Cave People Get Jobs
August 23rd, 2010, 6 Comments »
Another quick, odd photo post. I spotted this ad at a SkyTrain station. It seems to be irony-free, but that catchphrase is a little hard to believe:
A Really Big Satellite Photo of Port-au-Prince in Haiti After the Earthquake
January 14th, 2010, Comments Off
The good (if a little opportunistic) folks at GeoEye sent me a really big satellite photo taken yesterday of Port-au-Prince, shot after the tragic earthquake there. At full size, it’s 11, 445 pixels by 15,403 pixels and 47 MB–surely the largest photo I’ve ever uploaded to this site. You can view or download the full-size photo here (or here–this one might load faster).
Otherwise, click the image below and it will pop in a light-box. If you’re on a slowish connection, it’ll take a while, so click at your own risk:
The photo was apparently taken by a satellite from 423 miles in space at 10:27 am EST on January 13 as it moved from north to south over the Caribbean at a speed of four miles per second. The ground resolution is a half-meter.
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My Playoff Predictions
April 12th, 2009, 2 Comments »
I participated in a playoff pool draft tonight, so I had to map out my predictions of who would make it to the finals. As you might imagine, it’s as much about picking the teams as it is the players. A mediocre player who plays 22 post-season games is more valuable than a great player who only plays seven:
Yes, I think the Canucks will beat St. Louis and fall to Detroit in the second round.
Of course, these things are all about probabilities and mitigating risk. It’s likely that a dark horse will emerge and unpredictably make its well deep into the playoffs. But that’s difficult to guess correctly, so I went with likely outcomes and I’m hoping for the best. Here are the players I ended up with:
ZETTERBERG
MALKIN
SEMIN
M. GREEN
HAVLAT
CHARA
KRONWALL
RYDER
BURROWS
HOLMSTROM
GUERIN
GETZLAF
UPDATE: Had I known about Rinkology’s fancy bracket creator (thanks to James for the pointer), I would have used that yesterday instead of plain old pen and paper. Here’s a more legible edition (click for a larger version):
Prime Minister Demonstrates Worst Mexican Wave Ever
April 12th, 2009, 1 Comment »
I spotted this Reuters photo in the Globe and Mail last week. You can just hear our Prime Minister thinking, “now is when the humans raise their hands in successive groups. I, too, shall raise my hands, to cement the illusion that I am one of them.”
I was interested to learn that the origins of the wave are hotly debated.
UPDATE: I submitted this photo to Reddit, and was amused to read this (slightly paraphrased) exchange in the comments:
Redditer A: The lack of enthusiasm on his face makes this picture.
Redditer B: That is his enthusiastic face.
Joe Has a Malkovich Moment
April 26th, 2008, Comments Off
Conor snapped this photo of Joe (and Twittered about it) at Web 2.0 Expo. I think the resemblance is eerie:
Someone should notify the folks at Verizon.
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Spare Yourself 100 Days in Purgatory
November 30th, 2007, 2 Comments »
A couple of weeks ago, Julie went on a two-hour tour of the Gozo’s many religious niches–Catholic statues embedded in the facades of buildings. I was up for a one-hour tour, but that didn’t materialize, and I just couldn’t stomach two hours of historical niche study in a minivan full of British septuagenarians. Julie could, bless her, and took a number of lovely photos (she was also unknowingly photographed for the local paper). Here’s one:
That’s an inscription under this niche. A Maltese speaker can help with the translation, but I gather it says, in part, “say Hail Marys under this niche, and spare yourself a hundred days in purgatory”. I believe you can also roll again, unless you land on Park Place.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Abuse Stock Photography
October 20th, 2007, 7 Comments »
After signing up for the Sheraton’s Internet service, this was the ‘thanks for registering’ graphic they showed me:
Nothing says ‘go use the Internet’ like a guy smelling a cantaloupe.
ScanCafe: Scan Your Photos Negatives and Slides Cheaply
October 16th, 2007, 4 Comments »
I read about this last week in the newsletter, but it was such a compelling recommendation that I waited around for it appear on the excellent the Cool Tools blog. It’s a ringing endorsement from Kevin Kelly for a service that I could totally use–cheap and professional photo scanning. The company’s called ScanCafe, and here’s what Kevin thought:
The quality of scan is great for everything except huge billboard enlargements. The photos are scanned at 3000 dpi which gives a file about the quality of a 7 megapixel digital shot. You can scoop the final jpeg images into iPhoto or Flickr or Blurb books. They are rotated into correct up-down/sideways orientation by hand. They are clean and crisp. I have a Nikon scanner and these $0.19 scans are superior in quality.
When my Mom passed away, she left a couple of bulging boxes of photos and slides behind. At first I couldn’t stomach looking through them. Once I got over that, the task just seemed totally daunting. Considering that I can get 1000 photos for scanned for less than $300, this seems like the obvious solution. How long would it take me to manually scan and save 1000 photos?
Here’s a feature request for ScanCafe, and a great differentiator: build or buy some photo recognition software to add value in the scanning process. I send along a ‘primer’ of people photos, indicating who’s who in a few photos. They take my primer and use it to add metadata to the digital files they create, ensuring that every photo of my Aunt Lynn ‘knows’ who’s in the shot. This saves me the painstaking process of manually renaming or tagging each photo when they come back from the magic scanning factory in Bangalore.