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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For reasons which will become clear, I need a photo of a particular Vancouver hot dog stand. It’s the one on the south-east corner (that’d be in front of the London Drugs) of the Georgia-Granville intersection.
I’m not picky about what the photo looks like–be as creative or artful as you like. However, if there happens to be a young woman sitting against a streetlight pole right beside the hot dog stand, please include her in the shot. And try the turkey smokie, it rocks.
I figure somebody’s walking past that corner in the next few days, and might have their camera with them. I’d really appreciate your help if that’s you. Drop me an email if you’re such a person.
I could do it myself next week, but I’m not bringing our camera to Vancouver, so it’ll mean borrowing one and so forth. Plus, sooner is better. Anyhow, if anybody can accommodate my odd request, there’s link-love and good karma in it for you. I may even buy you a hot dog.
I’ll explain why I need this photo in a couple of weeks.
UPDATE: Thanks very much to Andrew for procuring an excellent photo of the aforementioned hot dog stand.
How would you do it?
We’re planning on running one for a client, and we’re thinking of just hosting the thing in a Flickr group. Contestants will add photos to the group to enter the contest.
We were thinking that we’d enable the community to choose the finalists and then have our client pick the winner. I was thinking that we could select the five or ten finalists based on the number of times a photo had been ‘favourited’ (Flickr users can ‘favourite’ photos to give a photo a sort of thumbs-up, and to bookmark it on their Favourites page).
Do you see any flaws in that plan? Here’s one. Users will have to either take new photos, or upload old ones again, because existing Flickr photos may already have accrued some favourites. Do you think that’s a problem?
Flickr does track when people favourite a photo (here’s an example). However, that’s a lot of manual pain on our end in counting the number of favourites during the period of the contest. And it could be confusing for other users if a photo newly added to the group has, like, 15 favourites.
I thought I’d crowd-source this problem to see if anybody had another idea. I’ve also posted to the Flickr forum to see what they think over there.
One of our clients is a global warming blog. We do sundry online marketing activities for them, and we’re planning an online photography contest on the site.
We’re looking for a kick-ass prize for the winning submission. We’re exploring some options, but I figured I’d post here and see if anybody had something to offer. Ideally the prize would:
- Be worth at least CAN $500. It can be cash, but it doesn’t have to be.
- Appeal to a broad audience. Or at least to your average Flickr user.
- Not be geography-specific.
- Not be from a company who’s trying to greenwash their organization. ExxonMobil need not apply.
Benefits to the donor company include:
- Associating your company with a particularly popular cause
- Brand exposure to all those tasty online influencer types
- Link love from the photo contest site, and possibly from sites that link to the contest
- Sweet, sweet karma
If you are, belong to or know of such a company, feel free to drop me a line.
I had no idea what that meant until I read Doc’s post this morning. As it turns out, I was a little late:
