The Home of The KCPokes

Most already know the story of the stair diving incident, but I’ve finally found the time to go ahead and get the pictures uploaded. For those that do not, here is a brief recap. The day before her 4th birthday, Delaney had a misstep on the stairs while going from upstairs to the main floor. She ended up falling down about four stairs, which given that she is a daredevil and falls all the time didn’t seem like it would have been a big deal, other then scaring her. Theresa was right there, scooped her up and tried to comfort her. We figured she was probably bruised and scared, but nothing major. Boy were we wrong. Theresa asked her if she was alright, which she responded that her arm hurt. Upon pulling her away to get a better look, tied with a collective gasp from Theresa, it didn’t take but a second to realize that everything wasn’t alright. She had clearly broken her arm, which was now doing its best attempt at imitating the letter S! We were dressed and to the hospital in 15 minutes.

She was an incredible trooper throughout the entire process, not even flinching when the nurse hooked up the IV. She was in a softcast, with splint, for two weeks, followed by a bright pink fiberglass cast for 3 weeks. Because she broke both bones in her left forearm, she had to have a full arm cast. Didn’t slow her down a bit. She was riding her four wheeler within a week, with her softcast, and took everything in stride. Amazing that she turned such an event into nothing more then a small inconvenience to her.

Time has past and her cast is now off. She still has a small area of one of the bones that hasn’t healed completely, thus she is still in a brace for another four weeks, but it is removable and not full arm. We were at the lake and swimming, in the “deep water”, within a day of getting it removed. Having a cast during the summer may be one of the cruelest punishments for a child that loves the water. Not that you’d wish for it to ever happen, but the day before her birthday, in the middle of the summer, is just bad timing.

You can view the set of pictures that we took during the span of her cast experience.

I also took a video of her getting the cast removed, just so she has something to remember the whole ordeal. We are still scared of the steps, but I suppose we can’t be there for every step she is going to take. We just hope that she slows down and uses more caution in the future.

I know it has been a while since we provided any updates or news, and for that I do apologize. Things have been incredibly busy, with my new job, Neill graduating, and life just happening. I hope to get things back on track soon. I’m looking to simplify the site, again, as the current site just doesn’t provide the necessary interaction I’m looking to accomplish. It probably will not be anything soon, but you’ve been warned.

Neill did graduate from High School this past weekend, for those that were not aware. We are extremely proud of the effort he put into it and are now anxiously awaiting his next journey, which will be boot camp in June. We hate to see him go so soon, but also know that it will be huge in getting the next phase of his life started. We have a ton of pictures from the graduation to post, which I will try to get to tonight. I’ll post an update to this post once that is complete.

Sorry there haven’t been any updates lately, just seems like there are just too many things going on. I am currently in the process of changing jobs, which requires finding one first, so between regular work, my work on the side, and the job situation there just haven’t been time for updates. I hope to get back into the flow and start posting more pictures and news, but until then please be patient.

Brad just made me aware that today, January 10th, is National De-lurking Day. What does that mean to you? Well if you visit this site, and read the articles, without commenting, then you are a lurker. Nothing wrong with lurking, it’s what we do. But since today is the official “De-lurking Day”, that means you should at least leave a comment and let us know that you have visited and come out of the shadows.

With Christmas comes all kinds of new “toys”, for both adults and kids. This year was no exception, with Santa determining that we must have all been pretty good boys and girls this year. With all the great things received, and given, who would think that we’d have the most fun with one of Delaney’s gifts? She received a VTech Kidizoom digital camera, which is essentially a low quality digital camera in a durable construction. She loves to play with our camera now so our thought was to get her one of her own and see what she produces. Who knows, maybe she is the next Ansel Adams?

It turns out that not only does she love her camera, but EVERYONE else did as well. For the most part she wasn’t even the one using it as all the other kids had a great time taking pictures of everything possible. Then the adults got ahold of it (ok, so it was me) and you knew it wouldn’t turn out well.

Some images didn’t need any extra effects!

To see all the pictures, not just the ones that the adults took, you can check out Delaney’s Album. As she takes more pictures, and trust me she takes a LOT of pictures, we’ll continue to add them to her album so be sure to check back from time to time. All new pictures will be added to the beginning of the album.

The camera is a hit so now time to see what kind of eye, and patience, she has. Hope you enjoy them as much as she enjoys taking them.

There are times when you find something that you find interesting if for no other reason then its different. That is the case when I stumbled upon a program called Metapixel. It is an opensource program, available for different Linux distros (it is in the repositories if you are running Ubuntu), and basically it takes your pictures and creates a mosaic out of them. So what does that mean? It means that it takes all your pictures, in our case that is around 7000 different pictures, and creates miniature versions of those pictures, as part of the preparation phase. It then takes the “library” created and uses them to create a mosaic out of your input picture.

Clear as mud?

I’m sure this means NOTHING to most people, but for those one or two people that this would actually be something they’d like to try, I’ll go through the steps.

Above and beyond everything else, of course you’ll have to have metapixel installed and in your path. I normally run Ubuntu, on different machines, so I just added it via the repositories.

First, we need to prepare all your pictures. This will not touch your originals, other then reading them in, so fear not. You’ll designate your input directory and your output directory:

metapixel-prepare -r /source_directory /destination_directory --width=30 --height=30

This can take some time, depending on the number of pictures you have in your library. The one positive is that you’ll only have to do it one time, regardless of how many mosaics you end up creating.

Second, once the library creation is completed, we’ll now need to determine what image we want to create the mosaic of. I recommend images that are in bright light, just from my testing; the dark pictures tend to show up with some strange colors. Once you have determined what you want to create the mosaic of, it’s time to kick off the second step of the process.

metapixel --metapixel /source_directory/input_picture.jpg /destination_directory/output.png --library /destination_directory --scale=8 --distance=50


What this does is take your input_picture.jpg and create the output.png file as your mosaic. It uses the images from the destination_directory, which you created the previous step. The scale directive is stating how big of an image to create, depending on how big your input image is; in this case we are creating an image that is 8X bigger then the original. Be careful, I got carried away the first time and it created a HUGE file that you cannot do anything with. If you input file is 1MB, your output file will roughly be 250+ MB. The distance parameter indicates the minimal number of pictures between the first usage of the image and the second; there will be 50 different images between the first use of an image and the next time the image will be used in the mosaic. The larger the distance, the longer it’ll take to create the final output. If you do not care about the distance, remove it completely to speed up the process considerably. Depending on the speed of your machine, the scale you’ve set and the distance set, this could take a while.

So what do you get out of it? Here is an example of a mosaic I created (clink on the image to see the full size):

I had to reduce the image WAY down as you’d never be able to open up a 266MB file; well not quickly anyway. Obviously reducing the image size also reduces the ability to zoom in and see the images used to create the mosaic, but zooming in on the larger image and you’ll start to see the individual images.

The usage is where the question comes in; what exactly do you do with something like this? Depends. My thought was to take and build a library of sports images and create a mosaic of something like Arrowhead Stadium or Kaufman Stadium, at which time I’d have it professionally printed and framed at the larger size. First I have to build the library, which could take some time.

So the challenge now is for you to create one and share your work.

The Christmas cards have been sent and should be safely in your hands, unless you were one of the few that I did not have an address for. There are a handful of people that I still do not have addresses for, thus their cards will be VERY late; everyone else should have theirs before Christmas. We went with the kids only, again, this year. Let’s be honest, no one really wants to see either Theresa or I.

We had some help with preparing the cards this year, so if you got a card with the return address label sideways or upside-down, well just know that Delaney helped personally with your card.

It is now three days until Christmas, all our shopping is complete and now just wrapping to complete. If we can keep the little one occupied long enough so that she doesn’t drive us crazy, everything will be golden. It is a whirlwind, it seems, but somehow we actually ended up ahead of the game. I hope everyone else can say the same.

Until we see everyone, of if we don’t talk to you until after, please have a safe and Merry Christmas.

Not much in the news department, but I did manage to get some pictures uploaded that were much overdue, specifically the rest of the Halloween pictures. The following albums have updated pictures:

Halloween 2007
Holidays 2007
Miscellaneous Family Pictures

That’s all for now. Be looking for Christmas cards in the mail any day.