Picasa Faces

While recently using Google’s photo program, Picasa, I noticed it was putting together a collection of faces. Apparently, it runs a background process looking for faces in all the image files it can find on the computer. You can look at these faces and put names on them. Here’s the neat part: put a name to a face and it’ll aggregate a bunch of faces it thinks are the same person which you can then confirm, and it uses that to aggregate even more faces it thinks are the same person. In a couple minutes, I had 300+ Izzy faces, 100 or so Becky faces, etc. It was even able to identify Stephen’s face with and without his beard! Click a face and it’ll display the photo it’s from. Any faces it presents that you don’t want to keep track of, you can tell it to disregard; such as cartoon faces, faces of presidents, etc. It has located a bunch of pictures I didn’t even know I had, since it doesn’t limit itself to just your regular image directories. Anyway, I thought this was pretty cool and worth mentioning in case people didn’t know about this feature.

Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

At least this year when we got back to KS from CA we didn’t have to dig the car out from under a foot of snow at the airport parking lot and then try to plow the car through the snowbank blocking the driveway (the snow from the street that the snowplows shoved curbside) when we got home at 2 a.m. and end up high-centered which, to make a long story short, resulted in lumbar x-rays and MRI confirming a herniated disk.

So, yeah, this year was better, even though it was essentially as cold. But, now, it’s 0° air temp, wind chill -11° and that’s just not fit for man nor beast, as somebody said, and forecast to be worse in the morning. We’re running a constant trickle of water from a couple faucets to guard against pipes freezing. Which we forgot to do before we left for CA so we were happy it didn’t get too cold too long in KS even though we weren’t there, er, here.

Makes a person wanna just hunker under the covers and hibernate. Which Becky tried to do a little while ago, for the night, but she’s back up because the humidifier isn’t working and without it the air is too dry for man or beast and you wake up unable to breathe through your nose, so she’s digging out an old humidifier. I should be helping, eh?

Instead, I made minor headway toward the goal of uploading Christmas photos. By that I mean I got all the files offloaded from camera to computer with backups to portable HD. Maybe during the KU game tomorrow evening I’ll tinker with Picasa and make a little more headway. Having got a preview look at ’em, for now I’ll just say there’s quite a few totally adorable pics of a certain two-year-old.

Random Acts

What with Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter there’s not much left for the Chappells Weblog but in case anybody is looking here and missed it elsewhere, let me just recommend Random Acts of Culture, as exemplified by this Youtube link.