Posted via iphone

Posting pics onto blogger from iphone...pretty cool!

The camera is good for a cell phone, I suppose, but hard to keep steady (and therefore difficult to avoid blurry pictures, especially when there's not much light)...but I will generally always have my iphone on me, so it's handy.

i love my iphone

I'm about a month and a half into my iphone and I love it.  Really helpful with almost anything, but not everything...

Weekend Kid Pics

Great weather in Boston recently...the brief period of time when it's neither too hot nor too cold, and biking to work is a great way to start the day. We spent a lot of time outdoors this weekend, including a nice picnic with Frenchies: Boston (the latest group of French people we've met in our still relatively new city) as well as several trips to various playgrounds. Here's some pictures:

Sophie, Max, and Louise play with chalk.
View from our living room window.
Max is hoping to be the DH for the Red Sox next season.
Sophie on the slide.
Ready for brunch at a Back Bay restaurant.

Hollywood in Charlestown

They're filming a major movie a few blocks away from my home in Charlestown--the other day I biked past the film crews as they were setting up.  No star sightings for me....yet.  The movie is called "The Town" and is being directed by Ben Afleck who is in the movie.  Blake Lively and everybody's favorite Mad Man, Jon Hamm aka Don Draper are also in the movie, which is apparently about a bunch of Charlestown townies who successfully carry out a bank robbery.  Wonder if they'll hit our local bank?

Laser Cheese Break

Since I have nothing else to write about....weirdo Japanese laser cheese commercial.

More Photomosaic Fun With Max & Sophie

More fun with photomosaics...I was worried that the program wouldn't really work too well with faces, but I think it's actually pretty good. There's a "Fade" option which allows you to increase the contribution of the original image to the final product. Here are a range of examples--the first image is the original (0% Fade) and the last image is using only photomosaic (100% Fade).





And here's zooming in on a random part of the photo. Pretty cool.

Screwing Around with Photomosaics

I had some rare downtime in the lab today and I started screwing around with this free software to make photomosaics on Mac, called MacOSaiX.  Pretty user-friendly.  This is my first attempt, using as a template a zebrafish embryos at 24 hours post-fertilization demonstrating expression of a gene within the kidneys and spinal cord (the purple stripes in the picture).  I used a bunch of "junk images" of old experiments as the individual cells.  The photomosaic is majorly reduced in image quality so that it is downloadable onto blogger.com, but you get the idea.  Imagine the possibilities...

Sophie's Version of This Little Piggy

She gets the basic idea of This Little Piggy, even if all the words aren't right...Papa turns the tables at the end however...

Sophie's Rookie Card

Screwing around on Photoshop this weekend + buying Sophie her very first baseball bat (albeit soft and pink) = Sophie's first baseball card. They are guaranteed to appreciate in value after her strong rookie season!

The Birds

Check out the massive number of birds Claire, Laure, Sophie & Max encountered on a recent trip to Plum Island in nearby Newburyport, Massachusetts. There is a wildlife sanctuary at the Parker River National Wildlife Preserve which houses over 300 species of birds. That's a lot 'o birds!

A Few More Good Ones

Continuing to sort through some of the great photos Laure took during her Boston visit.