Alan Kay, contemplating a object-oriented method to eating his Quintuple Beef Stacker McMileHigh with bacon, ham, fried chicken, onion rings, avocados, extra cheese and extra mayo.

The Assignment: I decided to hop on the bandwagon of other classmates that have been doing “Patty Pioneers” since Adam first submitted it as a DS106 assignment. He wrote the assignment instructions as follows:

Simply put, this assignment involves editing a picture of any Computer Pioneer so that it looks like they are eating/about to eat/holding a burger or similar types of fast food.

The Process/Story: I am quite familiar with Adobe Photoshop since, as I have mentioned before, I subtitle Detective Conan and use Photoshop in combination with After Effects to redraw and reanimate the Japanese signs in English. So this assignment was quite easy for me.

I started by deciding on a computer pioneer. I picked Alan Kay because when I was researching Alan Kay, I discovered that he was the pioneer of modern-day object-oriented programming, the process of taking what is normally a long list of functions of computer code and dividing them up into simpler chunks called methods that are not modifiable by the actual program, thereby avoiding bugs and crashes. Therefore, I came up with the idea of him puzzling how to divide an enormous burger into several smaller, simpler, and edible chunks.

Oh, and to me, his name also reminded me of the name of a food product maker, like the George Foreman grill.

Anyway I luckily found a picture that was perfectly suited to him thinking over how to workaround this problem simply by typing in “Alan Kay” in Google Images. Next, I typed in “gigantic hamburger” in Google Images, which gave me this image. To top off the fast food meal, I Google Image’d “McDonald’s french fries” and “McDonald’s soda” to find those two images.

Equipped with everything I needed, I started by expanding the canvas of my main image of Kay. I then moved to erasing the white background of the hamburger with Photoshop’s magic wand selection tool, inverted the selection and gave it a feather of 2 pixels to further erase the white around the edges, then pasted it into my main image. I proceeded to do the same for the fries and soda. For the fries, I needed to rotate and size them so that they would cover up the paper cup he has in the original image. After pasting the fries in, I simply right-clicked on the layer and used the “Free Transform” tool to rotate it and size it independently from the other layers until it fit.

To have his hand over the fries like he’s about to pick one up, I duplicated the layer of Kay, cut out only his hand, made it a layer mask, then moved that new layer over the others.

It was then that I thought “For added realism, why don’t I just cut all of Kay out, and make it look like he’s sitting in a McDonald’s?” So I went back to trusty Google Images, and found this by Googling “inside of McDonald’s”. I cut Alan Kay out the same way as the other images, threw in the McDonald’s background, and made that layer go under all the other ones.

Next, because I couldn’t find a good picture of a fast food joint’s table, I just drew one by making a filled rectangle, and gave it a drop shadow in the layer options. Next, I found a tray to place the burger on, cut it out like the others, used the clone brush tool to erase the other food that was already on the tray, then placed the tray under the burger.

To finish things off, I went around the edges of all the things I cut out with the Blur Brush tool to help the edges not look jaggy and out of place. Last but not least, I added some realistic-looking shadows using this tutorial because the normal Photoshop drop shadows look really artificial, cropped the excess off the image, and exported it to a PNG image.

This all took me about 45 minutes, not counting the time it took me to write up this description.

Now, considering I haven’t eaten since breakfast, I think I’ll go get something to eat.

Does anyone know where to get a burger like the one in the image?

The only downside of introducing the ds106 model to a large group of bright, curious and creative students is that the instructor will quickly become overwhelmed with a staggering level of awesome output. I’ve already spent one incredible all-niter reading student blogs and trying to leave coherent comments. I imagine there will be a few more before the semester ends. The funny thing is, I love it. I find myself energized and inspired by this class’s  enthusiasm and playfulness. I feel I need to redefine my personal ‘A – game’ standard upwards just to keep up with them.

Case in point is the suddenly spiraling out of control “Patty Pioneers” assignment. Adam started the ball rolling when he blogged a picture of Wendy’s Triple Baconator a week or so ago. I followed up with a photo of a poster of McDonald’s Grand Canyon Burger (only available in Japan).  Nick was the first to put food into the hands of a computing pioneer when he placed a slice of pizza in a photo of Alan Kay (which happened to have been taken by UWM ds106 instructor Alan Levine).

Back to Adam, he was inspired to do something with his Triple Baconator so he decided to put one in the hands of Doug Englebart. He then went on to write up and submit the assignment through the ds106 assignment submission form. Here’s how Adam describes the Patty Pioneers assignment:

Simply put, this assignment involves editing a picture of any Computer Pioneer so that it looks like they are eating/about to eat/holding a burger or similar types of fast food.

And then we’re off to the races. Marina worked a bit of word play as well as a cola and side order of fries  in to her stellar Weiner eating a wiener post.  I noticed Paul stuck around after class today to complete his beef-burger-homage to Ted “Mr. Xanadu” Nelson. Earlier, Paul had posted two clear and insightful blog entries on the man who coined the term  hypertext. But they’re not just photoshopping meals of the great minds here – something far more meaningful is going on.

Of course I love the playful nature of all of this. And it provides a great avenue to become more fluent with working with images and learning about image attribution and copyright issues. But the students here are also proudly displaying what they have learned about these different characters. They are sharing the findings of their investigations in a form that is informative, eye-catching and thought provoking. I’m not exactly sure how best to describe what seems to be happening. All I know is that I find it exhilarating and I’m grateful to be a part of it.

The idea of Sir Tim Berners-Lee being awarded a basket of fried chicken came when I couldn’t get the stack of pancakes image to properly fit the setting (the image of Sir Tim is from Academy of Achievement).

As the original image (from Bair’s Fried Chicken) of the basket had a white background, it was easy for me to select the white part with Gimp’s Fuzzy Select Tool, invert the selection and apply a layer mask to the selection. This turned the white portion  invisible so that only the basket remained. I had trouble when I tried re-resizing or moving the masked layer. The image and mask didn’t move or re-scale together. I discovered the Apply Layer Mask menu choice fixed the problem.

To get Berners-Lee’s hand to appear to be grabbing the basket, I selected his hand with the Free select tool and copied it on a new layer which was above the basket layer. A little bit of erasing made the base of the actual award he’d been given disappear.

As for why I selected Sir Tim for this assignment, the simple answer is that his is the first name that came to mind when I decided to do this assignment. I understand that he is credited with creating the World Wide Web. Somewhere in the recesses of my memory I seem to recall seeing his name in my early forays into web browsing in the early 90′s.  It struck me as a curious that the the earliest documents I found online all seemed to be coming from a nuclear research facility in Switzerland called CERN.

I vividly recall trying to convince friends and family that this internet thing was going to be huge. Few people I knew seemed to understand or care. The one exception was Uncle Calvin. For some reason or other, he has had repeated dealings with some of the CERN people over the years. I’ll try to share an account of some of Uncle Calvin’s affairs with CERN in a future audio recording.