Prodigious

Interesting idea for a webpage with an automated rating system for photos http://acquine.alipr.com/ .  I thought I would give it a try with some of my photographs from my old website.  Overall my photography didn’t rate that highly, but one did score in the 90s. I had plenty of low scoring ones, give it a shot and you’ll see what I mean, but I wanted to see what scored well…  Also look at some of the high ranking shots on the website.  Right now I don’t know that I would say the ranking is closer to random than really providing useful feedback.  But overtime it may train with enough images to become useful.  Who knows?

69

8 (50.5 for the black and white version) I noticed there are a lot of B&W images that score highly. I guess not many people use the setting on the point and shoot so it automatically scores higher

64.6 (yeah I know not that good of a photo)

89.9

96 (I had no idea this was one of the best images I had ever taken)

So my kids aren’t the toughest.  But occasionally you can get a picture of them that freezes a moment where they look tough.  I have one of Maister eating a sock that she looks real tough.  Here is Gator eating, while looking tough.  Below is Bud who is a lot tougher, but not sure this look gives him the “cred” he deserves.

And the photo below doesn’t fit at all with any of the above.  While we were getting our house repaired, Paisley took a ballet class.  Ashley sent me this picture from class.  Looks like she was stretching to me, but I guess she was just hanging out like that.

I have a coworker named Sam who is from China. I don’t know why he is a bit different but he has some crazy stories. Just today he told us he spent the last four months of college sleeping inside a building on campus. Sam here staked out the campus security guards and learned their shifts for checking the building so he would sleep in between those times. He had a comforter, pillow, and clothes that he would stash somewhere in the building. Eventually it got confiscated. After graduates, he goes back to the security office and asks for his sleeping stuff they had confiscated. Writing it out doesn’t sound nearly as funny as having Sam tell it but not different nonetheless…

Two complaints about getting a new phone:

1. Verizon only offers four phones that don’t have an extra charge for a data plan.  Is that crazy or am I crazy for not having a data plan?  I’m not about to pay $30 a month (and more for the text plan), and I would consider the $10 a month, but do I really want to be more connected to my email?  Some freedom from email and the internet is good right?

2.  It is interesting to think so much has changed where even getting a new phone you have to think about data being left behind in the form of text messages, pictures, etc.  The Verizon guy sort of swiped it since he kept the phone and didn’t mention he wasn’t giving it back.  So note to anyone else changing in the future, ask to keep your phone or else they’ll steal it from you.  How do they keep it and not mention it?  I thought he had put it in the bag.  But back to my original point.  Not only do you have messages and pictures, but default ring tones are intentionally painful to force you to buy new ones.  This isn’t conspiracy theory, its fact.  Phones used to have classical music in the default ring tones, now they all sound like the same annoying chime.  So now I have to come up with new ring tones and figure out how to get them free on my phone.

Finding a good ring tone is an art.  And every time you get a new phone, you need a new ring tone.  I first used Eye of the Tiger (from Rocky), but then everytime I heard it I felt like I needed to jump up to get my phone.  That song really gets the adrenaline going which isn’t a good quality for a ring tone.  I had a song from Remember the Titans which was soothing.  A much better ring tone.  Now I’m contemplating my next ring tone….  Any suggestions?

Ashley and I have been on quite a few roadtrips (recently returned from one). You get to those small towns in the middle of no where and always need to stop for lunch or something. I always have the impression to ask the people working at Subway, “So you actually live here?” I never do because I’m pretty sure that comes across as an insult, but who knows maybe they are asked that all the time…

Anyways, recently we’ve had a similar experience staying at a hotel in the city we live in. But it is more the wonder at why they are staying in a hotel here and it is quite packed. It is interesting how many sizable hotels a city of less than 100k can support.

I’ve been absent for a bit in part because I was helping Casey on the campaign trail. In the end, he lost but I thought he did a great job. I went to hear him speak at an event and have since learned a lot about politics in general. Casey is definitely cut out for that more than I am (not that he is embarking on more political adventures anytime soon).

This is technology from Cisco for video conference. Half our team is located in Santa Clara and half in Folsom (a number are out of town this week). But you video conference and can see the people as if they were sitting on the other side of this big oval table. The audio is directional too. It was funny because one guy walked in late and everyone in both places turned toward the sound. Sitting on the side everyone is looking a little to the side of where you are but nonetheless very impressive. The future of telecommuting…

Consider this a step toward solving this blogs identity.  Word of warning, this is boring information to most people, but just giving it a shot.  As you should know, quit reading any time it starts to get not interesting.  There is no miraculous ending or climax to the story.

A couple weeks back I attended ICASSP and since this was my first international conference I’ve attended, I thought I would give some insight into what a conference is.  This conference stands for International Conference for Audio Speech and Signal Processing.  Now audio and speech don’t really relate to me, but signal processing has a whole section on video and image processing.  There is a better conference for me (ICIP), but since it was in Hong Kong I didn’t get the green light to attend.

In a conference there are two sections, posters and presentations (there are also demos, but those were not very interesting this time so I’ll skip them).  The are happening at the same time so you have to pick or skip back and forth between the two (I was mostly back and forth depending on the subjects).  So during the poster a presenter stands there and anyone walks by and asks questions.  For a lot of people this is a chance to show off your intellectual superiority.  I asked a number of presenters what their research could be used for and it was interesting that a fair amount of research was a dead end in terms of actually being used for something.  They just like to be in school

And this is a typical presentation.  I guess the audio and speech tracks were more heavily attended.  For the video track, this was typical attendance around 20 (keep in mind some of the attendees are just waiting for their presentation too).  Presentations and posters mostly covered the how a lot more thoroughly than they did their experimental results.  After a week some presentations start to overlap or seem like more of the same.  And some seem like a logical fallacy (in the same presentation said the DCT was a good transform for spatial predictors and proposed a new transform for temporal predictors and then a later presenter said the DCT was good for temporal, but bad for spatial…one of the two was lying).

In the end, I think it was really good for me to get more exposure to what is happening in academia.  It was a little tiresome by the end of the week and there was a lot of things that helped generate thought.  For those of you that haven’t been to a conference, now you know what you’ve been missing all this time

I know my website change doesn’t make sense to everyone, but I’m pretty excited about it Part of it is that I didn’t want to have it be so photography-centric. I’ll still post quite a bit about photography I imagine… And we’ll continue with the identity crisis…

Also credit to Casey and Kellis for helping me figure out my new website name. Johnny is the only one that actually knows where it comes from. For the rest of you, watch October Sky.