In A Funk
And I don't mean a George Clinton/parliament Funkadelic type funk (but do please make my funk the p-funk), but just a cruddy downness. I made a mistake a year and a half ago in a spreadsheet. I just discovered it. It has affected the real world. And I'm sick of jokes about them docking my pay about it. Though The Director did tell me not to worry, that Tim Turkeystealer has managed to pull off the most expensive loss ever. A quarter of a million dollars in a vehicle wreck. Yowza.

Oh, and I do have to fix my 19 meg xls file. I've figured out that it would be easier to just fix it, since that way I don't have to remake the graphs.


Facial Composite One
With my new software that can morph multiple faces together, I have tried it out. Now, I'm nowhere near as good as the guy who runs Face of Tomorrow, but I also just grabbed some pictures off my Pbase site rather than going through several gigs of pictures I have at home.

The nose and eyes in this are a little botched. I forgot that when doing this you need to use either diffuse lighting or flash, and not strong sunlight. I didn't realize why, but it's the shadow from Nina's foster mother that makes the composite girl's nose have a bulge. I also obviously didn't center the node in the middle of the pupils exactly. Symmetry is so important in facial features too.

That image is made up of Nina's foster mom, Alison, my sister, my niece, and my nephew's wife. I also did another test one using photos of Sarah Michelle Gellar, Eliza Dushku, and Princess Amadala, I suppose in rabid geek frenzy. The composite really isn't that interesting. Their faces are quite similar.

I'm thinking for my next one, since this is all playing around even though I call it practice, I might try to find some high res pictures online. I think CBS keeps profiles of all the people who have been on survivor at their site. I could make the Survivor Male Amalgam and the Survivor Female Amalgam. Though I'd leave out Rupert. I just don't think I could place nodes accurately on his beard, and, I'm just sick of seeing him.

Another thought is to use the photocopy mode of my camera to get images from one of my yearbooks. I could composite myself with my friends. Or composite bullies' pictures. Or ex-girlfriends, though I'm not sure what the wife would think about that. Hmm, I wonder if I could get a yearbook from Alison's mom. I could make the freaky late 1940s dude and gal amalgams.

Chinese-er
Since having Nina as my daughter, I keep reading more blogs from people in China and seeking out Chinese stuff on TV. I also loved being over there. People just don't understand when you say it's totally different over there. We are majorly jingoistic here in the US, and we tend to assume when other countries do things different, they are wrong. But Modern China does have it's major flaws, but at least their govt didn't spent all the money that's supposed to go do my social security.

When Dishnetwork adds channels, the replaytv will add those to my listings, even though I actually don't subscribe to them. And there is always heavy turnover in the middle eastern and Indian channels. So, when I did a purge of them this last time, it didn't seem out of the ordinary that CCTV9 was there. I don't get it, so I deleted it.

But I do get it. I went to Dishnetwork today to change the debit card that they automatic draft off since it was on Alison's and that ends in January. When I was there, I decided to try to remove the Encore Movie Pack. It's a secret package they don't advertise. Seven movie channels for $5 a month, but all the stuff is old. We never watch it. I couldn't remove it, and then got sidetracked seeing what is the smallest package that I'd still have CourtTV and G4TechTV. It was then that I found out that my package, America's Top 120, has CCTV9 in it. Woot.

Me, Russian Mafia? Nyet!
I had a message on the machine when I got home. Visa wanted to check some unusual purchases I'd made. They were the two transactions with AllofMP3, which happened in Moscow. I'm glad they checked. It was interesting that they were not $10 and $25 like I had specified, but $10.10 and $25.26. I guess the exchange rate changed a little, since these were actually done in rubles really.

I am very pleased that I can get supercheap music, legally, by buying it in Russia and downloading it. Absolutely brilliant.
- posted by Nick Postagulous @ 9:33 AM