Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-11

Picasa 3 and its Facial Recognition

Picasa Logo I finally got around to importing all my photo albums into Picasa. The main reason I decided to go with Picasa is that I wanted a simple solution for sharing pictures and Picasa Web Albums won out after comparing to the likes of Flickr and Photobucket. For some reason I really dislike Flickr’s user interface. I would much prefer PhotoSleeve, but we all know what happened to that.

I also found a Picasa Facebook plugin that would allow me to upload photos directly to Facebook called: Picasa Uploader on Facebook. One thing I really missed about PhotoSleeve was that I was able to just select photos off the website and tell it to send to Facebook. That is not possible with Picasa Web Albums.

One of the features I wanted to play with was the facial recognition and I finally found some time this weekend. It took it about 4 hours to import about 25GB of photos (ranging from 2000 to 2010) and to detect the faces. It might’ve actually taken more time, but I was out having dinner with Xyon and Chad. Overall my impression of the facial recognition feature is that it’s pretty neat. It does a pretty decent job, but with some funky quirks.

First besides detecting faces, it also detects paintings, drawings, photos, television, posters and so on. I don’t blame it since I presume there really isn’t a easy way for the computer to determine stuff like that. It was funny when it detected the Taboo happy face. The weirdest one so far is for some reason it detected some wires and part of my motherboard to be a face:

wire face

Not quite sure how the above image represents a face.

Another really funny thing is it sometimes puts the most random pictures into someone else’s bucket. First of all, the face looks nothing like the person it associated it with. Gender is different, hair is different, even skin color is different. It does allow you to verify if it’s not very sure if the person is who it thinks it is, but I’ve noticed there have been ones where it was sure, stuck in the middle of 100 photos (very hard to detect).

One really annoying thing is that there isn’t really any quick shortcut/hot keys to ignore faces (either people I don’t know or don’t care about labeling). Either I have to do the context-menu key or use the mouse, which are both annoying, especially when I have over 5000 faces left to identify. Hopefully by identifying more, they’ll drop in batches as they’ll be able to identify more faces as I teach it.

Going through the photos have made me quite nostalgic, remembering both happy and sad memories. I think I’ll call it a night and go watch some How I Met Your Mother. Who knows when I’ll resume identifying faces.

I’ll end this post with the polar bear face it detected and the original image:

polar bear face

polar bear bandit plush

Now that polar bear’s got attitude! (-_^x)

Stress Relieving Lotion?

Aveeno Stress Relief Lotion I received a sample bottle of Aveeno’s moisturizing lotion today. Apparently lotions now come in “Stress Relief” varieties, as it “calms and relaxes”. Maybe it’s just me, but I found it amusing. Would’ve been nice if I had received this several weeks ago.

I wonder how it works… Is it like those caffeine soap bars where you absorb some sort of anti-stress medication through your skin?

More info: Aveeno Stress Relief Moisturizing Lotion

Anyway, I believe I have a 2-hour episode of 24 to watch. Ciao!

光良 – 童話

Michael - Fairy Tale CD Cover While going through YouTube, this video was recommended to me: 光良 – 童话. I fell in love with the song even though it’s 5 years old. My sister tells me that 光良 (Micahel Wong – the artist) was actually signing autographs sometime ago at a restaurant we frequent. However at that time I had no idea who he was.

One interesting thing to note is that I always seem to mis-sing part of the lyrics. The original lyrics are:
我想了很久 我開始慌了
I thought for a long time, I began to panic
是不是我又做錯了甚麼
Did I do something wrong again?

But instead of singing 慌了 (huang le), I keep on singing 懷疑 (huai yi). I guess the main reason is because I didn’t know what 慌了 meant and both phrases actually begin with the ‘hua’ sound. After looking it up, I see it means to panic. 懷疑 means to suspect/doubt and both seem to work fine in this context.

Another part that I sometimes screw up on is 守護 (shou hu) which means to guard/defend. I sometimes sing 保護 (bao hu) instead, which means to protect.

Here are the original lyrics:

忘了有多久 再沒聽到你
Forgot how long it’s been, since I heard you
對我說你最愛的故事
Tell me your favorite story
我想了很久 我開始慌了
I thought for a long time, I began to panic
是不是我又做錯了甚麼
Did I do something wrong again?

Chorus A:
你哭著對我說 童話裡都是騙人的
While crying you tell me, all fairy tales are lies
我不可能是你的王子
I couldn’t be your prince
也許你不會懂 從你說愛我以後
Or maybe you can’t understand, from when you told me you loved me
我的天空星星都亮了
In my sky, all the stars have brightened

Chorus B:
我〔願〕〔要〕〔會〕變成童話裡
I (am willing to) (need to) (will) become the fairy tale’s
你愛的那個天使
Angel that you love
張開雙手 變成翅膀守護你
Spreading both arms, becoming wings to guard you
你要相信 相信我們會像童話故事裡
You have to believe, believe that we can be like the fairy tale where
幸福和快樂是結局
Happiness and joy is the ending

Repeat Chorus A 1x

Repeat Chorus B 3x

喔…
Wo…
一起寫我們的結局
Write our ending together

Update: Translation note: Technically both 幸福 and 快樂 both mean happiness, but saying “Happiness and happiness is the ending” sounded a bit weird. Initially I had “Good fortune and happiness”, but good fortune didn’t quite sound right in this context. I ended up switching it to “Happiness and joy” which sounded much better. While contemplating this, I remember when I was a kid, my mom would give me 幸福傷風感冒素 (medicine by Fortune Pharmacal to treat the cold and flu).

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-04

Perry’s Birthday Celebration

Here’s my full set of pictures: Perry’s Birthday Celebration 2010. I believe Valerie also took some.

We celebrated Perry’s birthday today. We had dinner at Red Robin’s. By the time we got back to my place, I had realized I had forgotten to asked the waitress to take our picture, oh well.

At the end of dinner, Perry busted out his free Cold Stone coupon asking if anyone else was interested in getting ice cream. Sarah had secretly ordered a birthday cake for him and had planned for me to pick it up. Somehow it was suggested Perry could get his ice cream to go and save for later. No, no no, that was a bad idea. I was trying to decide what to do. Should I reveal we already have a Cold Stone cake for him? While Perry was about to order something, I tapped him on his back and said you should save the coupon for later. Perry goes, oh… I had wanted to pick up the cake in private and surprised him later, but it was too late now. I asked for the cake and Perry figured out it was Sarah who got it for him. Originally the cake was supposed to say “Happy Birthday Old Man” (it even says that on the order form), but it appears they just wrote “Happy Birthday Perry”.

We got back to my place. A couple decided to play a round of Settlers, while the rest of us busted out on Rock Band:

settlers rock band

Someone also busted out PGR3 sometime along the way. From what I hear, Chris dominated.

Here’s some other pictures I thought turned out pretty neat:

Phillip enjoying onion rings Valerie and Perry rock band PGR3 shrimp tempura hmmmm ying ying and valerie perry pointing

The ice cream cake from Cold Stone was really good. (Thanks Sarah!) It was a chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream, but also had pineapple and coconut. Mmmmm. Unfortunately I realized last minute that I didn’t have candles, so Perry had to pretend to blow out imaginary candles. You can check out the video on Facebook: Happy Birthday Perry!

Perry's birthday cake Perry blowing out imaginary candles Perry cutting the cake A slice of the delicious cake

We had several extra slices that Perry was going to take home. Unfortunately my freezer was out of space, so it stayed in my fridge. By the time we left, this was what it looked like:

melted ice cream cake

We ended the night night with some 4 vs 4 Halo 3 (Perry, Sathana, Valerie, Chris vs Toland, Phillip, Saran, Tom – unfortunately Ying Ying couldn’t participate) . The teams were actually quite even and we found the winning factor to be which team was using the big screen TV. Playing 4 player Halo on a 24″ LCD just isn’t good enough.