sacha chua living an awesome life

The stereotype of an entrepreneur is someone who obsesses about business at all hours of the day. It’s good for me to be able to relax and enjoy hobbies, though. It preserves that feeling of an abundance of time, which makes it easier and less stressful to make good decisions and to keep my values in mind. Hobbies also give me a way to refresh myself.

This is a picture I took at sunset in High Park. I like the muted colours and the blurriness of the sun just visible through the trees in the distance.

Many houses are slated for demolition along Bloor Street, to be replaced by a tall condominium building that spans the entire block. I took the picture on the left because the hole in the window looked like a cat sitting on the sill and looking out, as cats often do. On the right, you can see a tree fort behind the construction fence.

Ah, cats. =)

Not much in the garden to take pictures of yet, but maybe the seeds I planted will germinate soon. This year, we’re looking forward to growing more bitter melons (ampalaya), basil, snow peas, lettuce, spinach, blueberries, and nasturtiums. (Edible gardens for the win!)

It’s a quiet weekend, my favourite kind.

Inspired by my sister’s photo-assisted organization of her shoes, I decided to tackle my wardrobe. Taking an inventory would make it easier to simplify, replace, or supplement my clothes. Analyzing colour would help me substitute mathematics for a sense of style. Combining the images with the clothes log I’ve been keeping would make it easier to see patterns and maybe do some interesting visualizations. Geek time!

I took pictures of all my clothes against a convenient white wall. I corrected the images using Bibble 5 Pro and renamed the files to match my clothes-tracking database, creating new records as needed. AutoHotkey and Colorette made the task of choosing representative colours much less tedious than it would’ve been otherwise. After I created a spreadsheet of IDs, representative colours, and tags, I imported the data into my Rails-based personal dashboard, programming in new functionality along the way. (Emacs keyboard macros + Rails console = quick and easy data munging.) I used Acts as Taggable On for additional structure.

It turns out that the math for complementary and triadic colour schemes is easy when you convert RGB to HSL (hue, saturation, lightness). I used the Color gem for my RGB-HSL conversions, then calculated the complementary and triadic colours by adding or subtracting degrees as needed (180 for complementary, +/- 120 for triadic).

Here’s what the detailed view looks like now:

And the clothing log:

Clothing summary, sorted by frequency (30 days of data as of writing)

Thoughts:

• White balance and exposure are a little off in some shots. I tweaked some representative colours to account for that. It would be neat to get that all sorted out, and maybe drop out the background too. It’s fine the way it is. =)
• Matches are suggested based on tags, and are not yet sorted by colour. Sorting by colour or some kind of relevance factor would be extra cool.
• Sorting by hue can be tricky. Maybe there’s a better way to do this…
• My colour combinations don’t quite agree with other color scheme calculators I’ve tried. They’re in the right neighbourhood, at least. Rounding errors?
• I’ll keep an eye out for accessories that match triadic colours for the clothes I most frequently wear.
• Quick stats: 28 casual tops, 15 skirts, 12 office-type tops, 8 pairs of pants, 5 pairs of slacks – yes, there’s definitely room to trim. It would be interesting to visualize this further. Graph theory can help me figure out if there are clothing combinations that will help me simplify my wardrobe, and it might be fun to plot colours and perhaps usage. Hmm…

Other resources:

• Academichic: Fashion 101: How to combine colours: complementary colors and the two-thirds rule
• Work with Color

Not entirely traditional, but this IKEA jug makes an adequate tsokolatera.

Someday, I’m going to learn how to make tsokolate eh…

We picked up some lamps from Home Depot and used them to light a sheet of plexiglass. Here are the results of my experiments:

Hats

As part of Scott Kelby’s Worldwide Photowalk, W- and I joined more than three dozen photographers in the High Park photowalk led by David Allen. I was really glad I’d worn comfortable shoes and brought along a walking stick/monopod! I had a great time shooting with our new Sigma 150mm f/2.8 macro lens, and I’m looking forward to reviewing the pictures tomorrow.

The cats very obligingly sat for a portrait session:

From Cats

From Cats

No treats needed!