Here's my "good deed" for the day.

With the blizzard-like conditions out side, I figured it was an easy day to do a "good deed" with so much sleet and snow out there. After making my way out to get coffee and breakfast for the kids, supplies at the store (in case we got snowed-in) and then a few errands around town, I slowly made my way home. The truck is just great in this weather, and I rarely have any trouble.

I made the left-turn onto our street and noticed a guy stuck -- even though it was a Subaru AWD. I saw his neighbor using his snow-blower to clean his own driveway for his McMansion with complete disregard for this guy who was stuck in a really bad way. These kinds of people really piss me off. Luckily I was driving slow enough to stop safely and ask if the older fellow with the Subaru needed help, and he immediately said YES! This was an opportunity for a "random act of kindness" on my part, so I pulled over...

I introduced myself, and he did as well. He's been there 10 years and we've been here for eight — so we both know that there are two basic types of people who live in town. Pierre and I seem to be similar enough for me to want to help him.

I had a shovel in the truck and in about 20 minutes, I had helped him clear a big four foot snow-bank of heavy wet packed snow so he might be able to get out of his driveway.

I didn't realize that before I stopped to help him he had wedged the front wheel of his Subaru about 8 inches deep into his lawn while also getting it precariously stuck on top of an icy snow-pack — his All Wheel Drive was useless because the wheels that could turn just spun and the others did nothing.

I suggested that we continue to dig as much as possible, and then let the engine idle and maybe the heat would melt some of the iceberg beneath his SUV. It was frustrating, but he's not getting out until the snow bank melts a bit in a day or so.

Anyway we shook hands and I was off to bring the coffee and breakfast, and all the other things in the house and then shovel my own driveway. What I didn't realize was I had missed most of the first half of the Patriots vs. Jets game by the time I had shoveled my walkway and as much as I could of the driveway. Bummer.

I made the kids brunch and some hot chocolate with the game in the background. The Patriots were winning but it wasn't the type of "blowout" that folks predicted. The weather definitely had something to do with the game's outcome. The Jets gave 'em a busy day, but the Pats won which makes them 14-0 for the season. They may go all the way this year, which is basically what I said in August.

*~<|:-)

Neither rain nor sleet nor... huh?

Wow! I guess the old adage, "better late than never" really is true! I'm a big fan of the USPS, but check out this timely little nugget from Yahoo! News...

Christmas Card Arrives 93 Years Late.
Fri Dec 14, 4:13 PM ET
OBERLIN, Kan. - A postcard featuring a color drawing of Santa Claus and a young girl was mailed in 1914, but its journey was slower than Christmas. It just arrived in northwest Kansas.

The Christmas card was dated Dec. 23, 1914, and mailed to Ethel Martin of Oberlin, apparently from her cousins in Alma, Neb.

It's a mystery where it spent most of the last century, Oberlin Postmaster Steve Schultz said. "It's surprising that it never got thrown away," he said. "How someone found it, I don't know."

Ethel Martin is deceased, but Schultz said the post office wanted to get the card to a relative.

That's how the 93-year-old relic ended up with Bernice Martin, Ethel's sister-in-law. She said she believed the card had been found somewhere in Illinois.

Read the full story »

Cool Tool: VectorMagic

A few weeks ago, my co-worker DH sent me an IM "Have you seen this?" with the URL for Stanford's Vector Magic Online Bitmap to Vector Project. I was busy when he sent it and only just gave the site a quick visit, a bookmark and figured I'd visit again and blog it when I had more time.

Wow, this is an extremely cool tool! In a nutshell, The site converts bitmap images to vector art for you. It's an "online auto-tracer" built using Adobe's Flex2. To use it, just upload your image or photo, and the tool will create vectors for you. You can then save your vector art to EPS, SVG, or PNG format. You can use VectorMagic to process your image and then tweak the results as needed as well, this keeps all the heavy processing on their end, and you can focus on the fun stuff! Vectors are scalable because they are "geometric primitives" made-up of points, lines, curves and polygons — whereas raster graphics are a "map of pixels" (hence the name "Bit Map", or BMP). Vector files are also smaller in file size, and they can be scaled without a loss of quality. Find out more info on vector graphics on Wikipedia.

Here's an example of my first VectorMagic output. I took my avatar and ran it through their tool and got great results. Then I was able to play around with the SVG output to size my avatar as needed. I have the original Photoshop file so I can do that anyway, but this machine is getting old and slow, so it's nice to have a backup option. They also make it really easy to share your results to help spread the good word (you can play with my vectors made by VectorMagic, but my artwork is ©2006ptamaro so don't use it for your own purposes).

Also, if you don't have the original artwork in a vector format you won't be able to get good results if you need to change any of the elements, colors or size. In this case, you can vectorize the rastered artwork and then use the vectors to make the changes you need. Have fun, and let me know what you think of it!

    » Visit VectorMagic