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For lack of better alternatives, I bring to you the current meme on my plate.  Young whipper-snappers may be unfamiliar with this word, but it is essentially an Internet chain-letter.  Spazzmanda passed this on to me from her blog, where she refers to such activities as “tagging.”  I always thought that was a cultural art of defacement by way of graffiti, but what does an old fart like me know.

The Rules: Rules are posted at the beginning. At the end of the post, the player tags 5 people and posts their names. Then the player goes to each of the “named” people’s blogs and leaves a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. If you’ve been tagged, you do the same, letting the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer. Your answer, of course, is the answer to the following questions. Here we go!

1. What was I doing 10 years ago? One decade ago I was two months from my 2nd wedding anniversary with my lovely wife, Amy.  We had no children, though we had pets.  We were in our first year at our first house together (and current house).  Amy was still in school at North Georgia College and State University (though it may not have been a State University at the time), and I was working for…Whittman-Hart, perhaps.  I was a consultant beginning to cut my teeth on information systems security.  It would be my primary job and objective for the next several years.  I registered gradin.com for the first time – it was a standard 2-year registration and cost me $70.00 (I think my last registration was $8.95 for a year).  I was finally able to access my awesome Mindspring account web space using my rocking X2 US Robotics Sportster (externel) modem via www.gradin.com.  I was working in Allaire’s Cold Fusion, though I couldn’t afford a license for the server to host my own site using their technology.  I used Allaire’s Homesite as my primary editor with Photoshop and Fractal Painter as my graphics packages.  I think I was trying to get onto Bellsouth’s xDSL beta program, but with no luck due to my distance from the carrier.  I was, however, involved with Wachovia’s beta online account access.  It was a glorified BBS – awesome!

2. What are 5 things on my to-do list today? I’ve got ESX hosts to convert to 3.5i, installable.  SAN storage to attach, and VMs to migrate both through traditional migrations, as well as the new and improved Storage VMotion.  I also have some process proposal documentation to get done for the collected efforts of the Norcross lab engineering team, as well as that of our Hillsboro office.  I hope to get some ping-pong in at lunch, ride my bike 10 miles back to my car, and then facilitate a drum circle for 100 people in northeast Georgia with some friends.

3. Snacks I enjoy: Have you tried my nuts?  They’re salty and dimensionally variant.  I enjoy the texture especially, though others are just happy I am able to share – there’s more than enough for everyone to enjoy!  I also like beef jerky and granola bars.

4. Places I’ve lived: I’ve had a good spread in my life, though as of late my homestead has been very static.  I began in Ocean Springs, MI; moved to Plano, TX, and then jumped to San Diego, CA shortly thereafter.  We moved a couple of times there, but finally moved out the state to Tuscon, AZ.  From there, we departed for Waycross, GA, and then onto Gainesville, GA where I live now.  I’ve moved several times throughout both of these places in Georgia, and I’ve been here the longest amount of time so far.

5. Things I would do if I were a billionaire: This is actually the title of a post I’ve been working on for a while now.  It’s a recurring theme throughout our decade+ of marriage, and one that will most likely continue to develop and mature in time.  The most boring thing I think of from our list is to pay-off debt and acquire some commercial real estate to lease.  There’s money accumulation prospects in that, so we would do well to set ourselves for the inevitable loss of said billions through the frivolous purchases from our list.  There are two more intriguing opportunities: 1) Develop a waterfront district on Lake Lanier – a boardwalk with shops and dining – that aids in the lake’s restoration efforts, as well as providing some awareness about the lake’s ecosystem.  2) Convert an old mill on the outskirts of town into a turn-of-the-century arts and crafts guild.  History tells us that these guilds are mere congregations of passionate people in the arts and crafts and generally have no ability to sustain themselves financially.

5 “Tagged”

1. Sean Williams
2. Jason Darling (Bleh.  MySpace)
3. James Palmer
4. Israel Lawson
   
5. Steve Tucker

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Microsoft Labs: Photosynth Preview

Just in case you were too amazed to properly put together what you just saw, here’s my summary. SeaDragon developed an imaging solution (algorithm, I suppose) that regards bit depth and pixel count as only contextually relative. To an extent, your computer does this today. It’s just not as efficient as what SeaDragon was able to do. If your computer is asked to display 100 images in a grid and your computer’s monitor is capable of displaying 786,432 pixels (1024×768), then the SeaDragon algorithms resize the images to 7,800 pixels each (100×78) – don’t argue, just follow the logic of my simple example. Graphics programs such as Photoshop do this with a choice as to how you would like to interpolate the images (Lanczos, B-spline, Triangle/tent, nearest neighbor). I haven’t heard what math is used to do it in SeaDragon’s technology, but it must be something fast (not necessarily accurate). The implementation allows you to seamlessly zoom in and out of an entire image collection without delay. Microsoft demonstrated the technology as a new way to media market. The example involved showing a newspaper with vector text on it and images flowed – just as you would expect. However, the interesting bit was where they zoomed into an area of the paper to bring a micro-fiche like add to the foreground with distinct detail in the images and text (of course). It really merges the world of raster and vector imaging solutions. So here’s where Microsoft steps in and, correct me if my timing is off, bridges the technology with some Microsoft magic to create an imaging technique with spatial recognition. The example you see at the Photosynth link is a collection of Flickr photos of a specific cathedral. They’ve spatially mapped all the pictures into a model of the cathedral. This combined 2D/3D world now allows you to move around within the 3D structure while using a variety of images to give you the detail. As you move the mouse around, it highlights spatially plotted images that were recognized to fit. Now that you know what’s going on, go back and try it again!

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Lilly and family have put together quite the entrpreneurial activity. Lilly “hypnotizes” Green anoles by stroking their underside a few times in her hand. The lizard is pretty much inactive for 10 minutes or so while she dresses them in doll clothing, poses them in miniature scenes, or simply sticks them together like primates from A Barrel of Monkeys. The results, as captured by her father Lucien, are fantastic. You’d think they were Photoshop’d (yes, that’s a verb), but now you know better! Lilly was recently on David Letterman, so I’m sure she’s going to be busy hereon out.

Lizard Ville

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