Thanks XKCD

 

Sometimes I love this web comic.  Below is the link to the original along with the comic I have blatantly stolen to amuse myself.  Pure comedy gold.

XKCD comic.

Some quick Photoshop Action

My sister just made a winter visit down the road  to Niagara Falls.  She sent me some nice photos of the trip and I was particularly taken with this one.

I thought this looked pretty great, but given the weather of Canada in Feb, it is a little grey and dark.  So, I thought I would have a quick go at it in Photoshop to see what I could do with it.  I wanted to brighten it up and give it some wintery contrast.

What I did was this:

1. ran the auto tone and auto colour tools.
2. used the smart sharpen filter.
3. adjusted curves to brighten up image.
4. changed levels to increase blue level for a more icy feel.
5. selectively used the burn tool to bring out some of the details for more contrast.

What do you think?  did I go to far?  I thought maybe I oversharpened and it is a little grainy now, but I think I like the overall look of the image.

The Big Office Project

So, I was off for half of last week to build and fill up our new office furniture.

In the next few months, our house will need to be transformed to accommodate the addition to the family.  Basically the following has to happen:

1. Move office from first floor to basement
2. Move Liam from his room to old office (paint and furnish)
3. Paint and reassemble baby room.

So phase 1 started a long time ago with the design process.  Claudia and I took all the needed measurements, then decided what needed to go into the future office.  It was to be a home for our many many books and computers as well as the primary work space in the home.

It will also function as the secondary guest room in case we need another bed, in the form of a pullout couch,futon.

As I continue to hate Ikea, we decided to look elsewhere for furnishings.  After some search, we settled on a German shop, Moebelum.  Many shelves were purchased, and Claudia’s Brother Bernhard was drafted to help me with the project.

First we did the computer corner.  This will be my principal home in the office.

Next up, a cupboard and some shelves next to the desk.  The cupboard will hold my formidable board game collection and the shelves will be all of my books.

Next up, more bookshelves to the right of the desk.  Here you see Bernhard in action.

 

Then we add even more shelves, including a big one to hold our old TV.  This is keeping the long run in mind when we will almost certainly have some TV scheduling conflicts with the two little boys in the house.  We men can all watch hockey upstairs and send mummy off to the basement to watch desperate housewives or whatever chick show she is in to.  Ok, we all know that is not how it will happen…

 

At this point, Liam came home and decided to bring in a crane to help.  I thought he would lament the loss of the big empty room he sometimes played in, but he seems to like the new office so far.

Next up was Claudia’s dream desk.  A great big L desk.  Of course the clowns at the shop first forgot to send the hardware needed to join the L, and I had to drive the loooong way back to pick it up.

Here is how the join works.  There are three little clamps on the underside.

 

The finished desk.

 

Finally, clean up.  Also Liam took this moment to grab my level and make sure all the shelves were OK.  He went to all the ones he could reach and yelled out if they were straight or not.  Lucky for me they all were.

anonymous comments turned off.

Sorry, sick of deleting Spam comments.

no mor anonymous ones, you have to have a userid.

No posts this week as I have been building office furniture for the last days. I will have an update with much shelving soon.

Still a computer geek

Even as a fully grown up person, edging ever closer to 40, I still have a great love of video games. I don't even question this, I would still rather spend my recreational time gaming above so many other activities...

This year for Christmas, my gaming needs were addressed with this gift from my mother:

I was already a firm fan of Rock Band and I have been a Beatles fan for many years. This was a particularly good pick as the music selection is more accessible to Claudia should she want to play with me. She is not a fan of many of the more modern songs in Rock Band (regular) that I tend to enjoy, like the Pixies.

Liam also loves this rock band, but for him the entire game is about playing "Yellow Submarine" over and over again. Liam also liked Beatles music from a very small age, but for some yet to be explained reason, he always referred to them as "car wash"

I think he may have first heard them in the car on a trip to the car wash, but I can't be sure. He may have just randomly selected that name.

TRAGEDY STRIKES

I was shocked and sad to hear that the Joneses had a break in to their flat over the weekend while they were up in Germany visiting us.  Getting robbed sucks, but I think the important thing to remember is that it is just stuff.  No one was hurt and you can always get more stuff.

Apparently the police have advised that there is a problem with “Georgian gangs” conducting burglaries.  This of course led me to the best source of information that exists, Google.

By typing in to Google “Georgia Gangs” the first image that popped up was unfortunately this one:

Which is apparently a still shot from a film about English School girls, one of whom is named Georgia.  As much as I would like to think that an apartment could be burgled by a group of schoolchildren, I think this was likely not the gang I was looking for.

I refined my search to “Georgian Gangs Geneva Robbery” and came to this article:

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/index/Georgian_gangs_behind_rise_in_Geneva_burglaries.html?cid=685424

Apparently there is an organized crime presence in Europe and it has recently come to Geneva.  the article states;

“ Georgian criminal gangs are chiefly responsible for the large rise in burglaries in French-speaking Switzerland over the past year, the Geneva police have confirmed.”

Apparently burglaries were up 20% in Geneva last year, that is pretty shocking. 

Another Google search on “Georgian Robbers” gave me this nice photo of Dick Turpin, who really has nothing to do with either, but again I like to think of robbers escaping on horseback over the hills.

I also had a look at the Wikipedia entry on Georgia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_%28country%29 and it had zero mention of Georgian mafia gangs.  I am going to go out on a limb and say the robbers probably looked more like this:

You can clearly tell he is a baddie as I think it’s pretty universally known that baddies have masks, striped turtlenecks, crowbars, moustaches and smoke.  Also, he is yelling in Georgian and has a sack of Loot.

I have to say, I am filled with a tremendous dislike for all things Georgian and the entire nation of Georgia at the moment.  A few bad eggs have now ruined an entire country for me as I decide to paint them all with the same brush.   DO YOU HEAR ME GEORGIA!  I DON’T LIKE YOU NOW!

Well, that all being said, I am very sympathetic to the poor Joneses brush with EVIL GEORGIANS and I hope that the Police catch and punish the robbers in the most Swiss way possible, perhaps force feeding of cheese fondue while wearing decorative cowbells and having alpine horns blasted at them by traditionally dressed mountainfolk.  Oh, and also endlessly reading “Heidi”

If it is possible to think that any good has come of this situation, I think we can all agree that it has given me the idea for my new TV series “Swiss Justice”

So…. The iPad…..

Well, I am quite a tech loving guy, and like most of my kind I keep one eye on Apple whenever they are sending out their reality warping events promoting the latest giant bump in their product portfolio.

Yesterday was finally the announcement of the worst kept secret in the industry, the iPad.  I don’t know if I would call myself an Apple fanboy, since I have never owned a Mac computer.  There have been many occasions where I would have liked to, but have gone the way of windows for one reason or another.  I am an iPod guy, and have owned a few since the first gen of the iPod mini up through my current Nano.

Also, I have wanted an iPhone for a while, but absolutely refuse to consider it as long as T-com is the only provider.  I have deep personal feelings about T-com and will not be allowing them to have any of my money.  If the iPhone moves to another provider… it will be on my radar.  But that is another story.

I watched “the Steve” do his thing yesterday, and as usual he was very compelling.  As I watched the announcement and demo, I thought it looked pretty great.  But I have learned that the presentation style of The Steve really does distort opinions of the products, so I had to think about what he showed before I allowed myself to like or dislike this new product.

After much consideration, I would say the iTab is a good, but not revolutionary product.  To me, it is basically a super size iPod touch.  Perhaps a netbook replacement, but i don’t even know if that is the case.  What I like on the iTab

• Screen looks very nice.
• the iPhone OS was already pretty easy and fun to use.
• the Kindle reading application looks well implemented.
• Pricing was far better than I thought it would be.
• Ability to store and display PDF files is great.
• It looks like something from the future.
• 10 hour battery life?  sounds too good to be true.
• Wireless access plans (for US at least) is reasonably priced.

What I don’t Like on the iTab

• No Camera/videoconferencing.
• Any widescreen media (films) will have LOTS of black bars and bezel.
• OS does not support multitasking, not that big a deal, but on a “netbook killer” it should be there.
• Too many adaptors needed for everyday connections.  You need an adaptor for USB?  come on…
• No Flash in web browser.  This is a must if it is a real web appliance.

Will I buy one? very very unlikely.  It would be an amusing toy, but I think all in all I would rather have an iPhone with a few modifications to the OS, or even an iPod touch with a couple more features.

Not much going on...

I have really failed to take any new photos since Christmas, and I really did not take all that many over the break. Such a shame when I find myself with nothing to say.

The Playmobil Castle….

Liam’s big gift this year was a Playmobil knights castle.  I cannot stress BIG enough.  this thing is giant.

I wish I had taken some photos of the building process, as it was a nightmare of tiny parts.  It took me over 2 hours to get the whole thing together, and it was long after Liam was asleep.

Here is the thing in all its beastly glory… Basically every place there is a different colour of plastic, there was at least 2 pieces or more.  The walls and towers had many segments, and all of them needed tiny plastic fasteners inserted with a special tool.  It was very fiddly and slow, but the instructions were clear and nothing was missing.  They are one up on Ikea in that department.

Here is the view a little Playmobil munchkin may have riding through the front gates.Liam was of course overjoyed to see it all put together and ready to play on Christmas morning.  He was so excited to get it the night before and a little disappointed that papa was not a faster builder.  He wanted it to pop out of the box ready to play.   Just look at the size of the thing next to Liam.  We had to clear out a big space in his room to house this beast.  The Ritterburg has seen extensive play since that first day, and Liam of course makes everyone join in the fun.  Of course, Liam always gets first (and second) choice of which knights to use.  In keeping with a feudal themed toy, we poor peasants are left with the scraps once royalty has had its way.

Christmas gift time – Liam

A very memorable moment on Christmas eve was when we all came home from the church, and brought Liam into the living room.  We had sneaked all the gift down while he was getting ready to go a little earlier, so for him, they had magically appeared while we were out.

He stood there and looked at the tree and gifts and was totally speechless, something that we thought was impossible for the little chatterbox.

Here is a selection of Liam opening a few of his many man gifts.  The Knight’s castle was his big gift this year and I will feature it in a future post of assembly nightmares.

 

Christmas Tales

Christmas is of course long gone now, but this will not stop me from posting my Christmas photos. As usual, our house was all decorate up for the holidays, with a few new features this year.

First we have the paper crafted advent train. This came from a book that was a gift from Aunt Doris to Liam. The idea was that every day in December, you read another page in the story and assembled the next part of the display. Of course the reality is that it was way to delicate for Liam and Claudia did the entire project under his supervision. It did turn out very nice though.Next up, we have the winter display made of course by decorator Claudia. She took her domed cake plate, put down some powdered sugar snow, then added our little wooden Santa that we bought at a market some years ago. Of course the missing piece of that puzzle was the deer, which she bought at the hardware store in town. For some reason, they also sell some little toy animals there. Of course the centerpiece of every Christmas display is the tree. We had a nice one this year, although a touch on the short side. Liam would not get out of the way so he struck some slick poses instead while I was trying to get a photo. They worst thing with this year’s tree was that I seemed to be allergic to it. 10 min in the room and I had uncontrollable itchy eyes. I was not sorry to see it taken down last week.

My Latest Project - Home Media Network

So one of the things that has been keeping me very busy is setting up my home media network. This is something I wanted to do for a long time, and certainly something I had envisioned using my Xbox for. I actually don't play very many games on my Xbox, but use it extensively as a media server. I had been limited to the Xbox HD, memory cards, or other fiddly things to get my media on there though.

Over the Christmas break, I assembled the various hardware I have been slowly accumulating over time/holidays/birthdays and got everything together and running.

The files for my video, music, and photos now reside on my NAS (network attached storage) which is just a hard drive with a network card in it basically. This is then attached to my nice new (Christmas) router, making all files available to devices connected to the router.

So, I acquire new media via normal sources, iTunes, digital Cameras, etc.. and these are routed inwards via my old desktop to the NAS, which stores them all. Then I pull out the media I want to use via the Xbox in the living room, my iPod, or any computer that is on the network. It basically looks like this:

It is all up and running as of yesterday and so far everything works perfectly.

The next phase would be to enable web access to the NAS, at which point I will be able to use the NAS from any computer with an internet connection (and my address and password of course.)

I could even go so far as to stream audio and video files directly to an iPhone or iPod touch, neither of which I currently own. I am sure that audio would stream to them no problem, but I am curious to see what happens when I stream a video file to an iPhone that is not already in the correct H.264/MPEG-4 video format.

According to the manufacturer, the NAS will “render content properly for display on the smaller screen…” I am still not sure if this just means that the video resolution is downsampled, or if it is somehow reformatted. I would be quite impressed if the NAS could actually re-code and stream an H.263 file to an iPhone… I may need to enlist a tester with said hardware on that project.

Finally…

OK, i finally got around to unloading my photos and I can start to make some posts again.  I have to say there has been quite a bit going on these days.

I will start off with the usual family Christmas group photo.  This year we were missing the Joneses, who were off in the USA visiting Ryan’s family, and you can see Franz is still recovering from his surgery there.

This will be the last photo of ours with just one little troublemaker in it.  Claudia’s belly is not so visible here, but the next little munchkin will be joining us in future Christmas photos.  Oh, and if Claudia has her way, this is also the last Christmas photo with this couch.  She is desperate for a new bigger one.

Liam’s Photography

Last year (i think) Liam’s wonderful Aunt Shona gave him the gift of a kids digital camera.  I threw a largish memory card in it and let him off into his little world to have some fun. 

Since so many of the photos he took with the camera were really random, I kind of forgot about it and stopped checking up on them, but a week or two ago, he complained that he needed some new batteries.  I took that opportunity to see what he had been up to.  Surprisingly, there were 800 pictures on the camera.

some themes recurred:

1. Liams room
2. The living room
3. Mummy and Papa’s feet.

Here are a couple of the better ones he took.