New baby Frederickson - 20 weeks along!

Susie and I have been enjoying our pregnancy immensely. Susie has been very comfortable and we've both been feeling the baby kick a lot.  Only very recently has Susie experienced any discomfort and it's very minor.

Today Susie and I had our 20 week ultrasound.  The baby was very active and the radiologist says that everything looks great.  We did not find out the sex of the baby, so it'll be a great little surprise. :)

I've attached the pictures we had taken during the ultrasound.

Colt

New baby Frederickson is coming!

Yesterday Susie had another ultrasound and since we're past the magical "10 week mark" it's time to announce to the world that we're going to have a baby sometime around December 2.  We are so excited that it's been hard to keep it a secret for so long!

Ultrasound at around 10 weeks.

It was such an amazing experience watching our little one move around in there.  It's crazy how much you can see on ultrasounds these days.  We got to see the baby's fingers and toes as well as see that little heart beating away.  I need to start a betting pool on the sex of the baby, but that will come in due time. 

--Colt

Visualization Project and Google Maps

This semester I've been tasked with finding a reasonable project for my advanced graphics course.  A small part of me wanted to use a basic physics engine, get some nice graphics and make my own version of angry birds or something, but I decided I'd go with something else.  Maybe something to do with the social world...

I switched my plan to a visualization of individual tweets on top of something like Nasa World Wind, but as I began to investigate it, I found it very useless. A visualization of an individual tweet isn't nearly as cool as a visualization of many tweets over time, which brought me to my final idea (with the help of Tim)...

I think I'm going to do a visualization of twitter geographical data on top of google maps (or google earth).  This way I'm aggregating the data before showing it to the user, which should be much easier to understand.  My plan is as follows:

1. Divide the map up into a grid.  For starters I will just do this on a single major city.
2. At different zoom levels the data will be regrouped.  This way when a user is looking at the entire city it should show them a set of grids and as they zoom, the grids will become more detailed.
3. Provide (in tooltips or based on click events) details about the data in the grid they're selecting.
4. Provide some kind of coloring of each grid so that a user can tell where the most tweets are coming from.
5. Weight the tweets based on how old they are (e.g. a tweet from yesterday doesn't influence the coloring as much as a tweet from today).

This should provide an aggregation of data that shows where the most geo-coded tweets come from.  The plan is to architect this in a way that if it works well that I could expand my search to include a larger area.

--Colt