I thought I’d have a little fun with it. Here’s all the photos, in sequence, with the President roughly aligned. It must be tough holding that pose for so long!

Here are the photos composited:

I made the composite with my new mosaic and compositing tool.

My favorite photo of the set is this one, featuring the striking Chantal Biya. Such awesome hair!

I recently built an experimental Interactive Mosaic Maker on my Coverpop website. It allows you to build Coverpop mosaics, standard photo mosaics, and composite images from Flickr photos. Prolific Flickrer Leo Reynolds has been playing with it and produced some nice work, including this mosaic of cemetery symbols!

You can see the latest creations made with my tool here:

http://www.coverpop.com/newstuff.php

And you can make your own creations here:

http://flickr.coverpop.com/create/

If you make something cool, share it with other Flickr users in the Coverpop Flickr group:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/coverpop/

UPDATE:

Here’s an interesting composite image of the Eiffel Tower made by Erik Wennstrom.

You can also make composite images like these with the mosaic maker.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you took all the tracks from a Beatle album, and stretched them all to the same length and played them all at the same time?

I did. This is the result.

Composite Peppers

Now you know why this isn’t done more often!

By the way, all the tracks have been stretched to 162 seconds long, the same length as the median, “Lovely Rita.”

Here’s another one from another band. Can you guess which band/album were used?

Mystery Album

The answer is below in inviso-text.

Portishead, Live: Roseland, NYC

How many seconds did it take?

UPDATE

At Craig Kaplan’s suggestion, I’ve tried the same technique with a bunch of covers of the same track. I chose 13 renditions of “Stormy Weather.” In this case, instead of warping the length of the tracks, I’ve lined them all up to end at the same time, which causes them to form a climactic “storm”.

Stormy Weather

The artists, in order of appearance are: Lee Morgan, Joe Sample, Tony Bennett with Natalie Cole, Frank Sinatra, Django Reinhardt, Billlie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald with Nat King Cole, Ethel Waters, Etta James, Joni Mitchell, Sara Harmer, and Zooey Deschanel with Samantha Shelton.

I’ve started a monthly open-mic event at Jones Coffee, in Pasadena, to be held the second Friday of each month. The first one on a memorable date – my wife’s birthday.

This open-mic is intended to be singer/songwriter focused, but other performers (poets, comics) are welcome – we can always use variety! There is an acoustic piano at this location, and I’m be available to accompany singers who bring music/charts.

The event has a Facebook page, which you’ll find here.

Hope to see you there on Friday, 9/11!

Tonight, I drove into Sunland/Tujunga while Jenna took these photographs of the Station Fire.

I feel like I’m being bribed by Google.

Three days ago, they sent me an email that began…

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know about an upcoming update in your AdSense account designed to help you generate the maximum revenue from your ad units. You’ll soon be able to allow multiple ad networks to show on your pages, which means that advertisers from external Google-certified networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space.

Then, they started running these really ugly ads, like these:

So much uglier, than the old, tasteful, text-only ads, with the pleasant notice to remind me that I’m looking at an ad by Google. No notices on these new ads. And some of ’em are in Flash, and compete for CPU cycles with the lovely Flash I’ve written myself and am sometimes trying to demonstrate!

But then I look at what Google is now paying for these new ugly ads…

Almost twice as much! Yikes. Oh Google, you make it so hard to not be evil.

Sigh. I’m turning ’em off anyway. Can’t keep subjecting you to these ugly ass ads.

UPDATE: I’ve turned ’em off, but Google is taking a while to figure that out…

UPDATE: According to Google, the ugly ads and the recent policy change are unrelated. If you see an ugly or offensive ad, please let me know and I’ll pull it.

The previous blog entry was a little too subtle. How’s this?

Wanna hire a krazy dad? Click here to leave a message.

The headline: jbum looks for new job.

For the past three years or so I’ve been commuting an hour and change to Santa Monica from the Burbank/Pasadena area. First to Yahoo! where I did front-end development for Yahoo! Music, and then to Topspin, a music industry startup that helps musicians acquire fans and sell music to them. Both remarkable companies where I worked with a lot of excellent people. They made the commute bearable.

Still, three years is a long time to be driving that far, and not quite doing what I really need to be doing.

So I’ve decided to try to find work that is more closely aligned with my core interests, and that is closer to home (Burbank/Pasadena/Glendale area). I’ll be transitioning from a full-time employee at Topspin to a consultant, and I have worked out a schedule with those aforementioned excellent people to make it happen. Ian, Shamal, Kris, Bob and many others at Topspin have been wonderfully accommodating about this. They’re good people. Did I mention they made the commute bearable?

So what are my core interests? If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will have a good idea. My interests are fairly wide ranging, and involve art, mathematics, computer graphics, music, audio, puzzles, games, and history. I also love teaching (and have mastered the art of keeping students awake). I’m very good at making software tools for digital artists, and front-end or application programming in various languages – something I’ve been doing for a long time. I can be a good writer when I need to be.

I’m not particularly interested in making shopping carts, or business programming.

I don’t expect to find a full-time position that is both adequately stimulating and local in a short stretch of time, so I may be taking on additional consulting work in a couple months or so. We’ll see.

So, if you spy anything shiny in my neck of the woods, please let me know!

Hey, remember that music box kit I was playing with a few months ago? Vi Hart had the brilliant idea of twisting the paper into a Möbius strip! This effectively doubles the length of the music and presents an interesting compositional challenge.

Check out the video!