I got tired of staring at the one barf-colored wall left in my cubicle – so I used Rasterbator to create a large elephant image from a picture I took at the Nashville Zoo.
Note the copy of “From the Earth to the Moon” in there, next to the CSS Pocket Reference and my Firefox mascot. I wish I knew which of Nashville Zoo’s elephants this was. Here’s the original:
I like my little workspace.
Hello everyone! I’m rolling out a stupid little app for my greenville friends today. If you’re not in my Greenville circle of friends, you may need a little background here…
Actually, this origin story has become the stuff of legend over time, so the following may be totally inaccurate.
A while back, two of my friends Kate and Katie found this horrendous sweater-shirt thing at the Greenville thrift store. It’s clearly a sweater material, but it has short sleeves? What the heck is that all about? It has the letter “I” on it, two hearts, and two cats. The inexplicable monstrosity has been ever since referred to as the “I Heart Heart Cat Cat” shirt. We’ve all taken pictures wearing it – this has sortof become a hazing ceremony for joining our group of friends. It’s a right of passage thing.
Now that a lot of our friends are traveling the world and doing cool things, we decided to take some advice from the whole “traveling garden gnome” thing, and take pictures of us wearing the shirt in cool places, in front of historic and famous monuments, and the like. Of course, we need a Google maps mashup to keep track of all this, right? RIGHT??
Well, either way, I made one. I’m calling it the I Heart Heart Cat Cat Map Map App App.
Kristin looks awesome in that one.
From a technical standpoint, not too much interesting going on here. I did use MySQL’s spatial datatypes (only POINT, really) for storing the coordinates. This isn’t technically correct since MySQL only deals with planar points and lat/long are curvilinear, but I’ve been sorta geeking out over GIS technology lately, and I really just wanted to get used to the OpenGIS stuff. Any distance calculations I’ll have to do out of the db, but I don’t really think I’ll be doing much of those anyway.
The other kinda cool thing I did was set up an approval system. Instead of having users and junk to deal with (so not just ANYONE can post an image), The system accepts all images, thumbnails them and such, and sends an email with an approval code link. I check out the thumbnail in the email, decide if it’s cool, and click a link to either approve or reject it. Neato.
So there you have it. Check it out now and then, as we should have some new additions happening soon, coming from Turkey and London (hint hint kittermans).
By matt
on March 28, 2009 at 1:33 am
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Posted in Life, Photography, Programming, Travel
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Tagged GIS, I heart heart cat cat, I love technology!!, Photos, Probably the Best Thing Ever, Programming/Tech, Randomness, Travel, Whimsical
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It is likely unnecessary to note that Kristin and I had a great time in Hawaii.
The first week we were on Oahu, staying in a house with a bunch of people, doing group things, going to a wedding. Theft is rampant in Hawaii, we were on beeches a lot, and being in a group meant fewer things got done – so there aren’t as many pictures of the first half of the trip.
This is Waikiki. Never go to Waikiki. It is hell.
Independence day fireworks.
After we got to the Big Island, the photos picked up a bit. We saw sea turtles on TWO OCCASIONS!
You can apparently die a lot of ways watching lava.
Cuz it’s mean.
And glowing evil reds
And photogenic.
Here I am, practicing my “Barack Obama” pose.
Stocking up on food. We climbed a mountain. It was tall.
Very much tall.
Have I mentioned exactly how tall it was?????
13,796 ft, that’s how tall.
It was also cold. WICKED cold. And windy.
Anyway, that’s just a very small, non-representative sampling of the photos I’ve got posted on my gallery site. Check it out for more pictures of incredible natural beauty and me being ridiculous.
It’s about that time again, where I recap the past few weeks of my life in a hurried and cursory manner, but this time, I’ve got PICTURES.
First up, Chase (college roomie) and Caitlin (college buddy) got hitched in Greenville.
[click to see the full album]
As you will note, the wedding was otherwise well-photographed, so I laid low and served as meta-photographer.
Then last weekend, we went to Atlanta for a weekend trip. We checked out the Georgia Aquarium:
[click for the full gallery]
[also, we love fish]
We then went to the Atlanta Zoo:
[photos not available yet - I was too busy to upload them yet...]
Apparently, there is a whole World of Coke:
[click for the full gallery]
Who knew? We discovered it online, and were sortof confused/intruiged, so we decided to check it out. It. Was. Really. Cool. Very much had a Willy-Wonka-Meets-Jurrassic-Park feel to it.
And now for a few random highlights…
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There you have it! A few pretty good weekends there.
I finally got the camera situation wrapped up. For a number of rather boring reasons, it took a little while longer than expected (and a return or two) to get everything firmed up, but Kristin and I are now the proud owners of a really sweet Nikon d200 with a 18-200mm VR Nikon lens. This naturally makes us very happy.
So when Kristin’s parents and my parents were in town and we all decided to check out the world-famous (Yes, “world”-famous. Never underestimate the popularity of American country music in Eastern-European nations, for instance) Ryman Auditorium, it was a natural decision to tote the little (read: not-that-little) guy around and put him through the motions. Some nice pics can be found on the Ryman gallery on my site, but I’ll post a few highlights here. Note: I shot as a simultaneous raw + low qual jpeg, so I only uploaded the low qual jpeg. Don’t get all freaked out about why the nikon’s res sucks.
First Stop: The Ryman.
A cool building, was once abandoned and deemed not worthy of restoration. Took a lot of money to fix it up right.
The interior of the building is super cool. Good acoustics. LOTS of original wood. Note the radiused pews – that had to be hard to do (or at least costly) in the pre-computer days.
Me in the obligatory “Look at me play the Ryman!” shot. That guitar was out of tune.
Check out all the wicked-awesome printed show posters. This is the interior of Hatch Show Print – a print shop and living museum (still in operation) run by the Country Music Hall of Fame. My dad and I both put in some time working for printing companies in our day, so this was a really interesting stop for both of us. A LOT of that printing gear looked awfully familiar to my dad… Kristin and I are going to snap up a LOT of this stuff to decorate our apartment.
This Stuff is Old!
Check out the gallery for more pics. I just wanted to put up a short update since I haven’t blogged in a while.
Recording notes:
* Added strings to one of chase’s wedding songs – 12 tracks. Suck at violin less than I had feared.
* Started a re-do of the song “Please,” so it may make the album.
* Inspired to start doing recording for bands around here again – need to redesign we presence, and actually style this blog a bit first though.
* Working on turning some random (not very good) prose into a song about fear and uncertainty. I’ve been listening to too much NPR lately.
I’m checking out a Nikon d200 that a coworker lent me. I might buy it. But in the mean time, it means I get to make new background images for my work computer.
(Links to full size image – 1600×1050)
That’s one of the robots Kristin got me for Christmas – and he just wants to rock. That’s Silverface Dave. He’s just a little amp. And he also wants to rock.
Incidentally, that very Silverface Dave is being used ALL OVER my new songs. YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST, FOLKS!
So I love the book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I recently was referred to a photo gallery with original pics from the motorcycle journey that inspired the book. IT FRICKING RULES to see the actual author, his actual son, the actual motorcycle, and actual friends and actual places they went. For anyone interested in the book, these photos help place things a bit and give you more of a mental mood for the words.
http://ww2.usca.edu/ResearchProjects/ProfessorGurr/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=Pictures-Robert-Pirsigs-original-1968-trip&page=1
