Molly is two and Anders is ready to party

Anders likes to dress up for Molly's birthday parties. This year, he wore a bowtie.

The Thinker

Anders's days as an only child are numbered.

June 22nd (week 8)

July 23rd (week 13)

Judging from those 3D pics, Number Two seems to be a thinker.

Mad scientist

Sippy bottle + parts from a sippy cup + bottle nipple brush =

Choo-choo slide

Cugolino

Anders and I were at The Ark in Noe Valley today, and we saw a very cool set of wood blocks for building marbleworks:


I figured these couldn't come cheap, especially if you wanted a set as elaborate as that, but wondered but a starter set might cost. You know, something with just as few pieces, like this:


$20? $40? Oh, if only.

Click to read more »

Slip cover

The couch was in very poor shape. Twelve years, six households, and one toddler will do that. But the plan was to stick with it for a few more years, until Anders was in a marginally less destructive state.

Alas, the leather began to do far more than fade and wear—it began to tear. The cushions are not removable, so there's no simple "flip" solution.

Next idea: buy a cheap couch to get through the next few years, and then think about a nice couch. Turns out cheap couches are more expensive than I remember, for not so fabulous couches.

Ok, how about a slip cover? Seemed like a questionable approach, especially with many slip covers running into the hundreds of dollars. But we found an easy cover for $75, shipped, and it's worked out ok. Here are a couple of pics with no color correction; the actual color is somewhere in between what you see in these two pics.



That will do. Let's see how much time it buys us.

HDR fun

Here's a picture that may not look very interesting.

What's the point, right?

Well, here's what a picture of that view looks like, straight out of my iPhone 4's camera:

The sunlit view out the window is way too bright, resulting in massive blow-out of the image.

Ok, well tell the camera to ramp the exposure way down, so that doesn't happen. No problem. Then you get this:

Hm, that's no good, is it?

You see, your eye is much better at scaling very disparate brightness levels in a single view in a way such that you can perceive the very dark parts and the very bright spots simultaneously. There's a technique that has been developed to try to manage something similar in photos, called high dynamic range (HDR) imaging.

What you do, is you take several photos of the same scene at different exposure levels, and then blend them together with software. You can do a cheap version of this, using only two images, with the iPhone app Pro HDR (may require a 3GS or later iPhone—I'm not sure about that).

Here's the combined image of the two raw images above, using the default settings in Pro HDR:

This actually shows the details better than the image at the top of this post (which is the result of tweaking those default settings a bit), but I think my tweaked image more accurately reflects how the scene looked to the human eye.

Not bad for a $1.99 app.

The Tyrant

In this video, Anders demonstrates two new words, "delicious," and "tyrant."

His use of "tyrant," in conjunction with his use of the phrase "worker man," illustrates a deep understanding of vertical integration.

Bubbles

Cara helped Anders get his bubbles fix during the Fourth of July festivities.

nostalgia

I took a stroll through our iPhoto archives, and came across some pics I thought I'd share...

Anders's birthday—his original one.


Fat chins.


Just a few days before his first haircut.


Back when sitting on a bench was a fun time.


Anders discovers that there is more than one Big Dog.