Picasa

Brandon recently convinced me to use Picasa, a Google program, to organize and manage my pictures.  I am still learning the ins and outs of the program - but one neat (creepy?) feature is "face tagging."  Picasa automatically scans all the pictures you import for faces, and labels them for easy sorting.  You have to "train" the program by manually labeling some names at first.  But once it gets a database of photos for "Becca Alleman," for example, it begins to automatically label the pictures as you import them.  Sometimes the program has to guess, and you have to confirm or reject a label.  It is interesting to see how well the computer does at differentiating faces.  It did have difficulty distinguishing baby pictures of my nephews - but it does surprisingly well with twins!  Oh, technology.

Anyway, as I was going through some of the tags that needed confirmation, I came across pictures from many different phases of my life that made me chuckle.

Game Night Olympics, senior year at Hope (brought to you by Sarah and Mandy) - to cap off two years of weekly Thursday night shenanigans:

Our fabulous hosts; Marshmellow shooting - obviously;
The break-the-egg-with-a-dead-fish-(or bag of flour, in our case) Game; Cheetos fling. 

1. There were MANY goofy pictures with this girl from my high school days.

2. Cousins - born within three months of each other; inseparable growing up!  Taken at Katie's wedding back in 2003.

3.  The Mighty Mississippi :)  I heard the houseboat went in this week, and it made me think of this fun weekend with our new (at the time) Iowa City friends.  Now all the children in the picture complicate plans for relaxing river weekends.

4. I snapped this self portrait in India to document (I think) how long my hair was (probably the longest its ever been!).  Either that, or to work on my model face.  What do you think, Mandy - am I "smizing"??