December 2007 Archives

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Here is the image we used as our Christmas Card this year, which is actually made up of many smaller images. The software we used, called MacOSaiX takes a base image and then scours a source of images (in this case it was our iPhoto library but you could use Google Images or Flickr) and tries to tile the images together in a way that approximates the look of the base image. It takes a pretty long time and looks better the more images it has to work with.

In our case we had about 4,500 images to draw from, which is probably on the small side. In addition, we decided to make the tiles somewhat large so that you could at least kinda see them. Obviously you can't on this shrunk-down version. We did like the overall effect and decided to use it.

Hope you had a great Christmas and an upcoming New Years filled with friends and family.

Last Friday night Hale's school hosted a family movie night showing Ratatouille, a charming movie about a tiny rat chef. I was out of town, the kids were sick, and it just didn't work out for us to go. Hale was a little disappointed, but with a sick family and me out of town there wasn't any way to go there (or anywhere) and have an enjoyable experience. So we compromised.

I'll interject here in the story that I have always opted for DVD or CD options over just downloading the equivalent online because of the "secure" feeling of having my movie or music on a physical platter instead of in my computer where a bad hard-drive or inadvertent keystroke could prevent me access to this thing I purchased. And of course the pretty packaging and occasional DVD extras were nice. The reality is that the packaging gets torn up quickly in our house and the DVD extras get watched once, so they are really of negligible value. And did I mention that DVDs get scratched to the point of worthlessness?

And so I talked Jill through the purchase of Ratatouille through the iTunes Music Store and subsequently through the transfer of the file to our AppleTV. It took 3 hours to download the 1.27GB movie over our DSL line and what we ended up with was a 640px x 268px H.264 compressed MPEG-4 video that looks fantastic. It cost $12.99 -- $7 less than Amazon but is without the following:

Deleted scenes, All-new animated short: Remy & Emile in "Your Friend the Rat", Fine Food & Film, Animated short film: "Lifted"

Missing those things doesn't bother me. And, most importantly for the situation we found ourselves in, Hale got to have movie night after-all without having to take sick kids out to the store.