Rita Mitsuoka

A long time ago, on a French road trip far, far away Chloe and I got addicted to the French Star Academy TV show. It was the first year that we were in France (2002) and I have to say that as far as reality TV goes, it was pretty good. Maybe it was less cringe-worthy than it's U.S. counterparts because your average French person is a lot less, well ... stupid than the average American. Sorry, but its true.

This was the series that catapulted Nolwenn into fame. Our favorite contestant, however got kicked out relatively early, but not before performing a spirited rendition of Marcia Baila by Les Rita Mitsouko. As soon as she announced her choice of songs, it was pretty clear that everyone in the French audience knew (and loved) the song. Chloe and I had never heard it of course, and both got it stuck in our heads, so I scoured the net for mp3s when we got back to Grenoble. I even got over my "only indie in my ipod" pretensions and rounded up a copy of the original AND the star academy version. The originial is a catchy song, and I was reminded of all of this by the sudden re-appearance of the video for Marcia Baila on youtube. The reason for the reappearance is sadly because one of the original duo (Fred Chichin) just died of cancer.

I can't remember very many other details of the show except one of the contestants running around naked, and Lionel (pronounced Leo-nell) Ritchie making a guest appearance (ohhhh, what a feeeeeling... to be daaaaancing on the ceiiiillling)!


edit: wiki reveals that the female vocalist is an actress, with a rather niche filmography, which she had a shocking confrontation with the famous Serge Gainsbourg on TV about. I didn't learn those words in my crash French class!

OKAY

I'm going to hopefully find some time to catch up on the blog in the next few days, and based on the phenomenal interest in more photos of little ZZN, chloe and I have started a ZZN-only blog which will be replete with pictures and goo-goo faces. Over here at moneycrushing, it will be business as usual. I'll post a link here as soon as the zoeblog is ready!

Life Posters / iPhoto Mosaics

A while ago I saw a cool link on Lifehacker about putting together a collection of images from your iPhoto library into a large format mosaic ( for printing through the built in Kodak printing service). The crux of the method is the fact that you can print a contact sheet at up to 8 columns wide into a PDF in iPhoto, which can then be converted to a jpg (or whatever), re-imported into iPhoto and then sent off for printing. This is fine, but the contact sheet ends up looking pretty bad if you have portrait *and* landscape shots, which I would assume most people do (also, 8 columns is the max width). Also, the Lifehacker protocol called for constraining the proportions of all the photos, which kind of sucks. Anyway, I figured there was a probably a better way using Imagemagick and with a little fiddling, I got more or less what I was looking for.

I should also mention that I found a piece of software called Posterino which looks nice, but also doesnt seem to do well with combining landscape+portrait (And charges $25 for a single user license! This isn't frickin rocket science here!).

The biggest problem was just installing Imagemagick on my Mac. As far as that goes, here is what worked:

1)Install MacPorts
2)sudo install ImageMagick
3)sudo install GhostScript
4)add /opt/local/bin to the PATH
5)grab type-ghostscript.xml type.xml
and install into /opt/local/share/ImageMagick-6.3.7/config/
6)edit the paths in type-ghostscript.xml to point to /opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/

e.g.
metrics="/opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/a010013l.afm"
glyphs="/opt/local/share/ghostscript/fonts/a010013l.pfb

and voila: ImageMagick installed. If you can install it in a more starightforward way, more power to you and you can skip all that.


Now the easy and fun part.

1)Export 96 of your images from iPhoto in File->Export, File Export tab into a folder.
2)Open a Terminal window and go to the directory where you exported
3)montage image_names -background black -geometry 650x650 -tile 12x8 ../poster.jpg

and you whould get an image called poster.jpg one level up.

now import into iphoto and order your prints.

Another trip to tilden

We headed up to Tilden park to try out the new jogging stroller today. We started the outing on the Nimitz trail, but it turned out to be way too smooth for our bump and offroad loving baby, so we headed for the Skyline trail instead:

A day trip to Alta

Kenji and I headed up to Alta to check out some of Roy the arborists handiwork


We walked around to try to find the property line posts, and in the process found a huge pine tree that is definitely within the lines.

Royksopp

a cool video By a band I had never heard of.

A trip to Tilden

Katie, Taras and Lucy visit

meet Zoe, give us even MORE cool stuff, and try out the climbing wall

Thanks guys!

more baby pics

Death valley

an article on Death Valley in todays sfgate.

climbing wall complete

Finally! I had wanted to put a dead vertical section on the right hand side of the wall (just to cap the structure), but chloe convinced me to try out an idea I had drawn up for a full extra 4 foot section which makes a 30-45 degree angle with the 50 degree overhang. The advantage of this vs. and end cap is more climbing area and a very cool overhanging blunt arete. The disadvantage is that it requires a lot of careful measurements and cutting (for me, at least), so I drew up plans on google sketchup to avoid calculating angles and where to cut the plywood. After getting my next door neighbor tom to put a 30 degree bevel on two 2x6s, measuring everything three times and finally cutting the plywood it came time to get the damn sheet up into the overhang. Tom was sick and unable to assist or lend me his clamps, so I attached it with a rope and Christa and Stephanie's help. The end result was well worth the effort, so now it's route setting time!






The framework is actually kind of cool to play around with behind the wall -- I guess we could use it for storage or something.



a Sketchup file of the wall (without a lot of the framing) can be downloaded here

halloween

The realization that it was Halloween barely registered in our sleep deprived zombie brains today. I'm sure the parents out there can understand how low on the list of priorities finding a costume for a six day old baby who sleeps during the day and parties all night is. Nevertheless, it seemed a shame to let the opportunity go to waste, so without further ado, I give you ... FUTURE ZOE