have files from college that I can’t read because they’re in some arcane format for some program that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m sure a computer forensic expert could always read most of my emails, being mostly text, but I want pleasant, easy access to them. I’ve already written a perl script to pull out all the emails and attachments and format them in html. If I manage to make something usable then I’ll write more about it. My goal is to have “chapters” relating to all email traffic between me and each of the various people I’ve written to.
Also, if anybody knows of a program to print out all of one’s emails for browsing, I’d love to hear about it! Tell me now before I go crazy with another project. :)
Happy New Year everybody!
If you’re a hardcore fan of Matt Clapp, you may know that at one point in the near-distant past of graduate school, I dressed up as a certain Muppet with orange hair for Halloween¹. Well, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the effect, and I liked the idea, so I decided to try again.
So I present to you the new and improved Beaker. Hair and nose are more reddish, but much more muppet-like this time around. 
I’ve added a picture of the real Beaker here for comparison. Not bad eh? If you don’t know, Beaker was the assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the brilliant Muppet scientist. Beaker’s expression is due to the fact that he has the classic grad student role--the go-to guy for handling dangerous acids, extremely high voltages, or Muppet-eating animals.
At the costume party I went to, old friends and new seemed to receive the costume well. Some commented that my eyes were perfectly Beaker-like with no costume help, which goes along with past comments that I’m like a muppet in everyday life. Notice the classy gaffer tape name tag. Less apparent is the gaffer tape used in place of buttons on the cheap costume-store lab coat. The name tag is covering the original HI-larious silk-screened name on the lab coat, “Dr. Seymour Bush, Gynecologist”. So it wasn’t just that I needed to tell people who I was supposed to be, I needed to, um, change the tone of the costume from the original.
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¹ Original costume included a valiant attempt to dye my own hair orange (failure, hair was too dark and ended up looking like I was starting to rust.) I also couldn’t find a suitable costume nose, so I used a small Nerf ball with a nose notch cut out. It fell off constantly. This was later put to good use as a cat toy for housemate Peter the Cat. The high point of this costume was “borrowing” a lab coat from a certain professor who shall remain nameless, and then spilling wine on it at the party.
Here’s my bookshelf--nearly finished! Everything’s there except for the head casing and base moldings that will make it a true thing of beauty. An interesting photography note: the slow-sync flash was a nice compromise between natural light and the flash.
And here is a close-up view of the shelves. Not too shabby for pine!
And I can actually use it to hold books now! For the first time! So exciting!
This establishment is nothing if not Pr f ssional.
For a long time, life in my apartment was simple, clean and uncluttered. In short, I didn’t own a couch.
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This went on for months, until one day I decided that it might be nice if women were to want to visit me in my apartment. So I bought a couch!
Here I am welcoming propsective ladies. Hey gals, look, a couch!
Here I am “taking time out” as we used to say in the yearbook trade. Either that, or it’s an alcohol-induced coma.
That’s one comfortable couch!
Hey all, just thought I’d let you know about my new online photo album at http://photos.itsayellow.com .
Right now there’s just pictures from Barcelona, and no pretty main page. But I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret. I may still tinker with the theme of the photo pages.
The cool thing about the photo pages is that the cursor keys (left, right) navigate backward and forward through the pictures, so you can flip through quickly.
Enjoy!
Recently I’ve become aware of Panorama Tools, which are a collection of programs for putting multiple overlapping photos together into one large composite picture. It’s excellent software, giving great results--it’s difficult or impossible in many instances to tell that a resulting photo used to be multiple ones. The problem with it is that it’s not very user-friendly, and very technical. The learning curve is steep. And to me at least, it’s unclear whether the software is still supported, and where the definitive version is.
Because of this, there have sprung up a few graphical-front-ends to this panorama code to make it easier to use. At first, I was only aware of the shareware offerings: PTGUI (€65 to register), and PTAssembler ($39 to register). I’ve tried PTGUI, and it works, but after 30days I wasn’t willing to shell out the $70, so I uninstalled it.
Well, help is here, there is a program called Hugin which is a totally free frontend to the Panorama tools. It’s at version 0.5, meaning presumably things still need to be cleaned up, but I can vouch for the fact that it is already very nicely usable. And of course, it creates great results.
Here are some examples of my first attempts:
This picture was made from two separate photos that I didn’t take with the intention of stitching them together.
Here are the originals.
A more impressive example is the inside of Santa Maria del Mar, in Barcelona. I couldn’t physically get this much field of view with my camera, because the lens isn’t wide enough, and I couldn’t back up anymore because I was inside. However, by pivoting the camera and taking a bunch of pictures, I could stitch them together with Hugin and get this great shot. This picture is a composite of 9 separate overlapping pictures. Also, the final composite picture is nearly 10Mpixels, while my camera is only 7Mpixels. I assume if I ever want to make a poster, this would be the way to cheat and get more pixels than my camera can take.
Finally, there’s this beautiful composite of the Monastery on Montserrat, also near Barcelona. It was originally 4 separate photos. It’s not perfect, as you can see that because the original pictures had different exposures, the sky has a funny gradient on the right side. Also, if you’re very observant, you can see that the lower-left corner is completely made-up. I love the “Stamp” tool in photoshop. The original panorama had no photo for the area that is now in the lower left part of the composite, so I copied some mountainside to it in photoshop. Also, there didn’t used to be any sky in the upper right, which was a bit easier just to copy outright.
Here’s what it used to look like. Hugin actually produces a copy of each of the component pictures accurately warped and with alpha channels on each photo to allow you to put them together yourself, if you want. If I had spent the time, I could’ve fixed where the seam was between two photos to correct for the strange way the sky changes on the right side of the picture. But it’s pretty cool the way it is, and I was getting lazy…
I love almost everything about Picasa, but there are some drawbacks:
A very cool thing that I discovered is that Picasa supports uploading to a number of different online photo services from Picasa itself. That is, you don’t have to download a bunch of different lame programs from each online photo place, Picasa will upload your Picasa photos with its own interface to their site. This seems to work well for Kodak EasyShare at least. When you have pictures in your Picture Tray, just select “Order Prints” and you can upload stuff to the online photo site of your choice. It’s nice.
“Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written, but…”
There was some sitcom or book or play or something where the protagonist was reviewing his/her diary and every entry started that way. Well that’s how I feel now. It’s been a very long time since my last Journal entry. I was starting to feel so intimidated by the long pause, like to write something after so long, it had to be really good. Well, I scrapped that plan, and instead decided just to write something, anything, just to break my long online silence.
I got back from an amazing, amazing trip to Barcelona. I have to thank my hosts, Anna and Pau, and their families, and friends. Their hospitality and friendliness far surpassed any tourist experience I could’ve expected. I also was happy to see my friend Ruth, who drove all the way from Paris (not just to see me, but she drove a long way nonetheless!) At the end of the trip, instead of merely being tired from an adventure and ready for home, I found myself sad to go and missing friends.
Here are some pictures!
Anna, Matt, Walky, David at comida at Anna’s family summer beach house in Calella de Palafrugell
Anna and Pau at el far de Sant SebastiÃ
Anna, Pau, Judit, Matt at the beach in Barcelona. (Our backs are not to the sea!)
Re-enacting some event from the Barcelona Olympics
Matt and Ruth at Cadaques
Matt and Ruth: Wackiness!
Anna and Matt on the roof of Casa Mila
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture I: No, no, Pau.
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture II: Sigh.
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture III: Awwww, but we really like each other.
Hurray for cultural rapprochement!
The best going-away committee ever.
I finally biked all the way to work, on an exhibition trek on Sunday. It took me roughly 50min., and my bike computer said I biked 14.4mph on average, making the trip 12miles exactly. Now, there was still a bit of meandering while I found my way, and I’m a little out of shape, so hopefully in the future I will both bike at a faster rate, and slightly fewer miles because I know my way.
Since I took almost an hour to bike there, I decided to take the VTA Light Rail (now with 30% less Rail!) back. To my surprise, it took almost as long to take the Light Rail to Mountain View as it took me to bike the other way. How is this possible? I wondered?
Well, as the map shows, (thumbnail seen to the right,) the Light Rail route from Mountain View to the Tasman station is 9.75miles. On the official timetable, the train takes 30minutes to get between these two stations, making the average speed of the VTA Light Rail 19.5mph. Not so vastly different from my out-of-shape biking speed. If you add the time for me to get myself to the train station, wait for the train, and go from the end train station to work, you quickly get to at least 40minutes, not so much different from biking the whole way.
So the trade off seems to be biking: more excercise, more need for a shower, train: more sitting around, less stink. I don’t mind the stink, since my goal is still to get some excercise. I’ll probably start half-and-half and then possibly work my way up to biking both ways, especially when it stays light out later in the evening. At least my work has a shower.
I’m going to Barcelona!
For a while I’ve had way too many Frequent Flyer miles with United Airlines. It was making me a bit nervous, because I know that either United will go out of business, or decide that it’s lowly loyal customers don’t deserve such luxuries as free flights. Especially now that you can get miles for anything, including using your credit card, I assume that Mile Inflation has to happen soon, and they’ll be worthless. So I decided to use as many miles, as soon as possible.
But if you actually try to use your miles to go anywhere interesting, you’ll soon find that every time you try to look up a travel date, you will get the message “Date not available” for pretty much every day you look at which is less than a year away. This is really frustrating.
Enter AwardPlanner. It’s a website that’s basically a travel agent that will use your frequent flyer miles to book your flights, (as well as regular paid travel if you want.) The price to have them work for you is a little steep: $100 for a year of their service. They used to have a fee of $40 for one trip, but in the past month they seem to have stopped offering that. Anyway, a trip to Barcelona in April (when I wanted to go) is at least $1000, or $2000 for Business class, so to me $100 didn’t seem so bad if they could get me a roundtrip to Barcelona for only miles. Especially since I couldn’t manage to do it myself. One caveat: they don’t guarantee anything: even after you pay them $100 they might not find you a flight only on miles.
Anyway in the end the nice lady “Janet” got me a beautiful roudtrip itinerary from San Francisco to Barcelona, using only my United miles. First class domestically, and Business class transatlantic. In addition to these great accomodations, she also booked a 3-day stopover in Virginia so I can attend my cousin’s wedding on the way back. It’s possible I could’ve figured out how to book such a complicated itinerary using my miles myself, but I really don’t think I could’ve. I also know I wouldn’t have had the patience to wait with United on hold for as long as it would’ve taken.
So come April, I’ll be in Barcelona for about 11-12 days. My tour guide and gracious host will be my friend Anna, who was a housemate for about 3 months when she was a visiting student in Baltimore. It’ll be great to see her again. Here she is on the 4th of July, embracing America after years of being a self-described extreme America-skeptic. Actually that’s probably a nicer way of putting it than she self-described herself, but it’s ok because she seemed to have a good time and come away knowing that a few of us are actually pretty nice. So now I’ll be able to better appreciate her country, and learn all the wonderful things about Catalunya. (She is “not Spanish but Catalon!”)
In addition, it will be a real post-post-graduate vacation. I had a blast for 4 or 5 days in Mexico for my friend Marcel’s wedding, but I think getting away for almost two weeks is necessary to fully reward myself for escaping grad school. It’s almost like I’m some kind of adult now, what with the travelling and enjoying myself! I can’t wait.