Atherton Family Notes

Mardi Gras last week got me thinking about going to New Orleans, and Sandi and I have been looking in the possibility of doing so over Spring Break this year.  Obviously, we would be going there during what is probably a calmer time, which probably isn’t a terrible idea, especially with young kids in tow.  If we go, we will probably hit one or more of the various museums, and that should be enough for now.  :)

Thinking about this possible trip reminded me of a carnival event that we attended in France, in a town called Cholet, about 2 hours south east of St. Gregoire.  It’s not clear to me that it is officially part of what is considered “carnival”, primarily because it takes place after Lent, not before it, like Mardi Gras does.  That being said, it has a very “Fat Tuesday” feel to it, exact date notwithstanding.

The entire affair is a week-plus long event, although we only drove down for a day to attend the big daytime parade on Sunday.  On the Saturday following the daytime parade, there is apparently a night time version of the same parade with more lights, but we didn’t know that at the time.  Given that the night event doesn’t start until after 9:30 in the evening, it was probably better that we didn’t attend.

The group that runs Carnaval de Cholet says that it is one of the biggest and most famous events of its type in France, and that is probably true.  The parade was a couple of hours in length, and there were tens of floats involved.  There were also groups of marchers carrying enough confetti to create white-out (color -out??) conditions at times.

The carnival was not as traditional as the ones saw in Germany, nor as risqué as the parade in Ribeauvillé.  It was more modern, similar to the bits we’ve seen on TV of Carnival in Cologne.

That being said, it was a fun day, and the kids especially enjoyed it.

A showcase of some of the floats (click to enlarge).

The governmentally-mandated confetti cannon, hard at work creating jobs for the clean-up crews.

In the US, this band would have been pulled by a mere tractor, but in France, that was too simple.  :)

The world’s ugliest cheerleaders.  No wonder the NFL has never caught on in France.

Any parade with anthropomorphic, high-steppin’, silly-string-covered gargoyles is OK by me.

Photos originally from April 10, 2005.

Technorati Tags: carissa, celia, cholet, France, ken, panorama, parade, sadie, sandi

Local Tags: carissa, celia, cholet, France, ken, panorama, parade, sadie, sandi

 Format this post for printing

I am a fan of panoramic photography.  Computer algorithms have gotten very good over the last few years at “stitching” even the most amateur shots together, and as it turns out, I am an amateur that is willing to gather the input data.

I first started playing with panoramic photography in Germany, and it’s become a habit — any time I find a wide open view and I have my camera handy, I snap a series of photos to piece together later.  We’ve already posted a fair number of the results elsewhere on our blog, but I have taken many more that we’ve never posted.  In some cases, I’ve never even taken the time to go back a stitch the photos together.

I’ve recently installed the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, and it has an updated function called “Photomerge” which does nearly all of the assembly of a panorama by itself.  This has inspired me to go back and look through our 32000+ photos we’ve taken in the last 10 years to pull out some of those unassembled panoramas.

With Photoshop, I can specify which photos to use and which mode to operate in and a minute or so later (depending on the number of photographs), I have a nearly finished panorama ready for final tweaking (and cropping, which I have to do because I normally work without the aid of a tripod.

Photoshop isn’t perfect, and it can get quite confused about how the photos snap together, especially if there is not a lot of differentiating detail.  Photoshop used to have a “manual” mode for Photomerge which allowed the user to go in and move around the individual photos before the final stitching, but it’s gone now.  I’m not sure why this mode got taken out, because for all the improvements they’ve made to Photomerge, it still blows it sometimes, as aI learned the other day while trying to assemble a panorama I took of Silver Lake Sand Dune – the plain blue sky and the bare sand confused Photomerge at several points, resulting in content both inadvertently duplicated and accidentally deleted.  I’m still trying to figure out if I can make that one work.

Today I want to share one of the panoramas that I took when David and Shirley came to visit us while we were living in France.  At the end of their visit, we drove into Paris so they could see some of the famous landmarks.  Shortly before we had to go back home, we went with them to the top of the Arc de Triomphe.  From there, on that clear, sunny day, I made a panorama of the Eiffel tower.  This was taken just a month or so before London was chosen for the 2012 Olympics, so Paris was still covered in the hopeful advertising of a candidate city (which explains the “Paris 2012″ sign on the tower).  

I like the level of detail that this picture shows, even accounting for the tiny little camera I used to take the picture, and the fact that I’ve cut the size of the original down by 20%.

Click on the picture to see it full size.

Taken May 28, 2005

Technorati Tags: arc de triomphe, eiffel tower, France, nana cotton, panorama, papaw cotton, paris, vacation

Local Tags: arc de triomphe, eiffel tower, France, nana cotton, panorama, papaw cotton, paris, vacation

 Format this post for printing

Mrs. Benson told me this week that my project won the MLK contest for Wayne Township.  This made me feel happy!

On Saturday,I got to go out eat beacuse of that!  I went to the Cheesecake Factory.  Now it is my favorite restront.  And Carissa and Sadie went to some birthday parties while I was at the restront.  It was just me and daddy and mommy.

For dessert, I had a piece of Adam’s peanut butter fudge and oreo cheesecake.  No wonder the Cheesecake Factory is known for it’s cheesecakes!  You should go there some time.  

If you have, is it good or what?

Technorati Tags: celia, cheesecake factory, ken, martin luther king, sandi

Local Tags: celia, cheesecake factory, ken, martin luther king, sandi

 Format this post for printing

Here’s the final version of the other panorama I mentioned yesterday. It turns out that there is a way to get the interactive layout feature to work in the latest version of Photoshop if you download it from the website.  I think this means that the feature is eventually going to disappear, but they’ve temporarily given it a reprieve for people who still need it.

This one took a lot of work to put together.  Even after touching up the placement manually, I still had to do some blending at the seams.

This panorama was taken on the Silver Lake Sand Dunes on Lake Michigan, which we visited last summer.  The girls loved it.  You can seem them running across the top of one of the dunes at the far left and right of the pictures.  Sandi and I found the dunes very interesting, but our excitement was dimmed a bit by the sheer heat of the sand.

(click picture to see full size version)

Photographs taken July 30, 2008

Technorati Tags: carissa, celia, ken, lake michigan, panorama, photoshop, sadie, sand dune, sandi, silver lake, summer

Local Tags: carissa, celia, ken, lake michigan, panorama, photoshop, sadie, sand dune, sandi, silver lake, summer

 Format this post for printing

A couple of summers ago we went to visit Sandi’s grandmother in North Dakota.  North Dakota is not exactly the first place you think of when planning a vacation, but nonetheless we were determined to make the best of it.  It turns out that many small town there make an effort to give themselves one thing that make them unique, and in a lot of cases, this means making “The World’s Largest Statue of X”, where X is usually some kind of animal.  In this case, we went to see the statue of Salem Sue, “The World’s Largest Holstein Cow.”  The statue is located at the top of a butte, which means it has a majestic view of the otherwise flat surroundings.  Here is the view from the site of Salem Sue (she’s on the left side):

(click picture to see full size version)

Photographs taken July 26, 2006

Technorati Tags: carissa, celia, holstein cow, ken, new salem, north dakota, panorama, sadie, salem sue, sandi, vacation

Local Tags: carissa, celia, holstein cow, ken, new salem, north dakota, panorama, sadie, salem sue, sandi, vacation

 Format this post for printing

In the summer of 2007, we took a trip with much of the Atherton and Green side of the family down to Gulf Shores, Alabama.  On the drive down, we decided to stop in Huntsville to spend a day at the US Space and Rocket Center Museum.

It was a fun side trip, even though Carissa, Celia and Sadie were ultimately more interested in the rides than in the rockets.

I however, enjoyed seeing all of the artifacts of space exploration, even if I had been to the museum as a child (and honestly, the museum hadn’t changed much.)  In the outdoor section of the museum, there are several displays of rockets and of course, the  Pathfinder Space Shuttle (um, simulator).

There isn’t much space to get around the shuttle, so a close-up panorama was the best way to get the entire length on one shot.  Yeah, it never went to space and it isn’t quite as large as a real shuttle, but when else am I going to be able to get up close to such a piece of hardware?

Here is a shot from the underside.  The funny angle of this view made a fun scrapbook page about the trip.

And finally, a composite shot of several of the rockets on display.

Photos taken June 30, 2007

Technorati Tags: alabama, carissa, celia, huntsville, ken, panorama, sadie, sandi, space shuttle pathfinder, us space and rocket museum

Local Tags: alabama, carissa, celia, huntsville, ken, panorama, sadie, sandi, space shuttle pathfinder, us space and rocket museum

 Format this post for printing

I’ve added a map page to the blog up at the very top page. If you click on this link, it will take you to a map showing most of the places that we have written about on our blog represented as a bunch of little “push pins.”

I say “most of the places” because the tool I am using to set the geographic information only allows one location to be set per blog post. So if we talked about 5 different places that we visited in one post, I can only tag one of them as the location for the post. In those cases, I’ve tried to pick out the most important location, or at least the one we wrote the most about.

Clicking on one of the push pins will bring up a box showing the blog posts associated with the location.

I’m using a plug-in for WordPress called Geopress and while it does a pretty good job, it does have some rough edges. Locations can be specified either by a longitude/latitude pair or by an address. the long/lat pairs work really well, but sometimes the address part gives unexpected results. For example, I am aware of a few addresses that aren’t plotting properly on the map. One of those locations is the Gotthard Tunnel, which currently shows up hundreds of miles east of its actually location on the map, but when I look at the location in the associated post, it is correct. Hopefully, I’ll find a way to fix this — it looks like the easiest way may be to convert all of the addresses into long/lat pairs.

Now that this map is in place, it should get updated with each new post we make, at least if the post has an associated location.

What’s really surprising to me is how many places we’ve been that we haven’t written about!

Local Tags:

 Format this post for printing

Sandi’s friend Karen recently went with her family to Egypt and put together a video about it.

Sandi and I made a small number of updates to it — mainly to put Sandi’s favorite version of the song “Africa” in the video.

Here is the result:

Local Tags:

 Format this post for printing

It’s been a good week for CeCe. On Monday a week ago, she received her award for “Best Multimedia Presentation” in her age group in the Wayne Township Martin Luther King Jr. Project Contest.

Last night, we took her to the local school board meeting, where she and 80 other students from Robey Elementary received trophies for getting straight A’s in the 2007-2008 school year. She was very excited to go shake the Superintendent’s hand.

Mommy reminded her that she is one grading period away from having straight A’s in the 2008-2009 school year.

Here’s a picture of Cece with her latest trophy. All I had was my crappy little cell phone camera, so I dressed it up a bit in Picasa.

Technorati Tags: award, celia, ken, sandi, school, straight a student

Local Tags: award, celia, ken, sandi, school, straight a student

 Format this post for printing

Today has been an eventful day and tomorrow promises to be moreso. We’ve got a lot of things to write about, but it’s pretty late now, so I’m going to wait until tomorrow.

For the moment, though, I wanted to share this picture of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis that I took this morning:

I still need to go back and work on this picture… The seams are pretty obvious on the right side, but I was happy enough with it that I thought it was worth posting.

Technorati Tags: carissa, celia, gateway arch, ken, missouri, panorama, sadie, sandi, st. louis, vacation

Local Tags: carissa, celia, gateway arch, ken, missouri, panorama, sadie, sandi, st. louis, vacation

 Format this post for printing