Posts

Here are some photos that Adriana took recently, first of me playing with Connor, and then the aftermath: And then one containing the many faces of Maya: serious, spooked, happy, chipmunk, goofy, and pissed-off.

Here is Maya and Connor having a bit of fun in their favourite play spot while listening to the song “Wolf” by Pyramid.

IMG_20130921_130707.jpg

Recently Maya and Connor had a photo session at the excellent Elzee Photography, who specializes in photos of newborns and children. We got a fantastic set of photos back, and it was totally worth it in every respect. We are definitely planning to take them back there again for upcoming milestones!  I have uploaded the photos to my flickr account, available here (web versions) and here (print versions). ...

*very* early, when they were only a hundred or so cells in size. Of course, we have no idea which is Connor or Maya.

On August 3rd at 9:30pm, after a long and arduous journey, our twins Connor (left) and Maya (right) were delivered at the Baptist hospital of Miami. The three weeks since then (and it only seems like this all happened a couple of days ago) have redefined how much sleep you really need to survive, although recently it’s pretty obvious I am ‘broken’ and find myself walking around in circles due to constantly switching between all the tasks I need to get done. Although we’re extremely exhausted, we’re also overjoyed and are so unbelievably happy. The fact that Maya and Connor are our children is slowly starting to sink in - for a while it felt like we were renting them. They are both very, very distinct in their movements, the sounds they make, the way they feed, and right now it’s hard to see how they could be brother and sister. However, Maya definitely has some of Adriana’s traits and Connor… well, his head size reflects mine that is for sure. ...

After spending a month in China here is the loot that Adriana and I acquired. It includes things made of silk, many types of tea and ways to drink it, obligatory panda stuff, and ingredients for cooking Sichuan food. All good.

While over in Italy for our Honeymoon back in 2010, I used my trusty G1 for all our navigation.  Two years later, I finally got around to uploading the GPS tracks into Google Maps.  I had to use a trick to get the map into one page (typically, Google Maps tends to split the tracks over several pages, so you don’t see the whole view), but phew, I finally did it. ...

I recently participated on a photo scavenger hunt on Google+ arranged by the awesome Chrysta Rae.  The idea behind the hunt is that you have about a month to take photos of ten different subjects.  The use of Photoshop/Lightroom is encouraged, although I didn’t explore heavy editing that much.   You cannot use photos you’ve previously taken - they have to be taken during that month.  At the end of the month, Chrysta compiles the photos from everyone (500 people are in the group, with about two-thirds of that participating),  and the photos are judged (Chrysta is not one of the judges, of course). ...

This moment has been a long time coming.  The first step I’d taken on this journey, and shown in previous posts, was to create a fractal scene piece-by-piece and then simply paste all the pieces together to create a final image.  The image was zoom-able but did not allow the user to pan in any direction.  I thought a good way to enable panning was to create a tile-based engine.  That is, the scene would be divided up into equal-sized square tiles and if the user panned from the left to the right, tiles to the left of the screen boundary would appear while visible tiles near the boundary to the right would disappear.  That seemed ok, and followed what existing tile-based game engines do (think Metroid or Super Mario Bros).  However with engines like that the tiles used to create the final image already exist.  For fractals, and their infinite nature, that can’t be done. ...