Coyote Blog

I usually create our Christmas card each year in Photoshop.  Here is this year's effort.  Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and have a great 2008.

No blogging, just lots of overstimulated children.  Be back soon.

...not

Today Dec 23 Mostly Sunny 77°/46° 0%			77°F Check Your Local Event Forecast
Sat Dec 24 Sunny 76°/45° 0%			76°F
Sun Dec 25 Partly Cloudy 78°/45° 20%			78°F

Merry Christmas from Paradise Valley and the Coyote Clan!  Every year for our Christmas card, we try to do something unique.  We always end up with a homemade card that costs 10x more than a nice store-bought one.  This year was no exception, burning through any number of expensive HP ink cartridges.  I used a neat free program called Andrea Mosaic that creates a photo mosaic of any picture you choose using a folder full of secondary pictures used as the tiles.  This is a very easy project with the free software and I have found it a sure-fire way to impress people.  Nothing a geek loves more than the reaction of "How did you do that?"

Also, I think I set the record for most pictures of my kids included in a single Christmas card, with something like 300 in this mosaic.
Update: Actually, I see that this is an older version, since I can see side-by-side picture repeats in the mosaic and in a later version I learned to make the program not do this, but you get the idea.

Merry Christmas, and I hope everyone is having a happy version of whatever holiday they celebrate. 

Around our house, I am always the tech support guy, fixing issues ranging from computers to hitting all the right buttons on the home theater.  Because my wife has a Mac and I and my kids use a PC, just trying to keep everyone playing nice over the home network is hard enough (god, this is starting to sound like a Chaos Manner column).  Usually, this duty is spread pretty evenly through the year, but on Christmas day, our household has an influx of technology that often needs support.

Yesterday was no exception.  First, with the arrival of yet another new mini iPod, this one for my son, a new user partition had to be created on my wife's Mac.  Later in the day I was back on the Mac, helping my son when iTunes inevitable Christmas Day server overload caused him to have a few songs disappear on him during download.  In between, I was on the PC helping my daughter with Zoo Tycoon 2, given to her because Santa knows that she loved the first version. 

Finally, towards the end of the day, I was helping my son with his Star Wars Battlefront game install.  Unfortunately, the install code on the back of the CD box did not work, so with my son panicking when I told him he would have to wait 2 WHOLE DAYS for the the tech support people to come into the office, I swallowed my scruples and went to one of the pirate sites that publish registration codes for games and successfully used one of those to get the game started.  Unfortunately, those sites slam you with pirate-ware, so first I had to fire up my backup computer I use for such grossly unsafe surfing.

Whew.  I can relax now, everything is up and running.  Imagine my relief this morning when my kids wanted to play something low tech - Yahtzee.