Should you not know about these gravatars: The name comes from “Globally Recognized Avatar” which is like your profile picture on facebook or that byline image of the author next to their newspaper article. It’s an image associated with your online persona. The cool thing about doing it online is you can change it at any time and anywhere that image is used (when you leave your plethora of grateful comments on this very blog perhaps?) it will instantly update! How truly meaningless and fun!

For those of you who do not have a gravatar yet: go get one! It’s crazy simple and your icon starts showing up whenever you comment on somebody’s blog etc! Oh the meaningless joy!

For those more paranoid (and this should be ALL of you): the system works by hashing your email address (that’s generally required to comment) and turning it into meaningless (to people) gibbarish. This gibbarish is hauled off to the gravatar server where it’s linked to an image and that’s what gets displayed. Your email address is safe for another day! Hoorays!

Ok, time to go home. A certain game drops at midnight and I need to sleep some time :)

Leave comments and check out your new gravatars!

Come on… you know this is what he was thinking…

Explanation: I’ve started doing photoshop compilations with a hard 5 or 10 minute time limit on the work over my lunch break. The time includes finding the images, putting them together and getting a final image out. Sadly it means I can’t realize my pope-with-a-lightsaber dreams because google image search wasn’t kind in the 45 seconds I allowed myself for getting content. Oh well, next time! This one is a waving pope, an asian chick’s hand, and a Maya rendered katana. Thank you google…

Why have I forsaken my dear little blog? I’ll tell you why, because I’m cheating on it. That’s right. I have another place to write. And this one is better*

What and where is this amazing repository of wordsmithery you may ask? It’s over at Robots of Joy.

“Oh no, he’s making interactive sex-bots… again” I hear you say, but no! Not only will I never tinker in the gray triangle region between a roomba, prostitute, and God EVER again** but this project benefits sick kids (although depending on how you take the word “sick”… never mind I’m straying from my point.)

Here’s how it works (shamelessly copied from something I already wrote)

The Robots of Joy project was conceived in early 2008 as an all-around-everybody-wins mixture consisting of a scoop of the love of technology, a handful of engineering, and substantially more than a pinch of helping out others who could use a boost.

The plan falls into five parts:

Stage One: Design of the actual robot project. This stage is currently IN PROGRESS down to the Solidworks drawings, component choice, etc. For more on this check out this article.

Stage Two: We acquire the needed parts through donations (physical parts or money to buy parts) ad-based revenue from the website, and good old-fashioned out-of-pocket expenses. To add a bit of incentive each of the donors’ names will be laser etched into the side of the final project and recorded here on the site. (Have a blog or a website? That’ll also get face time here)

Stage Three: The build is on! Machining time has already been donated to the project and some of the operations code is already in the works. Admittedly this is the fun part :) Pictures of the build and how it progresses will go out on the website and in the newsletter. Hopefully we’ll really build some excitement for this stage and get a good rolling start into…

Stage Four! The whole project is sold to a lucky bidder on eBay. That’s right the whole thing will get packed up and shipped off. For this first project expect to see somebody’s computer room get a blast of very awesome. As soon as we find a home for our little creation it’s on to…

The BEST Stage: After out-of-pocket expenses are settled we’ll be giving %90 of the proceeds to the great guys over at the non-profit organization Child’s Play (childsplaycharity.org) who supply over 40 children’s hospitals with gifts, toys, and all manner of great things for children in long-term care. Read some of the letters these guys get and you’ll instantly understand the great service they provide to a lot of kids who really need a pick-me-up.

So where does that extra 10% go? It becomes the seed money for the next project allowing us to continue this cycle. We may change charities from project to project or year to year but the end goal will always be the same: to help fund amazing charities and do it all while developing some great open source projects.

So there you have it. That’s where the time has been going.

On the life side of things: Work is good but classified. Apartment is good but lacking dishwasher. Health is good but… EVERYTHING. Megan and I have bronchitis or some such nonsense and I’ve been missing the aforementioned work and dragging myself around the aforementioned apartment. Lotta WoW and sleeping. About the only things these here cough meds let me do. Well that and write this post…

And with that I’ll let this here robitusssin and delsyn fueled rant come to an end. Kelly consider yourself re-mocked…ed… mockeded… THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

* It may not be better and it’s not exclusively mine but it’s where my “writing time” has been going. Along with my “free time.”
** Not saying that I have, but damn if it doesn’t make for a good mental image in a blog post.

If you look closely the border around the tree on is topographically equivalent to an @ symbol.
@+tree=Atwood (=>I’m a nerd. I know.)

Tell me what you think!

Now they do full adjustments to the model’s face structure and I have nowhere near the eye for that kind of thing yet so I started out with skin, teeth, eyes, etc just to get a feel for it. But models, how to get models…. A tutorial I was reading suggested female faces that were somewhat familiar as they lack beard stubble and it’s generally easier to tell what looks ‘good’ on people you know. So I needed a group of photos, something where people submitted what they thought was a good picture of themselves (or a silly one for that matter) something like a yearbook… or a FACEBOOK! Yeah they’re not too hight rez but taking the top three girls who came up in my little random ‘who is your friend’ panel gave me a starting point. A few hours of not-working-on-VLSI-CMOS-Design later I have a few worthy results.

Roll over each image to see the original.

Lara and Shawna(?) This first one was just background, skin and eyes with just a couple touches on the teeth. Meant to put in a good background but never really got around to it. Maybe later. I have a distinct feeling that all the photoshop in the world wouldn’t make them look sober….

My friend Carly from back home. Skin, teeth and a couple flyaways tied down…It came out a bit flat for what I was hoping but it’s not too bad.

Meggie’s sissy Katie-ba. This was the last one I did of this set and I think I got a bit better from start to finish. This was a lower resolution image to begin with and getting the JPEG jaggies out without washing the image was kinda tricky. I had the most fun with this one but I think I went a bit overboard. Most of the stuff didn’t really need to be done but I wanted to try out some stuff so I played around with teeth, hair, eyes, skin, lashes, background and lastly I matched her shirt more to her eyes for color composition…

::Badier says I’m gay and I blow a kiss back at him::

So there you have it. Instead of designing the layout for a mocmos 300nm MOSIS foundary submicron logic gate I made people unnatrually smooth and glowy… I think my time was well spent…