John's movie

Back in September I posted a "Lance movie" made from photos of him set to music.  Now it's John's turn!



You may notice in this video a few photos that seem to be a part of a larger mosaic of photos of John.  Here is the full photo mosaic:

There are over 1000 photos here!

I'd recommend you download the photo mosaic and view it as large as you can on your screen to get the full effect.  Pretty cool!  I made both of these things using Picasa photo editing software, free at http://picasa.google.com/.

Enjoy!

GJS

Comparison

I've been wanting to get some photos of John and Lance side-by-side at about the same age for comparison's sake.  Picasa just made it really easy for me - it displayed these two pics right next to each other:

That's John on the left and Lance on the right.  I think both pics are taken when they are about one month old.  I know for sure the one on the right (Lance) is at one month, I just took it a few days ago.  As for John's pic (on the left), that's his Grandpa Sampson holding him while visiting us in Hawaii not long after his birth, probably about a month or so afterwards, but my memory of exactly when my folks came to visit us then is a little fuzzy.

Anyhow, it's fair to say there's some family resemblance here!  Discuss amongst yourselves...

GJS

Tokyo DisneySea

We had a good time at the DisneySea park today.  We were fortunate with the weather both days - relatively mild, and lots of sunshine today. (OK, I'll admit that it was a tad cold for my taste - looks like it started off in the upper 30s today and almost got to 50.) There seemed to be a lot of people at the park today, a lot more than we saw at Disneyland yesterday, but I would bet that it was a light day in terms of paid attendance at the park in comparison to when the weather is warmer and when school is not in session.  I couldn't help but run the numbers listed on Wikipedia talking about attendance at this DisneySea park, some 12.5 million guests in 2008.  That works out to almost 35,000 each and every day, assuming that the park is open 365 days a year. (I think I saw somewhere that it is closed sometimes, maybe a dozen or less days a year.) That's a lot of people to get in and out of the gate, on rides in an orderly fashion, fed, "restroomed," and basically entertained.  And the folks at Disney do a fine job of it.  I was impressed by the parks and the experience overall (although the prices for anything involved, from hotels to park admission to food, do not come close to being a bargain, not by a long shot).  

Here are today's pics (also on Picasa - please let me know if you are having trouble viewing these at all):

Tokyo DisneySea

John is holding up pretty well, still coughing some, but for the most part back to normal during the day.  Sometimes at night he is still having a little bit of a hard time.  I think soon he will be completely over his sickness.

Next few days will be general sightseeing around Tokyo - we are done with Disney.  One more day might have been nice, but I think the day and a half we had was enough for us.

GJS

Yesterday's pics - Tokyo Disneyland

John with his new friend

OK, I've discovered a work-around for my non-ability to access Flikr - it's Picasa, Google's photo sharing service.  In fact, all the photos I upload to the blog (for use for various posts, like the one above) are already there, but this is the first time I've actually used Picasa itself for uploading photos.  Why were the uploaded photos already on Picasa?  Well, it's quite simple - Blogger, the blogging service that I use for Garblog, is a Google entity, and so is Picasa.  They work together.  Flikr belongs to Yahoo, so it is not as compatible as two services that belong to the same giant company.

At any rate, here are the photos from yesterday:

Tokyo Disneyland

Yesterday we did Tokyo Disneyland and it was a lot of fun.  Today was the sister theme park, one that is unique in the Disney pantheon, called Tokyo DisneySea.  While the Disneyland park here is essentially the same as the one you can visit in Anaheim or Orlando, there is but one version of the DisneySea park, and you have to travel to Tokyo to see it.  Reportedly, it was the most expensive theme park ever built, and the fastest to reach 10 million visitors (just over 300 days).  I got this info about the parks from Wikipedia.

Today's pics to follow soon...I must be slipping, I took far less than 100 photos in a full day at the park! (yesterday was over 100 in half a day)

GJS