My Awesome Sis

Yesterday was my dear sister's birthday. I spent all day trying to come up with some creative way to pay my respects to her on the blog besides just waxing eloquent about all her wonderful qualities and incredible accomplishments. I failed.

But I had an idea this morning--I thought I would take a photo of her and make it into a photo mosaic using smaller pictures of things that represent Olivia. Brilliant, right?

Well, there were problems. I decided to start with a test image and see how it went. I entered the search terms "dogs, bees, flower, skiing" using Google as the image source. The software I use kept telling me there were 0 images that matched any those search terms. Ha. I doubt it. After fighting with that for about an hour, I gave up and tried using Flickr as the image source with the same search terms. Lo and behold, it worked! And worked. And worked. And worked....about 5 hours later I have a mosaic of Olivia from images that have dogs, bees, flowers, and skiing.

Now, ideally I would go back and do another one with a more well-rounded representation of my beautifully complex sister. But because I want to post this before she turns another year older, I'm going to cheat. Instead I'll give you a list of the images that I would have liked to use and then let you look at the image with just dogs, bees, flowers, and skiing.

Olivia's images:

1. (Dogs, bees, flowers, and skiing)
2. Mountains
3. Jeeps
4. Tiny dirt trails
5. Cameras
6. Gourmet food
7. Taco Bell
8. Sunshine
9. Rivers
10. Canyons
11. Books
12. Hammocks
13. Bug net
14. Classroom
15. Coffee
16. Deserts
17. Tents
18. Travel Guides
19. Dennis
20. Birds



Happy birthday a day late to my wonderful and amazing sister!

P.S. Something interesting you may notice if you look closely at the mosaic above (although I don't think the resolution is good enough): there are random images of people's faces in there. Why were they included? My only guess is that they are ex-boyfriends that their ex-girlfriends tagged as "dogs" on Flickr. Also, there are pictures of cats. I guess some people don't know the difference between a dog and a cat? And apparently there are very few bee pictures on Flickr. We should work on that.