I found a site the other day which allows you to “tilt-shift” any photo. For those of you unfamiliar with tilt-shifting, it’s a photo manipulation technique which basically blurs the foreground and background of your photo and results in a “miniaturization” effect. It only really works on landscape type photos, but the effect is pretty nifty. For example, the picture below was taken from the the ski lift at Park City earlier this summer:

You can see the original picture here for comparison. And if you’d like to try this out on your own photos, you can visit the tiltshiftmaker here. Or if you’d just like to view all the crazy pictures other people have made, you can check out the flickr group here (beware that some of the pictures in that gallery didn’t work out so well).

The past few days have been a bit rough on the twins (and Emily). On Monday Jack was puking most of the day and you could tell he felt pretty crappy. And now today Emily and Annie are both feeling pretty rotten. I think I may also be coming down with whatever it is and as I sit here thinking how crappy it is to feel crappy, I can’t help but think how it must suck 100 times worse when you have no idea why you feel bad and you have no way of expressing how you feel. It’s never good for anyone to feel sick, but I feel extra bad for the twins cause they have no idea what’s going on and they can’t really explain what they’re feeling. You can tell it’s a bit scary for them any time they throw up. They get a scared/confused look on their face like “Help me! My insides are falling out!”. I just hope we all get over it soon cause being sick blows.

Let me preface this one with the fact that I’ve seen WALL-E multiple times over the last few days. It was our Netflix movie last week and as such, was viewed far more than it might normally have been.

Anyway, the other night I was having a strange dream regarding the seemingly endless supply of energy that the Axiom ship (that’s the human “life raft” ship in the movie) seemed to have. As I dreamt, I recall wondering how, after 700 years, the ship was still able to power all the lights and billboards and robots and other electrically powered items on the ship. Keep in mind I was dreaming so the possibility of some alternate source of energy didn’t really enter my mind. I was thinking strictly in terms of energy storage circa 2009 so my mind was boggled while trying to figure out how they hadn’t run out of energy yet.

I pause for a moment here to acknowledge that to this point, there really wasn’t anything interesting about this dream. It might be an odd subject for a dream, but I’m sure many of you have had stranger dreams. However, the thing I found interesting about this particular dream is how it seemed to be a result of my physical situation at the time. I’m sure many of you have experienced something similar when you can’t seem to stop dreaming about water and then when you’re forced awake, you realize that you’ve never had to pee so badly in your life. Same sort of thing here.

As most of you probably know, I have a little ailment called Diabetes. One result of the medications that I take to control this ailment is that I occasionally experience the effects of hypoglycemia which is basically what happens when the sugar content in your blood gets too low. Basically, without a high enough content of sugar, your body literally runs out of gas and it results in weird side effects like shaking, sweating and loss of concentration. So to tie this back to where I started, as I lay there dreaming about power consumption in a fictional space and as I wondered how power could be maintained for 700 years without a recharge, it happened that I was at the time experiencing the effects of hypoglycemia. Luckily this condition tends to wake me from sleep (which, if any of you know how heavy a sleeper I am, you may find this rather miraculous). As soon as I woke up, I started to put the pieces together. As I rushed into the kitchen to shove anything I could find into my face I was a tad amused at how the brain works. I couldn’t help but find it amazing that as I lay there sleeping, my brain was still interpreting input from it’s surroundings and trying to put that information into some sort of context that made sense. I was literally running out of juice and my brain subconsciously turned that into an apparent need for a quick recharge via my hideaway solar panel.

It’s things like this that make me wonder about our true capacity for knowledge and learning. Brains are amazing things and it’s my opinion that they can do so much more than we can even comprehend presently. Guess we’ll just have to wait for that next sphere of existence to learn all the secrets. Until then, I should probably investigate some way to rig up a personal limitless energy supply so I can survive the next 700 years in space… or something like that.

I’ve been a bit lax about posting lately so prepare for a bit of a posting barrage.

There’s not much content in this post other than a couple pictures of the babies sleeping. I just like how peaceful (and silly) they look while sleeping.

- Originally typed at 5:51am on Nov 24th -

Either way, it’s probably the greatest idea EVAR!!! (Yes, I meant to spell it that way, please refer to my post from Oct 22nd, 2007 for details.)

Anyway, I woke up from a dream this morning at 5:51am in what can only be described as “a moment of genius”. Emily and the babies probably wouldn’t agree because I woke them up as well as I scurried to the computer and began furiously typing in order to get it all down before it fluttered back to the land of dreams, but I’ll let you judge for yourselves. I won’t go into the details or the scenario around which the dream was centered (let your imaginations run wild), but here it is…

Conan O’Brien circa 1979.

I googled it and found no results that matched my idea so I can only assume my brain concocted it during REM sleep, but the brilliance of the idea makes it hard to believe that it could have come from my own brain. Some of the details of the dream wouldn’t have really worked so I guess that adds fuel to the dream argument, but in the dream Conan announced that they would be doing a whole seasons worth of shows from 1979. He announced that due to some crazy snafu, all of the Late Night shows from 1979 had mysteriously vanished and were no longer in the archives (yes, I’m aware he wasn’t on the air then). There was some contest or another in the dream, but basically they would be doing an entire season of shows as if the year was 1979. The theme would include retrofitting the set and making sure that all costumes were chronologically correct (guests included). All musical guests would also have to conform to the time shift and Max and the band would cover all sorts of hits from the 70′s during commercial breaks.

- Typed this evening -

It’s been a week or so since I first had the dream and the idea doesn’t seem nearly as amazing as it was after being startled awake at 6am, but I still think it would be a clever running gag for a few shows. And if there’s anyone that could pull it off, it’s Conan (or maybe Craig Ferguson). Anyway, Conan, if you’re interested, feel free to use the idea but please give me some sort of acknowledgment in the credits. Or you could fly me out to be a stupid extra for an episode. Regardless, I’d love to see the end result put into practice. It’s just too bad I’m not a comedic writer for Conan’s show or maybe I could show you all what a great dream it was.