Celebrating one year...

Yes, folks, it has been one year since Elijah arrived!!!

Popular adoption terms include "gotcha day" or "arrival day".  I don't like either.  I prefer just "homecoming day".   I've assembled a slideshow utilizing one of the latest features of Google Picasa - "Face Movie".

It took me a lot longer to finish this slide show than I would have liked (what doesn't, after all?).  As Voltaire said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good".  Nonetheless, "Face Movie" is not quite a perfect feature for Picasa -- a piece of software I generally LOVE (it is one of the reasons I switched back to PC from Mac!).

You'll see the movie is organized based on the best available facial transitions.  Unfortunately, there is no option to make the video chronological: it would have been very cool to show Elijah's progression over the past 20 or so months.  Instead, the video jumps all over (although it looks great doing it).  This is really the triumph of style over substance.

I had another problem that I cannot blame on Picasa: my song selection - Chances by Five for Fighting - was incorrectly identified by Picasa as being 6:48 (instead of 3:35).  This resulted in Picasa generating a 7-minute long video with no music for the second half!  Out of frustration, I substituted "Secret Love" by Jim Brickman.  This track features nice instrumental piano, but not the "oomph" I was looking for.  It turned out the metadata within the Chances MP3 (purchased from Amazon.com) was somehow flawed.  I ended up buying a second copy of the song from iTunes, burning it to CD and re-ripping it to MP3.  Ouch!

So, "Take 1" of the Homecoming slideshow -- featuring the Jim Brickman track -- is featured here:

Nonetheless, Picasa Face Movie produces a high quality result with minimal work (even rendering in high quality 1080p video).

Happy Anniversary to my wonderful little boy!

Enjoy!