Nothing much today.. chilling out..

Well today is 29th April liaoz.. my SL card (transportation for T-bana n bus) expires yesterday...

but i m not gonna buy the next mth's card today.. Planned to buy it on 2nd May, Monday so as to maximise my usage.. we have booked a flight to Barcelona on the 2nd June.. if i buy on the 2nd May, then my card will expire on 1st June.. see how lah.. must plan properly.. tomolo going to Uppsala, shld be jumping the barrier tomolo.. haha.. if kena caught, its a fine of 800kr, a SL card costs 600kr.. doing the mathematics, of course its much better to buy a card.. but aiyah i saw ppl jumping the barrier blatantly in front of the ticketing counter.. so.. see how lah.. haha

Not going out today since no SL card.. study, update blog n stone loh..

yep toking abt homework, i thot of my Image Processing class.. the lecturer mentioned smt abt this image that has been used in almost all Image Processing lectures, tutorials and txtbks in the world..

Lena Soderberg was the person in that picture.. She was last reported living in her native Sweden, happily married with three kids and a job with the state liquor monopoly. In 1988, she was interviewed by some Swedish computer related publication, and she was pleasantly amused by what had happened to her picture. That was the first she knew of the use of that picture in the computer business.

The interesting thing is that this picture actually comes from a full page centerfold in a November 1972 Playboy magazine..

The story of the image is as follows..
Alexander Sawchuk estimates that it was in June or July of 1973 when he, then an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the USC Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), along with a graduate student and the SIPI lab manager, was hurriedly searching the lab for a good image to scan for a colleague's conference paper. They had tired of their stock of usual test images, dull stuff dating back to television standards work in the early 1960s. They wanted something glossy to ensure good output dynamic range, and they wanted a human face. Just then, somebody happened to walk in with a recent issue of Playboy.
The engineers tore away the top third of the centerfold so they could wrap it around the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had outfitted with analog-to-digital converters (one each for the red, green, and blue channels) and a Hewlett Packard 2100 minicomputer. The Muirhead had a fixed resolution of 100 lines per inch and the engineers wanted a 512 x 512 image, so they limited the scan to the top 5.12 inches of the picture, effectively cropping it at the subject's shoulders.

For the full image.. haha WARNING!! There is nudity in this link...
Original Lena Image

yeah.. another thing i wanna say.. is yah abt Ryanair Tickets..
Ryanair is a top budget airline in Europe..
its air fares r pretty cheap but that is exclusive of tax.. the tax r usually more ex than the air fare.. to get cheap air fare, u have to book very early like more than 1 mth before... n the cheap air fare r usually to a limited number of places n usually flying from London where Ryanair HQ is at..

An example is that i booked an air ticket from Venice to London for our upcoming summer trip.. its stated 0.99 Euro but when the total tax and the credit card handling fee is included, it comes up to abt 22.58 Euro !!
From London to Stockholm, its stated 0.99 Pounds, but after tax, it became 16.59 pounds!!.. but its still quite cheap to fly at these prices...