I was waiting to write today until the canvas wraps I ordered from Canvas On Demand had arrived. I have always wanted to do a canvas wrap of a picture, but never really knew which one to do.

As it turns out, we are decorating one room of our house in a ski theme, and the two pictures here seemed perfect for it. So last week I sent the pics off to Canvas On Demand and waited anxiously. Once I got the shipping notice on Tuesday, I knew they would arrive today.

They come packed very well so nothing gets damaged in transit. Standard shipping is via FedEx ground, but you can pay more to expedite it. The quality of these images is superb. After having these two made, you can be sure I will be doing more. Maybe some small 8×10’s of my flower macros. I could even add a water-color treatment in Photoshop first before I send the file in. I’ll bet those would look really sharp. I am glad I bit the bullet and did this. You should try it too!

I am lucky in that my travels sometimes take me to some very cool places and I get to see or do things I have never done before. Such was the case at the recent Governor’s 2008 Colorado Tourism Conference in Beaver Creek, Colorado. Besides being in the mountains for all of the great fall colors, I came across this car near the ice rink in the main plaza at Bachelor Gulch.

It is a Volvo XC90 that has been completely covered in Lego. I tried searching for it on Google to learn more (there were no placards or anything else to explain why it was there), but all I came up with were references to a blue one. As you can quite clearly see, this is not the blue one that kept coming up in my Google searches.

Here are more photos of the red Lego Volvo. And in case you were wondering, yes, it is a real car underneath - I got down on the ground to take a look.

Arrived in Phoenix and drove to Tucson to see a few things. This is the underside of the Kitt Peak Solar Telescope.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft Photosynth hit the Net. A few of the blogs I follow talked about it, and it looked interesting. I had some time during my conference in Phoenix, so I made a “synth” of my room at the Westin Kierland Resort in Scottsdale, AZ. I downloaded the PDF synth guide with instructions for making a new synth, and set about shooting the room. I wound up with 78 photos.

I shot them in RAW, so I exported them from Lightroom 2 and then started the upload process. This is where my frustration started. It took over 4 hours to upload those pictures. Luckily I had other things to do, like go to the pool and then a dinner engagement, so I left to do that.

When I came back after dinner, the little green box said it was done, and that my photos were “58% synthy”. Whatever that means. I proceeded to load the synth, and was not pleased with the results. For whatever reason, I had expected this to work like other synths I had seen, that acted like a virtual walk-through. I took pictures of the room, the balcony, and the bathroom. I took “approach” photos that I thought my be what synth needed to construct the next scene in the walkthrough. It didn’t do any of this.

You are probably asking why I did all this, and expected a result other than what I achieved. Fair enough. It’s because the PDF instruction set didn’t have specific directions for how to do this. In the absence of those directions, I made an assumption. I wonder how many other people are experiencing this.

Oh well. I don’t really see an application for this anyway. You have to download software to even view these things. When you consider that Flash is on 99% of computers out there, it makes more sense to do virtual tour types of things in Flash than this thing. It’s a solution without a problem.