My Photos on Schmaps

Schmaps is an online digital travel guide that leverages the community’s efforts in aggregating data. 2 of my photos on Flickr have been included in the past for their Tucson guide

tucson desert

hotel congress

Just today I was notified that my photo of the El Rey theater in Los Angeles has also been chosen for inclusion for the LA edition. Whats interesting is that my photo of the El Rey was taken by my camera phone. Not even a nice one, my old Motorola V600 camera phone. Take a look at this photo. If you are a member of the band Magna, you might be excited to see your name in lights…

el rey theater

Microsoft Photosynth is now available for public preview

You may have seen the video of Microsoft Photosynth app. Here is the Web app you can try for yourself. It is simply amazing. I never expected it to work so smoothly inside the browser (Even Firefox).

Photosynth Tech Preview
Photosynth

Peculiar photo from my friend Ryan at his company Website

My friend from high school Ryan has a photo of himself with a couple of his coworkers on the company’s Website where he works for his dad. At first glance I noticed something peculiar and odd about his appearance. Take a look below and you will see what I mean:

skinny ryan

Does it look strange? The 2 women look normal but Ryan looks as if he had been stretched. His head is just ever so slightly skewed. Maybe Ryan has been working out and trimming down. Good for you Ryan! Coming from a another ‘big bone’ fella like myself I think you look GREAT in this photo.

Well, after a little bit of photo manipulation, I came up with the following modified image of the original:

normal ryan and fat ladies

There! Now that’s the Ryan I remember. That is what Ryan looks like in real life. What could it have been? Do you think the photographer just made a mistake? Or did Ryan make an ‘executive decision’ in having the his photo stretched? I mean those 2 women sure look horrendous in the second photo. Here is another superimposed photo that combines the 2:

ryan skinny and fat

Well, you be the judge. I am guessing someone is not happy with their photogenicity and requested the photographer for a little digital plastic surgery to improve his image. Afterall, you GOTTA look good when you are commanding a fleet of Volkswagen-Jetta-driving, baton-wielding George-Nori-listening and ham-radio-operating rent-a-cops around town in the dead of night…..

My Script for Displaying Flickr Photos from RSS Feed

I wrote a little script that allows you to display the photos from any Flickr RSS feed. The phot album you see to the side of this blog is using this little script. It uses the lastRSS class to parse the feed written by Vojtech Semecky from lastRSS.webdot.cz as well as javascript library from script.aculo.us. It has some nice caching features built in to speed things up a little. Enjoy.

Download RSS Flickr Photo Album version 0.02

(Requires PHP4)