My friends Jamie and BK just became the proud parents of four baby ducks.
These particular ducks will grow up to be Indian Runner Ducks. The breed is characterized by their peculiar stance. They tend to stand straight up on their hind legs - rather then the squat position usually associated with ducks.
Anyway, here are a ton of super-cute photos. Be warned: the cuteness is on par with that of puppies and kittens.
I spotted this in the bargain bin of a local store and took this fuzzy picture.
At first, I thought that it was an unfortunate translation issue (non-native speaker confusing rotten for fresh or ripe) - but then I noticed who the manufacturer was. David and Goliath makes a whole line of halirously named products. Their lip balm line includes items like one night stand and boys are smelly flavors.
Unfortunately, the subtleness of “rotten fruit flavor” gag didn’t seem to be working - it had already been marked down in price several times.
Even after giving Rob some guff about not optimizing his image - he was kind enough to append my comment to the original 1K Competition post. So, I decided to take the challenge and create a real 1K entry.
I wanted to take the competition as literally as possible, but I am no wordsmith. So I decided to create an image - a 1K reporduction of the famous Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci. The image to the right was “hand drawn” with a mouse using only the pencil tool in photoshop. I used this image as a reference, but did not resize or trace it.
And yes, I used PngSlim for maximum compression. It took a lot of trial-and-error to get exactly 1K.
Here is a larger version (html resize of same file). I like how the small version looks pretty good, but in the larger one she begins to resembles a creepy robot.
Over on BoingBoing Gadgets, 1 billionth drive. To commemorate the event, he asked readers to create something less then 1K:
1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide. Use your imagination. Give us a thousand of whatever you want. A 1,000 byte JPG, MP3 or textfile. Need a little extra? 1,024 will do, we’re not religious. We’re cool. Just make it 1K of awesome, k?
To demonstrate how small 1K really is in digital term, he notes that the simple seagate logo at 1,025 bytes is too big…
Thats a PNG. Did you remember to crunch it? I bet that it is full of unnecessary metadata. Reordering the bits would probably help a little too! Thanks to a little program called PngSlim, that image is now only 799 bytes. Thats a loss of 226 bytes or 28%. All without changing a single pixel. You could now fit 275,954,704 more of them on a 1 Terabyte drive.
- 1,000,000,000,000 / 1,025 = 975,609,756
- 1,000,000,000,000 / 799 = 1,251,564,460
- 1,251,564,460 - 975,609,756 = 275,954,704
Derek Tonn, who first introduced me to PngSlim at the 2007 HighEdWeb conference, was kind enough to send this:
Just for fun, I re-ran your optimized 799 byte Seagate logo graphic through the new 1.0b1 “beta” release of PNGSlim, and it was able to shave 1 more byte off that image (798 bytes, attached). Not sure if that is worth a re-submit on your end of things or not…but I just thought I would share. :-) Keep up the good fight related to image optimization!
Thanks Derek!
February and most of March had been unseasonably warm. Many days it felt like springtime.
But during the past two weeks, winter has been playing catch-up. During several days last week, I stepped out of the office to find that it was snowing - big fluffy flakes. Then this weekend we had snow followed by a half-inch of hail.
Our good friend Fish recently left the Pacific Northwest and moved to sunny, sunny Florida.
He just sent me an email about his fishing trip (something that I guess people down there do on a Thursday). He included a great shot of his gear and an even better one of a danger sign. It is similar to a sign that I once encountered, but this one could only happen in Florida.
PS. Fish, you might be interested to know that it has been snowing here for the past few days.
I try to ride my bike whenever possible.
Over the years, it has become obvious that drivers are trained to see other cars. I have narrowly avoided several accidents where drivers later claimed that they “did not see me”. When this happened to me on bicycle - I thought that it might my relative size or lack of strong lights. Then one day, it happened to me while riding a motorcycle…
Anyway, over at bikeportland.org, Jonathan Maus posted a nod to the London cycle safety campaign that is driving the point home: You can’t see what you’re not looking for
“There’s an interesting PSA spreading around the web like wildfire.The “Awareness Test” was created by Transport of London as part of their cycle safety campaign.
Try it out for yourself at DoTheTest.co.uk (you can skip the intro). I failed the test, but the message came through crystal clear.”
I also failed the test - let me know how well you do.
For over 15 years in Portland, I have stared up at Mt. Hood.
Each winter, it becomes covered in a fresh blanket of white snow. I have gone hiking, snow camping and even snowshoeing. But, until this year - the most traditional of snow sports (skiing) had eluded me.
This was my third time and what they say is true: “you get exponentially better each time.”
Sam my parents and I, all managed to have the same Friday off. So we piled into a single vehicle and headed toward the Cooper Spur resort on the north-east side of the mountain.
This is a great little place for beginners. The runs are short, the lines are decent and the price is half of the other places on Mt. Hood. Unfortunatly, after the 1st of March - they are only open on weekends!
So we continued all the way around the mountain and eventually stopped at Ski Bowl. Rentals and lift tickets are twice the price, but there are far more runs.
Everyone did great (nothing broken) and the sun even came out for a bit.
A big weekend.
On Saturday, we went urban-lumberjacking again. On Monday, Fish flew out to his new home in Land-o’-lakes Florida. Between those two, I found some time to do a little paddling.
Jamie and I went to the Elk Rock Island dock that is about 5 minutes south of my house.
When you launch here you have two good options.
Instead (for some strange reason) we choose to paddle up the tiny flow that is Johnson Creek.
This trickle flows through SE Portland and is notorious for yearly flooding. Near my home, it joins up with the Crystal Springs and becomes an actual stream.
At the mouth it is about 20ft wide, but as we found, it quickly narrows and could easily be jumped in places.
It is also very shallow at many of the “rapids”. However, this increase the fun as we tried to crawl up them. My only regret is that I banged up my carbon-fiber paddle when pushing myself up river.
On the way down, we surprised some teenagers that were trying to sneak a beer on the bank. They quickly tossed the cans as we approached. “Hey”, I yelled… “Don’t Litter!”
