Feline Narcotic Water

Tiki was not impressed with the water quality in her water fountain.

What happened was that Tiki knocked her catnip pillow into the water and the water turned colour because of the catnip in the pillow. That pillow is super gross too because it is covered in the saliva of probably half a dozen cats...

Tiki didn't drink the water, but she's not that crazy about catnip. Wonder if other cats would've liked it though...

Shape Collage 2.1

Shape Collage 2.1 has been released!

There are a couple new features, some performance tweaks, and some bug fixes. The coolest new feature is the ability to add photos from the web. Just give it *any* webpage that has pictures on it and Shape Collage will automagically download the pictures from that webpage for use in the collage! This does not however, work for sites that require you to login, like Facebook, but that's what FaceDown is for.

Other new features include the ability to adjust the rotations of the photos and the drop shadow. The program settings are now saved between sessions so if you like the settings a certain way, you don't have to set them every time.

I promise that this blog is not becoming an advertisement for Shape Collage and VincentCheung.ca. I will be blogging about my vacation (eventually) :p

6 weeks, 14 planes

Here's some of what you missed. I'll do a proper blog later with the rest of the photos.

A monkey riding a hippo!

Bears boxing!

 

The Asian squat!

As seen in a restaurant (Hint: this is not a fish)

Some other restaurant

Yet another restaurant

LEE KUM KEE!!!

Grandma's childhood home with almost all of her grandchildren

Disneyland!

Random observations 2

• There are *way* more asians in Winnipeg then there used to be. It used to be that you'd go to a bar and you could literally count the number of non-white people on one hand. I don't know where all these people came from. It seems that the generation just a few years younger than mine is a lot more multicultural, even in Winnipeg.


• Girls definitely dress a lot skankier here than in Toronto. Even with a windchill of -40, girls wear super short skirts and dresses. Girls in Toronto seem to dress rather conservative in comparison.


• Tonight it'll warm up to -18 with a windchill of -28. I think we've finally seen the end of this cold snap! (This is *not* a sarcastic statement, this is the actual view of people over here)

Oh, and here are some amusing photos showing how cold it is:





Oh wait, these aren't actually pictures from Winnipeg where we've seen windchills as low as -49 in the last few days and there's permanently 2 feet of snow on the ground. My friend in Seattle took these and it was -3 outside and it had snowed a little overnight.

Shape Collage

Some collages of Tiki made using Shape Collage

Shape Collage is the latest side project that I've been working on. It is an automatic photo collage making program that can make collages in different shapes. Just look at the collages above and at the end of the post to see what it can do. There are a lot more examples on the Shape Collage web page.

It's really easy to make a collage. You can make one with just 2 mouse clicks and in as little as a couple seconds! It's quite customizable as well, as you can change the shape to really, anything you want. You can even draw your own shape! You can also customize the border, background, etc.

Arranging photos into a collage

The photos are automatically placed in the desired shape of the collage using a machine learning algorithm that I came up with that is simple, but fast and effective. Basically what it does is put the photos on a page and jiggle them around so they are arranged nicely. This is a much harder problem than you may think. My readers with some knowledge of computer science will be familiar with NP problems. My algorithm isn't perfect, but it does a pretty good job most of the time. If you're really anal about it, you can save the collage as a Photoshop PSD and edit the collage in Photoshop if you don't like the automatic placement of the photos.

I started working on this project b/c I read a paper that automatically created a photo collage and thought that it was really cool, especially since it took me so long to make my Californian photo collage. Since they didn't actually release a program or their source code, I decided to just implement their approach, but it was overly complicated and rather slow - it took several minutes to create a collage with just 30 photos. So, I tried something simpler that was much faster - my program can easily create a collage with thousands of photos. Then I realized that my algorithm didn't have to only create rectangular collages and could also create collages in different shapes, something that I had never seen before, and so Shape Collage was created!

Anyways, check it out and let me know what you think! It's available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and anything that supports Java.

Snowboarding snowman collage

Volleyball collage

Lord of the Ants

I now command ants in addition to wasps

My apartment in Seattle 3 years ago

Long time readers will remember my post from almost exactly 3 years ago about wasps coming into my apartment to die. I now have control over ants. For one reason or another, insects are attracted to me in the last moments of their lives. I must be some sort of insect religious figure that they believe they must visit when they die in order to transcend from this life into the next. Maybe these ants are actually the wasps from before, but in their next life...

Nuit Blanche 3

Last week, I went to the 3rd Annual Nuit Blanche in Toronto. It's "a free all-night contemporary art thing". Basically, they have artists put up their contemporary art throughout downtown Toronto, often converting public spaces into art exhibits. Some are cool, some are weird, some are dumb. It goes from sunset on Saturday to sunrise on Sunday.

I went to all 3 zones this year and did a lot of walking. I took my GPS along with me to record exactly where I went and so that I could geotag my photos (automagically putting the longitude and latitude into the photos so that I could put them on a map so you can see where I took each of the photos):

View Larger Map

There were my favourite ones (in order that I saw them):

A dozen mascots dancing in a field to music. It was remarkably amusing

Shipping containers that would shine light spelling SOS in morse code

Dropping and smashing stuff! You can't see it b/c of the motion blur, but there's a monitor and computer being dropped in this photo.

I don't think this was an official installation, but it was cool. Some guy in the back of a truck dressed in a chicken outfit sitting with chickens.

My favourite one. A waterfall coming out of a 3rd story window.

Video games using lights in Toronto City Hall. It's Pong on the left and Asteroids on the right. You control it by calling in to the photo numbers supplied.

More photos

GPS + Photos = Awesome

I got my GPS logger today and I took it out on the water with me when I went kayaking on Lake Ontario.

Basically the GPS logger is a small GPS device with no screen and you can connect it to your phone through bluetooth to figure out where you are. That's the basic "GPS" part. The "logger" part records where you've been and you can then download the tracks onto your computer later and do some cool stuff with it.

I got the QStarz BT-Q100Platinum. It works like a charm, is small, and the battery apparently lasts up to 32 hours. I'm not able to get a signal in my apartment, but once I got onto the street, it worked pretty well, although it made some errors with the tall buildings in the way, but out on the water, it was pretty accurate.

My attempt at hand modeling. If it looks bad, it's b/c the photo is not rotated correctly and I'm too lazy to fix this after having already uploaded the photo

Here's the path that I recorded (I rollerbladed to the place, kayaked to Centre Island and back, then rollerbladed home). The path isn't 100% accurate and some of the tracking is off. My rollerblading is not as erratic as the GPS device made it out to be (I was going straight on the road, but it thought that I had veered off the road a couple times and it also thought I was somewhere west of my apartment when I was in the elevator). It seems to be pretty accurate on the open water, but got confused in the city with the tall buildings blocking the satellites.


View Larger Map

That's pretty cool. It gets even cooler when you synchronize your photos to the path to get the exact longitude and latitude where you took each photo (since GPS inherently has timestamps for each data point). Click on the camera to see the photos that I took in that spot. This is all automatic!


View Larger Map

The long/lat info is stored right in the image file and when you upload to Picasa Web Albums, all the location information is automatically shown there as well (check out the map view on the right hand side).

View Album

Get your own

I am definitely going to be doing this on my trips from now on!

My computer screen

I love how there are multiple internet streaming feeds for this year's Olympics :)

As a bonus, I'm also able to record the videos right to my computer :)

Rediscovering Winnipeg

Strawberry picking

Ballet in the Park

Fringe Festival Improv Show

Ziplining group photo

Ziplining

Video I took while on the zipline

Wind turbines

More ziplining pictures and videos

People always ask me what there is to do in Winnipeg and I usually reply with "not much". That's a lie. On the surface, it's not a very exciting place, but as with every other place, it is just as much fun as you make it out to be. There are always interesting things to be found in your own backyard. My goal each time I'm back in Winnipeg is to do things that I haven't done before, whether it's watching a Manitoba Moose hockey game, seeing (hearing?) the WSO (Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra), going bumper boating, snowboarding in a valley, or going to Folklorama.

This trip has been no different, as you can tell from the pictures above. I've gone strawberry picking (I got two of those boxes and they were quickly demolished by my family), saw Ballet in the Park (had no idea that it's been going on for 30 years), went to the Fringe Festival and saw an improv show starring one of Jill's coworkers (it was hilarious! I haven't laughed so hard in a while), went ziplining in rural Manitoba, and saw the wind power generating farm.

Sheep for wheat?

Vince to Rob via Irish postcard: Sheep for wheat?

Anyone have ore for trade? I have brick.

GReunion 5.0

Me and Adam! Just like back in the day, I got Adam sunburnt :p

We walked EVERYWHERE! 17km...

I haven't seen Adam since Google almost 2 years ago. He was in town for a bit, which obviously called for a GReunion! We spent the day together with his friend, Beth, who broke the sexual tension between the two of us. It was really good seeing Adam again and we did a lot of reminiscing of the memorable summer of 2006. We walked EVERYWHERE (17km) and saw a good chunk of Toronto (numbers do not correspond to the numbers on the map, which are kilometre markers):

1. Brunch at Over Easy


2. U of T Campus


3. Maple Leaf Gardens


4. Eaton Centre / Toronto Life Square


5. Nathan Phillips Square


6. Fort York


7. Plane / swan / duck watching at the lake front


8. Steam Whistle Brewery (free beer!)


9. Harbourfront Centre (aka Harperfront Centre)


10. Hot dog on Queen Street


11. Drinks and dinner at Montana's (movie ticket included!)


12. Scotiabank Theatre (formerly Famous Players Paramount) for Forgetting Sarah Marshall


13. Chinatown


14. Playing with my pussy and Wii

My prize of the day was swiping this glass from the Steam Whistle Brewery

Couple or just friends?...

Random sustenance shopping blurbs

44lbs of cat litter that I carried while rollerblading

My brand new shopping cart that I can use instead of being a mule on wheels

Lugging a 44lbs (4 pounds was free!) bag of cat litter while rollerblading is pretty tiring. The people at the pet store looked at me funny as I rolled away carrying the stupidly large bag. The funny thing is that now I know what it feels like to carry 44lbs of stuff while rollerblading and I've definitely carried a lot more than that before.

Side note: I use organic, non-clay based, clumping, flushable cat litter now.

I typically procrastinate grocery shopping and will go only when I have to. This means every 2-3 weeks and I'll spend $100 - $150... and carry it all by hand by myself! I go prepared. I bring a large duffle bag and a backpack! I tell you, that's way heavier than 44lbs. 44lbs is a walk in the park compared to carrying groceries. When I go grocery shopping, the first thing that I think about when I see a product is not the price or it's healthiness, but rather, it's weight and size.

But no more! I finally bought one of those shopping carts from Chinatown! You know, the ones that the old women push, but I got the large, manly size. I've been thinking of getting one for a while, but just have been too lazy to do so. I tell you, it's amazing! Of course, the first thing I do is buy a 18lbs bag of rice and a bunch of groceries from Chinatown. Now, I can go grocery shopping without thinking about whether I can carry it back or not :). People look at you funny when you are rollerblading and pushing a shopping cart though. I had one guy in my apartment building audibly laughing.

In my shopping in Chinatown, I made some interesting observations:

• If you're shopping for a shopping cart, they speak to you in English


• If you randomly stop at a fruit stand and quietly pick mangoes, they speak to you in English to tell you to pay inside


• In the Chinatown TD Canada Trust, despite all their Chinese signs, Chinese tellers, and Chinese customers, they speak to you in English by default. I think the only non-Asian in that building was the security guard.


• If you buy esoteric dried food products, such as 茶魚 (tea fish), from a small shop where they only have signs in Chinese, they speak to you in Cantonese


• If you ask for Chinese vegetables (菜心) from the guy that grabs them and puts them in a bag, they speak to you in Cantonese


• If you're reaching to the top of the shelves for a whole box of instant noodles, and there are 2 boxes above the one that you can reach, they ask you in Cantonese if they can help


• If you're staring at the multitude of options for rice for 5 minutes, they speak to you in some language I don't understand (Mandarin?), and you reply in English

Earth Hour

Makeshift candle using the lid of a jar and about a dozen birthday candles

Makeshift candle engulfed in flame

Downtown Toronto on Feb. 20, 2008 during the lunar eclipse

Downtown Toronto during Earth Hour

A disappointing showing by Robarts and Grad House during Earth Hour

I think the whole Earth Hour idea (where you turn off your lights and appliances at 8pm for an hour on March 29, 2008) was a bit of a gimmicky, silly idea. Sure, electricity demand dropped by 8% for a brief period during that one hour, but that doesn't make any difference. Congratulations Toronto on reducing your power consumption by 0.0009% for the entire year by turning off some lights for an hour on one day!

As for raising awareness, people that were environmentally conscious before Earth Hour, will continue to do the small things to reduce consumption, while people that weren't, won't change their habits. My roommate continues to leave unnecessary lights on despite sitting in the dark for an hour on Saturday.

I did however, participate, because, why the hell not. Blackouts are fun! I was rather disappointed by the participation levels as there were still many lights on outside. The big thing, comparing my pics of the Toronto skyline from the lunar eclipse and Earth Hour, was that the big office towers turned off their signs and they had fewer lights on. Other than that, there wasn't much difference. In fact, it's quite a bit darker out right now (2:30am) than it was during Earth Hour, though the Bank logos are disrupting the darkness.

Here's what I did during Earth Hour:

• Used my Forever Flashlight.


• Realized that I didn't have any candles.


• Created a makeshift candle using a lid of a pasta sauce jar and about a dozen birthday candles.


• Thought about what to do if my table caught on fire from my makeshift candle that erupted into a massive flame.


• Put away my laundry.


• Put away my Christmas tree.


• Gave up on the idea of stargazing b/c the sky wasn't fully dark and there were so many lights on.


• Stood on my balcony and took photos.


• Turned on the kitchen fan after I turned on the lights because my apartment was really smokey.

Lunar Eclipse

Lunar eclipse on Feb. 20, 2008 between 9:45pm and 11:22pm EST

Saturn and it's rings were supposed to be visible near the moon

Looking down Spadina at the CN Tower, SkyDome, and skyscrapers

More pictures

There was a full lunar eclipse tonight (where the Earth casts a shadow on the moon, as opposed to the moon casting a shadow on the Earth). I decided to bundle up and sit out on my balcony with my binoculars to observe the eclipse. We were lucky here in Toronto as the skies were perfectly clear. While I think I was able to figure out which little light in the sky was Saturn, unfortunately, my binoculars were not powerful enough for me to see its rings. I took out a tripod and snapped some pics of the eclipse, which I think turned out quite well. While I was out there (and waiting for stuff to change), I took some pics of the city as well. I should do the same during Earth Hour.

I would like to point out that I didn't observe the lunar eclipse just b/c of all the hoopla that it was given through the facebook event. This is actually my 3rd lunar eclipse:

Lunar eclipse on Jan. 20, 2000

Lunar eclipse on May 15, 2003