settling in to Lexington

We have arrived and have spent a week settling in.  So far I think we are going to like this place, although it will take some time to become accustomed to all the horse statues.

I now have a new professional website with a professional blog.  I plan on posting to this site occasionally as I have fun travel pictures or quirky things to say.

st. louis earthquake

My first earthquake (and aftershock):

Image from ERI at SLU.

I passed my oral exam

I passed my oral exam this week. Now I need to start doing research again.

ski trip

Julie and I spent last week in Copper Mountain, CO. I will omit details of the conference I was attending and instead tell you about the vacation part of the trip (pictures). The summary is that we both went skiing for the first time and had an awesome time.

A photo album of our trip.

Day 1: Arrived at Copper Mountain Resort

We flew from St. Louis to Denver and met up with some friends at the Denver airport. From Denver we drove on I-70, passing through the Eisenhower Tunnel, in a small snow storm to our condo.  We arrived in the Center Village at the resort and started drinking lots of water to avoid dehydration.  Although I did not think so while we were on the highway, I now realize that the fresh snow was a good thing because you ski slower, crashes are less painful, and it is very pretty.

The mountain from the athletic club.

Center Village from our condo balcony.

The base of the American Eagle lift from our condo balcony.

Day 2: Took ski lessons

We woke up early and arrived at the ski school, rented skis, and signed up for lessons. Julie and I had never skied before. I highly recommend taking lessons for your first time. We took no pictures today because we did not want to break our camera with all the falls.

Day 3: Went skiing again

More skiing. We made it off of the Kokomo lift (the easiest) a few times today.

View from Kokomo lift.

Julie on skiis.

Day 4: Took a 2 hour snowmobile trip

We were both pretty sore from skiing and falling so we decided to go snowmobiling (the photo album has video). We took a two hour trip that went almost to the continental divide.

The rear view.

Julie and I at the half-way point of our trip (they should have warned us that our clothes would smell horribly of exhaust if we did not wear the ski suits they provided, yuck).

A snow angel in very deep snow.

Julie warming her hands and feet (did you know snowmobiles have hand and feet warmers?).

Day 5: Went skiing again

The fifth day was a breakthrough day for Julie, she figured out how to ski well enough that it was fun. We were both glad we did not try to snowboard because the beginning snowboarders still looked very frustrated.

“This is fun.”

The view from the Lumberjack lift.

Day 6: Heading back home.

We woke up early (there were workers with axes on the roof breaking icicles) and went for a walk before checking out and heading for our flight.

Dudes on the roof with axes.

A snowy creek that runs through the resort.

Montage of False Color Images from 165 Webcams

 

Yet another pretty picture generated from the AMOS dataset. This montage consists of 165 false color image (each created using principal component analysis) generated from 165 different webcams.

Tagging using the Flickr API

My goal for the day was to geotag the mongage images I uploaded last week. Luckily each image title contains the latitude and longitude of the camera so I extracted the data from the title and added it back in the image tags.

Here is what I did:

1. Got a Flickr API key and authentication code from the Flickr services website.
2. Installed Beej’s Python Flickr API.
   1. Downloaded and extracted archive.
   2. Called python setup.py build.
   3. Called python setup.py install.
   4. Edited flickrapi.py to properly call firefox from the Windows command line (added double quotes around the URL in validateFrob).
3. Wrote a python script to extract the title, parse it, and upload the new tags (I started with the test script Beej provides).
   1. It took a while to realize I needed to include both the method and auth_token parameters for the photo.setLocation and photo.addTags methods.

Images from the Archive of Many Outdoor Scenes (AMOS) on flickr

Here is one of the 170 montage images in a collection of images generated from the AMOS dataset. In addition to uploading them to flickr, I ordered a couple of mini-photo books from qoop that I am hoping will arrive before I leave for CVPR.

This is an archive of Scene 388 from the dataset which is located at (37.759700, -114.972400).

CVPR 2007

In less than two weeks a group of fellow graduate students and I will crowd into a van and drive to CVPR (a computer vision conference) in Minneapolis.  I hope to see some new things that will  inspire my research and to talk to people about a summer internship.  On Thursday, June 21, I present a poster on temporal variations in outdoor static cameras.

Today we adopted Princess Zelda

Today we adopted a cat (not my idea) and named her Princess Zelda (not my idea). We are all very excited.

Flowers bloom in our garden

 

After a long winter of waiting we finally have flowers blooming in our garden. And, just to prove this is not an April fools joke, I included a picture of our first blooming Rose Verbena.

See my previous post for more information about our new landscape.