Escaped Thoughts

In any given hand, Laura is not allowed to score more points than Stuart.

I hope that settles that question. Now that it appears on the internet (with the word “official”, no less!), it must be true.

That is all.

Category: Random

Writebacks (0)

In preparation for heading to Germany, in light of all the German we didn't keep studying like we had intended to, we plastered index cards all over the apartment last night identifying objects with their German names. The cards tell me that I am sitting at "der Computer", looking at "der Bildschirm" as I tap away at "die Tastatur". Probably not critical words I grant you, but many of the others are much more useful. Hopefully that plus some targeted studying of important words (we didn't find any prepositions or adjectives around the apartment, unfortunately) will slightly reduce our ignorance before we strike out.

And hopefully the week in France won't erase what limited German we have...

Category: Life

Writebacks (0)

Okay, so I missed my post for yesterday. But Sunday morning is a lot like Saturday night, right?

Anyway, I have an excuse: I was playing with hugin. It's an automagic panorama creation tool—you drop in some pictures, feed it lens information, define control points in pairs of images that correspond to the same point in reality, optionally tweak some parameters I don't understand yet, and poof! Instant panorama. It does all the necessary warping of the images to remove perspective effects and minimize barrel distortion, while keeping the horizon level, then positions them correctly and does some edge blurring to remove harsh lines.

It's not perfect; the OS X port still has some roughness to the UI, and it doesn't (as I was hoping it would) automatically do color level adjustments of the pictures to match the colors at the control points in order to prevent sudden color variation across the final image. On the other hand, setting the control points is surprisingly painless, and it's pretty impressive to see how quickly it figures everything out. It's certainly unbelievably easy compared to doing everything myself in the Gimp, and does a lot more actual distorting rather than relying on meticulous airbrushing to fake it. And as an added bonus, there's actually a step where I have all the distorted and positioned images as separate files; it would be easy for me to inject some manual color adjustments at that point, or even to to my own custom fuzzing and stitching if there are any details I want to get just right.

All in all, I rate it extremely cool. Stay tuned for a sample panorama or two.

Category: Photos

Writebacks (0)

This was just too good not to mention:

What might cause us to go to EDA-Level Red:

you may wonder? I'm glad you asked. And as for why, well, there are apparently plenty of reasons.

Category: Random

Writebacks (0)

I'd been meaning to post a detailed comparison of just how much better my new iMac is than my old G4, but I think it's easiest to just sum it up: it's about a jillion times better.

I'm very pleased with the speed, the screen, the quietness, and even the look (despite my misgivings when then G5 iMacs were first introduced). All in all a great computer, saving me lots of time (and sanity) that would previously have been spent sitting and waiting a little bit longer every time I did something moderately taxing. It even runs Aperture like a champ, which is good since I'm probably going to be switching over from iPhoto to Aperture—after having played around with it for a few hours, I am hooked.

So for anyone who was wondering how I'm liking my new computer, the answer is: very much, thank you.

Category: Life

Writebacks (0)

Today's deceptively simple quiz: Fill in the blank in the title. Give both the spelling and pronunciation of the missing word.

Category: Language

Writebacks (6)

I think it's safe to say that the answer to the question "Will getting a domain encourage me to post more?" is "No". I've had some posts floating around in my head, but for whatever reason they never actually made it up here. But two months of dead space is getting to be a bit much even by my standards—so, to compensate, I'm going to try an experiment: I will post something every day for a week. I certainly don't expect to post every day forever, but maybe some forced posting will get things kick-started a bit.

Here goes!

Category: Life

Writebacks (0)