Post-It Art: Ms. Pacman

It started when I tried to accomplish something in a software 3 times in a row and failed. Out of frustration I went looking for a creative outlet.

Earlier on I had purchased some small square Post-It notes, so I thought maybe I can add to the wall that already has a giant thumbs up sign on it with some more Post-It art.

I did Ms. Pacman first.  I had a limited supply of colors and my initial idea of doing the Mario 1-Up Mushroom wasn't going to work since I had no black squares to work with.

One of my colleagues colored a white square in with a black sharpie to create the single black mole for Ms. Pacman.

After lunch and some meetings, I came up against another road block, so I went back to the wall and added the blue ghost and cherry with the little "white" dots.

White wasn't going to show up on the white wall so green was used instead. I also originally did the blue ghost when it's in "edible" mode, but it was a bit small and the resolution wasn't fine enough to reveal the squiggle of its mouth.

At the end of the day, I went back and replaced the blue ghost with a "normal" one that is bigger in dimension, so I could have the resolution I needed to give it a proper shape and also proper eyes.

With this version, I didn't need the mouth, which worked much better. Using the same technique as earlier, a colleague helped me color in a few white squares as black for the eyes.

Connecting the dots (literally) with the original thumbs up on the wall, that was done by my colleague many weeks before.

Finally, another colleague mentioned it might make sense for the ghost to be looking back at Ms. Pacman. I agreed and we went about moving the eyes so it looked to the upper left instead of the bottom right.  A master piece in 8-bit pixels, if I may say so myself. :)

3D Puzzle - Pearl of the Orient

I had a chance to put together the 3D puzzle of Shanghai's Oriental Pearl Tower this afternoon. The box said 180 min or so, and I finished in about 2 hours.

I wonder if the puzzle designers modeled the building first, and then found a way to "flatten" it into puzzle shapes, or if they actually thought in terms of these construction pieces to begin with and figured out a way for all of them to fit together to look like the final product.

It's very intricate, and I can't imagine someone designing this without some sort of CAD program.

Now that I work in the 3D modeling industry, I can't help but wonder if the process of making these puzzles are similar to that of our customers who does design for sheet metal, where a part gets flattened into metal sheets that gets bent into the final product.

Turkey Mum

Sometimes you'd be surprised at what you can find in the local grocery store. I was out running errands the weekend before Turkey Day and had some time to kill before my evening plans, and decided the best use of that time was to go to the grocery store. There wasn't anything on my shopping list, cause I had just gone the day before to Trader Joe's. So I already knew I would be overspending cause I was "looking" for groceries to buy.

I got some hummus, taco seasoning mix, sponges, etc. Nothing all that exciting. But walking past the floral section I noticed some really cute flower arrangements. I thought about buying some for the big Turkey Day dinner, but thought bringing pie is probably more than enough. So I kept walking.

Then I saw the most creative thing - a mum, dolled up to look like a turkey with pipe cleaners. I couldn't resist and sifted through to find the most "turkey looking" one and brought it home.

They did a pretty good job. The picture doesn't show it well enough, but there are gold sparkles on the mum itself. The eyes are just lop-sided enough to make the turkey look dopey, especially when it leans the same direction as the thing that hangs from its neck (which I just learned is called a wattle). It fits the color scheme of my kitchen so there it sat to accompany us at dinner and any other time we're at the table (which is almost all the time).

It's totally an impulse buy and way overpriced for a single mum. But the entertainment value is well worth it, cause it's still going strong.