Great Expeditionary Blogging: an Episodic Gratuitous Blag: The Blog: The Battle of Five Countries

Well, four, really.

Statistics time!

So, at the time of this writing, my blog has been viewed 231 times.

Most people are viewing it on Chrome.

The most used OS is Windows, which is probably all my intern friends and various Intern Managers at Microsoft. Guys, get off my blog and back to work.

I have about equal views from Australia and America.

43 Australian views - all my friends from Down Under.

50 American views - interns, you know what it’s like, you’re in half this stuff. Can’t imagine you’re getting heaps out of it. Plus my Intern Manager, who will probably fire me soon.

Then there are views from Alaska, Germany, UK. The European ones may well be legit, as I know people currently in these countries. Alaska? Probably not.

Yes, I know that doesn't add up. I am doing a math degree, ok? I'm probably just reading labels wrong.

Computer Vision

This isn’t anything serious, just stuffing around with OpenCV briefly. It really is a trivial trick. But still cool. Bluescreen program!

Space Needle

plus desktop screenshot

equals blue-screen in the desktop
behind the space needle!

Basic pixel replacement. Python is fairly slow with it. I need a better algorithm. Apparently it’s a lot faster with HSV instead of RGB arrays. Photoshop and After Effects probably have a more efficient way of doing it.

Formatting sucks. That should all be in line.

This is a cafe in Bellevue. I was hoping that giant robots would be serving up Kaiju meat, but in vain.

I believe they do serve Jaeger-meister, though

Christmas!

We had it later than everyone else.

Christmas rainbow
(Trivia: this is actually christmas eve)

This was christmas

It did not snow. I understand that snow is rare for the populated areas, but still …

There was mistletoe. I did not stand under it, for those wondering.

Toes of missiles

I had Christmas with some relatives here. Mum’s cousin. I think that’s my second cousin, or second cousin once removed. I don’t know.

I ate clams. These were actually nice.

I cannot think of a clam

I also had ratatouille made by Karl. This was also good.

We had giant marshmallows. None of them ate Ron Weasley (bonus points: without checking, tell me which exact book this reference comes from and the surrounding context)

seriously, this thing would eat Aussie marshmallows for breakfast.
Or roast them on a fire.

Liz burnt the turkey and ruined christmas, and people seemed to blame Karl. This was less good.

I went for a bike ride around Lake Sammamish. Clearly my sense of scale requires calibration, cos it was way bigger than I expected. But it was nice. Here is a photo:

We went to church Christmas eve. I really should have taken photos. 2/3 churches I have been to so far have a mandolin player. Is there some deal about mandolins here? Are they a thing?

I realize this has been out of order, and that ‘realise’ was autocorrected to 'realize’. I do not like this. Americans, you do know that ’s’ can make a ‘z’ sound, right? That’s ‘zed’, by the way, not ‘zee’.

American roads

Ok, Aussies, you know Spaghetti Junction and how that is just an unbelievable mess of civil engineering? Or the roads around airports? Well you know what? That sort of thing is a regular occurrence on American highways.

You know how we get warning of merging lanes? You don’t get that here.

Lake Serene

How’s the serenity?

This place was truly serene. Just beautiful. 5 hour round trip, spectacular views across the valley to other snow-capped peaks, and the lake itself … amazing. This was Christmas.