… Yes, I changed my background image two days in a row. I’m happy with this one, though, so I’ll be keeping it for a while.

If you’re curious to see what the original photograph was, it looked like this:

I basically took a larger version of that photograph, cropped it, adjusted the brightness and contrast, and applied a Gaussian blur.

Someone asked me about why I add a blur to my background photographs, and I told them that I would answer that in my next blog post, so here’s my response.

An easy example of why I do it is to look at any photograph with a low depth of field. If you take a look at those photos, you’ll notice that portions of it are blurry and portions of it are crisp. The (obvious) point of doing that is to draw attention to the sharper portion and have the blurry portions be con­sidered the background or anything that is not the main subject of the photograph.

By doing this on my website and making the entire background photograph blurry, I am drawing attention to the main content of my website, which would be the text and images embedded inside articles and blog posts. The blur encourages the eyes to concentrate on the crisp main content, but still gives some artistic and aesthetic value by adding color to the page.

A side effect of this is that it also makes the file size smaller. If you are unfamiliar with photography, you might not know yet that the blurrier an image is in .JPG form, the smaller it becomes. The smaller a file is, the faster it loads on the viewer’s computer. I understand that not everybody has blazing fast Internet, so I design my website such that it uses as little bandwidth as possible and loads as quickly as possible. Although this is not the main reason I use a blurred background, it is something that I like about using a blurred background.\

You might have noticed that the background image on my website has finally changed. (If it’s still the same for you, do a hard refresh, which is Ctrl+F5 on most browsers.)

For those of you who were wondering, the previous picture that I had as my background was a picture of Chicago taken by someone who offered his/her picture for public use. I chose to use that picture because at that time, I was still back at home in Illinois, and I wanted to have the background photo relevant to some aspect of my life.

I intended on changing the background picture to something Madison-related as soon as I arrived back in Madison, but I wasn’t able to find any good free public-use photographs of Madison. I ended up keeping the Chicago photo for a while until I finally got the motivation today to change it.

Now, it’s a picture of Bascom Hill and half of Bascom Hall.

That’s a photograph I took last year in mid-October. It’s not a very good photograph, but it’ll have to do for now. I’ll change it to a better photo if I ever remember to bring a high-quality camera around and end up running into a scenic view.

I am currently at the 2011 Wisconsin Facebook Hackathon.

http://twitter.com/Parkzer/status/117359944554123264

For those of you who don’t know, the Facebook Hackathon is an event hosted by Facebook staff members at various universities across the United States where they gather up local engineers and software developers to come program something new. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog for over one year, you might remember the video I made for the 2010 Facebook Hackathon. I’m back once again for the second annual hackathon.

If you don’t remember my video from last year, you can search for it on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Facebook+Hackathon+2010+Parkzer

This year, the event is going on from 5 PM until 5 AM. I haven’t really been taking many photos like I did last year, but I’ve been getting a lot of footage for a video that I should be done making sometime tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

Here are some photos that I’ve gotten so far:

Those are fortune cookies that we got after ordering Chinese food for dinner. That’s probably the great­est number of fortune cookies I’ve ever seen in one place at the same time.

That’s the sketch the table next to mine drew out on the dry-erase board to plan out their software. I don’t really know what any of it means, but it looked interesting and complicated so I took a picture of it.

I’m doing some of my own programming right now (for the Badger Herald, not for the competition; I’m not good enough at application development to be successful in the actual hackathon) and starting to map out a timeline for the final video that I’m going to make for this event. I’m probably going to make more than one video again like I did last year, and the first one should be done in a few hours or so.

Check back tomorrow for more updates from the Facebook Hackathon.

I got a surprisingly large amount of emails asking me what the solution was to the “challenge” I posted three days ago.

The only problem is that I don’t know, and I posted that as a joke more than I did as a real challenge. All I can tell you is that the pen is a Zebra brand, and that it works very well.

While on the topic of trying to figure out what used to be printed on old writing utensils, I have another one for you.

I can tell you that the top used to say “HIGHLIGHTER,” and that’s it. I have no idea what anything else used to say, so don’t contact me asking for the solution.

I’m slowly becoming shorter and shorter of time as my pile of coursework is getting higher and higher.

As you have probably guessed by now, this means less intensive blog posts and more time spent on fin­ishing homework and not failing.

But it’s okay.

The sun is still shining and the sky is still blue.

Quote of the Day

During lab yesterday, one of my zoology lab partners said after seeing a cut-open cnidaria:

“It sort of looks like a dumpling.”

I suggested that she eat it.

She refused.