The local environmental non-profit group I’m involved with had a significant event happen in its history today.  Due to a variety of factors (primarily budget shortfall issues), the board today voted to become an all-volunteer organization effective at the end of June 2009.  This is a huge change: the original founder had been a full-time, paid contractor prior to this point.  No longer will this be the case, and the process of creating this change is a major one that has big consequences for the founder.  No one likes to change jobs, even if their paycheck was sporadic at best.  No one likes to release the reins of their own creation.

Our board has bitten off a huge responsibility to ensure that the organization continues to fulfill its mission, and to properly honor the contributions, vision, and work of our founder.

Let’s just say that it all made for a pretty heavy board meeting.

For this project, I picked an area up my upstairs office that was nestled between some built in shelves and cabinets on one wall.  It measured 48 inches wide by 33 inchess tall.

Next I went to my favorite free high resolution desktop wallpaper sites, and looked for something that I wanted to see on my wall.  I wanted to find something that included obvious perspective cues to give the illusion of depth, and seemed to have a light source in the middle of the picture where my lamp was going to be shining from.  I picked this one without over-thinking it too much for the purposes of the experiment.  Many others would have worked, and been much more interesting.  I downloaded it at the highest resolution offered (2,560 x 1,600 pixels).

In order to know how my photo would look, I divided the number of pixels I had wide by inches wide (2,560 pixels/48 inches) = 53 DPI (dots per inch).  For a section of wall that people will be at least 1-3 feet away from, 50 DPI is fine.  100 DPI is good if people will get less than a foot away at eye level to your wall.  This requires less DPI than other printing applications in order  to look good from the distance a viewer sees it.

Next I went to an online printing place to have it printed large.  I went to BargainBanners.com, (my employer), here.   My wallpaper printout arrived well within a week.

When it arrived, I thumb-tacked it to the wall under where the trim was attached.

Since there is a lamp that goes on that part of the shelf, I set it up without its shade to preview how the room’s real lighting would work with the image.  Looks like the bulb is practically part of the sky.  Exactly the effect I was hoping for.

Wood trim, lampshade, and various office junk put back into place.  I’m pretty happy with how it turned out for a first try.  What does everyone else think?  I have more complicated wood paneling elsewhere in the house.  I was thinking of trying something more complex, with a more meaningful image, in the future.

Regarding the copyright of the image, that part is sticky.  I believe it would be a better practice to surf on over to iStockPhoto.com to buy the proper rights to an image they have for $5-$12.  Better yet, if you have a camera with a lot of megapixels, you can print directly from your photographs, which you already own.  My employer sees a lot of this for beautiful engagement photos on huge display at the wedding reception.

Well, almost.

Naturally I’m referring to Microsoft’s newly-made-live-and-public PhotoSynth technology with the freshly added ability to create your own PhotoSynth content.

Now PhotoSynths are NOT the same thing as your old school, late 90s virtual tour animated photo panoramas.

In the below YouTube video, you can see a screencast I filmed of a tour through a PhotoSynth I created of my home in Dallas:

By going around my house and taking 322 individual photographs, and uploading them into the new Microsoft PhotoSynth creator, I had hoped to create a complete 3D tour of my home that I could show people (family members) in distant areas in order to share my home with them. Although far better than hearing a description of the phone over the phone, or seeing just a few still photos, it wasn’t completely immersive.

Even though I followed the Microsoft PhotoSynth guidelines fairly well (or so I thought), the panorama that my photos allowed the system to create were about 18% ‘connectable’ according to the system. Did I take the photos poorly? Would it work better with a wide-angle, higher resolution camera? Does the software need 100,000 people like me to upload data so that they can improve the algorithm for detecting how pictures fit together?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Please view the video to see how it turned out, and visit Microsoft PhotoSynth to try it out for yourself. They have created tours of places far more interesting than my house in north Dallas, Texas.

On the plus side, for the first time my grandma in California really seemed to understand how the parts of my house connected together and the layout of the space. Previously she had see a few still photos, and hadn’t really visualized what it was like to be here. So even my simple effort actually achieved what I had hoped it would. It is very sophisticated computer graphics technology, and has been adapted to be very user friendly. No doubt, they have already taken this far beyond what has been released to the likes of us.

You can see what I made here on the PhotoSynth website. (Please note: to view the synth directly, you’ll be prompted to install the MS PhotoSynth viewer software. Just view the demonstration I uploaded to YouTube instead if you don’t want to install any software.)

Previously, I hadn’t quite been thrilled with the look of my fireplace. This fact, combined with the siren call of about 160 individual bricks and the giddy thrills of climbing 15 foot ladders led me to recently paint my fireplace.

Covering brick with latex paint is no special trick, and people do it all the time. The fun in this project was that I wanted to leave the mortar alone and only paint bricks. Each bring was lovingly painted about 2 square inches at a time in order to "color within the lines". The fireplace now matches the wall on the opposite end of the living/dining great room. The picture shows the project in progress before I replaced the trim on the paneling above it.

Also, this room got some new plants and I ran wiring through part of the attic to get the Bose really high up in the room. Maybe I’m getting the hang of this compulsive homeowner thing.

By the time we got to mid-morning, it was time for breakfast.

On a normal weekday, we make some type of egg white & cheddar breakfast sandwich or muffin. This has been a staple breakfast for a long while, and keeps us (and our occasional houseguests) going strong all morning. On weekends, we always aim for something more special.

Starting last week, this became a simple French crepe for one of the two days on the weekend.

Beginning with Bisquick (our first occasion ever for buying this product), we mixed up a couple of cups of thin batter using lowfat buttermilk instead of regular milk. The batter, of course, was made a little thinner so it would go flat and tin in the pan and wouldn’t leaven too much.

It took a bit of experimentation, but the rejects were still tasty. As each one was each cooked up, it was quickly enjoyed with a little bit of jelly as the next one cooked. The recipe (2 cups bisquick, 2 eggs, 1 cup buttermilk) produced about 5-6 crepes. Every crepe was different, as no two were filled with the same jelly filling.

This was possible thanks to my mom. She recently visited me in Texas for a few days. During her stay, she helped us make about four dozen jars of various preserves, jams, and jellies. Among these were Pinot Grigio Wine jelly, strawberry preserves (popular so far with our friends), a Pink Grapefruit Marmalade, Grape Jelly, Blueberry Jelly, and No-Sugar (and no fake sugar) Blueberry/Pomegranate Jelly.

Why crepes? Years ago, my grandfather used to make these for his grandchildren when we stayed his and my grandma’s house. You could call this a childhood comfort food of mine. I don’t know if mine are as good as his were, but it’s a great way to remember his kindness toward his grandchildren. I’m glad I finally decided to buy a box of Bisquick and finally try this.

So needless to say, breakfast was today. What a nice way to start the second half of the weekend.