Photo-chop contest submittal — Woot Contest 98: When Titans Woot!

I’ve always had both an artistic bent and a computer bent, so computer graphics have always been sort of a hobby of mine. I can remember writing programs to light up individual pixels on the green display of my Apple IIe computer when I was a teenager. I remember drawing out a Garfield cat onto graph paper first, then mapping out all the pixel X and Y locations on the graph paper to type into my computer program. Ahhhh, those were the good ole days. 🙂

I’ve been a Woot (woot.com, what is Woot) customer since May of 2006, buying cheap electronics here and there whenever I saw Woot offering something that I really needed. When I subscribed to the Woot RSS feeds (so I wouldn’t forget to check the daily sale) I noticed that they were holding weekly Photo-chopping contests there. And they were actually giving away monetary prizes too, or at least monetary credit for purchases on Woot! I’ve got a little bit of Photo-chopping experience, so I started keeping my eyes open for a contest theme that I would enjoy working on. Then Woot Contest 98 caught my eye.

The Challenge: Alter an existing comic-book cover so that it’s named after and features a product we’ve sold on Woot.

This was definitely down my alley. I searched the Woot blog for a product that would work good in a comic book cover. I saw the Navman portable GPS navigation system and immediately thought that I could turn either Spiderman or Superman into Navman.

Navman GPS.

Navman portable GPS navigation system

I searched the Internet for comic book covers of Spiderman or Superman. I found a good Superman source comic book cover here: http://www.tgfa.org/ … /Superman_349_Cover.jpg

Superman Comic Book Cover.

Source comic book cover

Then I started chopping! I used lots and lots of image layers to get all of my changes into the image. Layering also gives you lots of flexibility and allows you to fine tune things later without a lot of work. Here is my final contest submittal:

My contest submittal.

My contest submittal

Woot Contest 98 Results. I didn’t receive a monetary prize, but I was very honored to have won the “Champions’ Championship Champion” award. After inquiring what the heck that award was about, I was told that it is voted on solely by previous contest top 3 prize winners. So I’m actually quite honored to have received this nod and respect from the previous contest winners on my very first entry. That felt pretty good, and gave me the confidence to enter more contests. Also, my entry came in 5th in the Viewer’s Choice award, which was pretty cool!

Kurt

Safety tip: Nail gun accident!

Power nail guns are quite dangerous, and even though they have a pretty good safety trigger, they are not accident-proof. One of the many ways you can get shot with a nail gun is for the gun to be too close to the edge of the board that is triggering it and for the nail to miss the board completely.

Over the holidays, someone that I personally know (whom I’m not going to identify, because they’re embarrassed enough as it is) accidentally shot a 10d nail into their arm near the wrist. The nail hit the bone and it actually bent the nail a little bit. Thankfully, the bone was not chipped or hurt in any way and this person made a quick recovery with only a slight bruising of their pride.

Nail in arm.
Photo of nail lodged in arm.
This photo was taken by a cell phone camera
on the way to the emergency room.

X-Ray of nail in arm. X-Ray of nail in arm.
Photos of x-rays from hospital.
No bone damage was found.
So please be careful with power nailers. A good safety precaution is to never put any part of your body anywhere near inline with the shooting path of a nail gun. Not even if there’s construction lumber in between!
Kurt

I’m a lab rat in a motion sickness study

I recently volunteered to be a test subject in a NASA/KSC study on motion sickness. I call it the “spinning chair of death” study for fun, but it’s really not too bad. Today was my turn in the chair and it was actually a breeze and I never even felt queezy. I guess I’m not very prone to motion sickness because I can count on one hand the total number of times I’ve ever felt motion sick.

Here are some details of the study:

The chair is actually a racing seat mounted on a wooden box. The wooden box holds all kinds of electronic gear (biological sensors) and a laptop PC powered by a car battery and an inverter. The wooden box is connected to a gearbox and a motor that spins it at 15 RPM’s or about 4 seconds per revolution. It’s not real fast. The whole contraption is also tilted from vertical 15 degrees. It’s this tilt combined with the rotation that gives your inner ear a real workout and causes most people to get motion sick.

After my test is complete.
Photo of me in the chair after my test was
complete and all the sensors were removed.

After filling out about 5 pages of medical history paperwork, the doc weighed me and then put 2 sets of EKG pads on my chest and side. One set was for local recording on the laptop PC that spun around along with the chair, and the other set was for wirelessly transmitting across the room so that the doctor could track my health during the test and stop the test if things went south. Then they sat me in the racing chair and strapped me in fairly snugly. It’s a pretty comfortable chair.

Then they hooked a constant blood pressure cuff on my left middle finger. This little cuff measures your blood pressure every single time your heart beats. It’s pretty cool. It inflates just like the standard cuffs do, but it pressure pulsates with your heartbeat and somehow the thing uses an infared beam or something to look at your blood flowing in your finger. I really don’t know how the thing works, but it’s a cool little device.

The last thing they hooked up to me was even cooler than the constant blood pressure cuff. It was a doppler blood flow sensor that was mounted against my right temple on my forehead. It’s just like the sonogram device a doctor uses to find the heartbeat of a fetus in the womb. And it sounds exactly like that, because they turned the sound up when they were installing the thing. They put this little helmet thing on my forehead and tightened it down snugly. Then they played around with the position of the doppler sensor on my temple until they found just the right artery and just the right position on that artery. The doctors and technicians were all crowded around the laptop watching the realtime plot waves while the sensor was being positioned. This sensor was difficult for them to get just right, but when they got it, it was rock solid … even when I moved my head around.

Then the doc gave me final instructions on the hand signals that I would be using during the test. Every minute during the test, the doc would ask me to rate my motion sickness symptoms on a scale from 1 to 5. With 1 being no symptoms, to 5 being “I think I’m gonna be sick so stop the test right now!”. Then they started the test with a 5 minute waiting baseline. I breathed deeply and tried to relax for the baseline measurements. 5 minutes is a long time when you’re waiting for it to pass in silence. They wanted all subjects to perform the rotating part with their eyes closed, so I closed mine for the baseline also.

Then the rotation started. It was to last 15 minutes or until I felt sick. Every minute the doc asked me to hold up fingers for my symptoms. For the first couple of minutes I felt like I was moving exactly as I knew I was moving. During the rotation, my body and head were being forced by gravity forward, to one side, backward, and then to the other side.

But then my brain kind of switched things around and it didn’t feel like I was spinning anymore. My head and body were still being pushed forward, to one side, backward, and then to the other side, but my brain made me feel like this motion was because I was being translated around on an air table and always facing the same direction. Imagine your hand on a hockey puck on an air table or on an ice rink. Now move (translate) the puck around in a large circle without rotating the actual puck. This is what I felt like I was doing now and it didn’t feel bad at all. As a matter of fact, I probably could have fallen asleep doing this if given another 15 minutes or so. After a while it was actually soothing. If my brain hadn’t switched me from feeling like I was rotating to feeling like I was just translating, I don’t know if I’d have made it.

After the 15 minutes were up, I had given them 15 motion sickness symptom scores of 1 with my hand signals and had no symptoms at all anywhere. No dizziness or anything going on in my stomach. During the last cycle, the chair slowed down and then finally stopped in the same position it started in. When it finally stopped completely, I felt my brain for just a couple of seconds continue to want to rotate and I’ll bet my head even twitched a couple of times towards the direction of rotation. But that passed after just a couple seconds and then I felt perfectly normal. They had another 5 minute period of waiting and then the test was complete.

The test was fun and I would do it again if given the opportunity. If I wasn’t having so much fun in my current organization, this department would actually be a pretty cool place to work. My buddy Dave works in this department and actually built the “rotating chair of death” and put together all the electronics that go with it.
Kurt

Mission style wall hanging mail holder

This was another case of seeing a product in a mail-order catalog and saying to myself, “I could make that, and it would cost me way less than 40 bucks!”

.01-mailholder.JPG .02-mailholder.JPG

I don’t really have a lot of details to talk about here. I saw this product, probably in an expensive Pottery Barn catalog or something. It was not a big deal to make. I just cut some boards to size, made rabbit joints and finish nailed them together. I put lots of coats of dark stain on it to get it as dark as I wanted it. I wish I would have made it about an inch wider, though. When we put magazines in it, they get rolled up at the bottom corner because the slot width gets skinnier at the bottom.



Thanks for visiting,
Kurt & Sam Leucht
Titusville, FL
http://www.leucht.com/
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