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http://twitter.com/#!/googlenexus/status/136352988997492736
I’m not so good at art, so I decided to use my 4 year old son, 2 year old daughter, and 1 year old daughter’s art to make my creation for the Galaxy Nexus challenge. Here’s an image to the art (full size):
Process:
My original idea was just to take one of Caris’ drawings, and then make a photo mosaic using their pictures of my kids from the past 4 years. However, it seemed a little too simple while creating, so I needed to add Caleb & Chloe to the mix as well.
Caris
I first had Caris draw an Android figure. It was quite beautiful.
Here’s the picture I used for the final art.
Caleb
We decided to make cookies for our last Music Together class. Here’s Caleb and Caris mixing the cookie dough.
I used some of the extra cookie dough to make this Android figure.
Chloe
I figure Chloe couldn’t draw anything that resembled an Android figure, so I just gave her a green crayon and hoped she would draw some grass. Mission accomplished.
Of course she was a little hungry too.
Here’s what Chloe came up with.
Putting it all together
I wanted to take the characters and grass and put them on another canvas, so I had to crop out the Android figures and grass using gimp.
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Now I just need to put them all together.
I added the ground, the sky, the sun and some clouds. And voila.
Honestly, I could have been done here, but my original idea was to create a photo mosaic of my kids art. Since Caleb was born over 4 years ago, I’ve taken over 15,000 pictures. That should be enough images to make a nice mosaic.
Using metapixel, I converted all my pictures into 64×64 images.
Then using our art we created above as the source, I created the photo mosaic (full size image/warning: 80megs. You can even seen my children!).
Not quite satisfied with everything, why don’t I go back to the beginning and insert this image back into the board where Caris originally started.
Here’s the board with non-mosaic board.
And here’s the final image.
I’ve been trying to sell my extra laptop for the past month. I’ve been posting ads on craigslist and Facebook. However, almost all of the responses I get are from Nigerian scammers. I have a few options when dealing with scammers. I either ignore them. Or I pose as an interested buyer. Or I simply call them out on it.
The image I used below is the first image I found when I searched for “grandma” on Google images with moderate filtering. Maybe it’s this result just in Belize. It is crude, but fitting nonetheless.
Start Slide Show with PicLens LiteBetween You and Sindri Joe
Sindri Joe February 25 at 1:01am
hi
i am really interested in buying this item for my Grandson in west Africa as a Birthday gift and i will be offering you $570 including the shipping cost to west Africa kindly get back to me with your pay pal email address, so that i can send out the payment as soon as possible.
Thanks and Stay Bless
Christopher Wong February 25 at 9:43am
Your grandson? Wow. You can’t be more than 20 from your picture. You should really find a new picture that reflects your age.
what do you mean by that?
If you’re going to pose as a grandmother, perhaps you should use a photo that doesn’t look like you’re 16 years old. Technically, it is possible at that age to be a grandmother, but highly improbably. Like one in a million if not worse odds. That’s like you having a child at 8 years old. And then having your child having a baby at 8 years old.
If you are that one in a million, I’ll send you my computer free of charge. You’ll need all the help you can get. That’s got to be psychologically and emotionally damaging.
However, I’m assuming you’re a male Nigerian scammer, who hasn’t had much luck scamming people via Facebook. The least you can do is use a picture of an actual grandmother.
http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi
Google, come to Duarte, CA, please! I think I should forward this to my city council members.
Why would Bing suck? For only one good reason, of course. Vanity search. Google got it right. #2. Yahoo is okay. On the first page still. Bing? Why don’t you look up that silliness yourself.
What is all this? You have repeat links. You have Dr Christopher Wong as the number 2 result? Have you tried clicking through links on that site? It’s broken! This is your number 2 result? Really? I can’t even make the first page, and the number 2 site is broken website?
Bing, you fail. I own chriswong.com and chriswong.org. That alone should hit me front page, but no. What am I doing wrong? Am I not posting enough? Or maybe something else is wrong. Microsoft, you are wrong. Fix your search engine.
I’m gone on vacation. I miss news for a couple of days. And now I read about Google pretty much killing custom ROMs for Android (at least for now). What are you doing, Google? I’m your b***h. You’ve got me, okay? I’m not going anywhere. But if you want me to enjoy having you as my pimp, don’t kill custom ROMs. Don’t be stupid. All you’re doing is angering some of your most diehard fans. You want us to stay in your eco-system, not leave it. Without a rooted ROMs, I have no reason to recommend any Android phone over the iPhone. With it, I’m down with you, homey.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here are some links
http://phandroid.com/2009/09/25/cyanogen-gets-cd-from-google/
http://phandroid.com/2009/09/25/google-responds-to-cyanogen-uproar/
http://phandroid.com/2009/09/25/eff-google-screw-android-the-backlash-begins/
Seriously, Google. Don’t be stupid. We already bought into your system. You own us. Don’t kill the best thing Android has going for it.
Reading this stuff makes me want to cry. It’s like having your pimp loving you and giving you everything; all the nicest jewelry and cars. And then he goes and slaps you for the first time. That’s what Google did to me. You slapped me, Google. I feel betrayed. I may forgive you, Google, but I won’t forget.
This is the one area in my life where Google doesn’t own me. Online photo gallery. Now don’t get me wrong. I love Picasa and Picasa web. But there is one thing about them that prevents me from using it and that is storage space. 1 gig is all they offer for free. 1 gig?!? Do you realize that I have over 45 gigs of pictures? So 1 gig is good for a free service. You know how much it costs to upgrade the storage? For 10 gigs it’s $20 a year, which still wouldn’t be enough to store my photos. For 40 gigs it’s $75 a year, which yet again wouldn’t store all my photos. For 150 gigs, it costs $250. $250 a year to store my photos if I were to use them. What’s worse about this storage upgrade is that it shares that store with Gmail as well. So if you have 1 gig worth of email, like I do, then you have 1 gig less of storage for photos. Picasa web… Not worth the money.
Flickr, in my opinion, is a much better option. The free version is kind of limited, but it works well. But for a mere $25 a year, you get unlimited storage, unlimited uploads, unlimited bandwidth, etc… So if I wanted to store my photos here, it’ll cost my $25 a year. That’s a tenth of the price for me than Picasa. The features of Picasa and Flickr are different, and I think Picasa is better. But that storage absolutely is dog doo doo. This would be a no brainer for me… if it weren’t for my stupid internet connection.
Do you realize that I still only have 1.5 Mbps / 384 Kbps DSL? Do you know that’s the fastest speed I can get at my house? Yes, there is cable internet here. But if you know me and Charter, then you know that’s not an option. So let’s do a little calculation here on how long it would take to transfer.
In reality I really only get about 35 KB/s max upload rate. I normally limit the upload rate to 25KB/s so it doesn’t kill my connection. 45 GB = 45,000,000 KB. With my connection maxed out, it would take me over 357 hours to finish or almost 15 days to finish transferring my photos. With my upload rate capped, it would take 500 hours, or 20.8 days to finish transferring my pictures. Now if I had FiOS and my 15 Mb uplink, I’d be able to finish that transfer in 400 minutes, or just under 7 hours. Who needs FiOS? I do.
Where is my FiOS, Verizon? I have been waiting patiently for years for you to come to my house, and you are still not here! Come now!
hey matt it’s me so i found a ken doll on my way out to them on to go pick up she lives in flynn arson carson went and guard so we haven’t been there in time leaving them on that all of that and i guess i’ll talk to them up at your sense that i didn’t hear from you i was gonna ask you if you wanted to stop by home really quickly travel more if you want me to drop them off to church in yeah man picked up your phone i will try to drop them off at church right now i’d i 55 okay talk to you later bye
I made some changes to the feed. You don’t need to update the rss feed now. I have it redirecting to feedburner properly now. Hopefully feedburner can properly get my feed. Of course eventually http://chriswong.org/rss might stop working when I move my site over to WordPress, but I guess I can make that still work anyways.
I’m locked into Google. I got my G1, and I’m connected to Google all the time now. My primary broser is Google Chrome, and it probably will be for the foreseeable future (of course foreseeing the future in browser technology is a very small window). Mail goes through Google Apps. Still the only search engine I use. Google Reader. Google Calendar. They own me.
The one thing that is holding back Google from completely owning me is Picasaweb. The Picasa program is great. Online storage… Sucks. 1 gig of storage? That’s it? It costs $75/year for 40 gigs of space. But why pay that if I can get unlimited with flickr for $25/year? Picasaweb doesn’t allow uploaded photos over 1600×1200 (or at least it didn’t before). Google needs to revamp that cost if it ever wants to totally own me.
But latest Google thing I have to talk about is Experimental search. There are keyboard shortcuts! How did I not know about this?
So we’ve decided to add Safari/Webkit support to our editor at work. I don’t think any of you have seen our product, but it’s heavy on javascript (jQuery) usage. So I decided to do a speed test with our editor to see how well each browser performs on just loading the editor.
So obviously this will test the html rendering of the browser. It’s a big page and we use lots of CSS. And then it will test javascript speed. It’s pretty apparent that this isn’t the be all and end all of speed test reviews, but the results are entertaining nonetheless, especially since I can see the real world speed test of our system. So here are the results from just loading the editor, which is the only test I’ll have time to do for now.
Test System:
Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
2 Gig Ram
Windows Vista 32-bit Business
Load Times in Seconds
- Firefox 3.0.1
- 13.3
- 13.3
- 13.1
- Google Chrome
- 7.7
- 7.7
- 7.1
- IE8 Beta 2
- 11.8
- 11.2
- 10.8
- Safari 3.1.2
- 10.0
- 8.1
- 11.5
- 9.4
- 8.6
- Firefox 3.1 Alpha2
- 9.2
- 10.0
- 9.3
It’s pretty clear from my tests on our system that Google Chrome is clearly the fastest browser. I remember switch from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3 and seeing how much faster that was. I wonder how slow Firefox 2 would be on our system. Even with Firefox 3.1 new javascript engine, it’s still significantly slower than Chrome. I know it’s just an alpha product, so it still has the potential to be faster when the final version comes out. But 3.1 is still close to 2 seconds slower loading the page.
What was interesting to me was to see how Safari was all over the map in loading the page. It had 8 seconds loads. And then it had close to 12 seconds loads. I tested it some more (not shown), and those results showed the Safari was consistently inconsistent for some reason.
Chrome is not without it’s faults. It doesn’t render the background image to one of the divs correctly in my editor (but Safari correctly renders it for some reason). This could be because it’s using an older version of WebKit. Incorrect. But fast.
