french turkeys

not so large, it seems

So this morning, I went turkey hunting. Not turkey hunting in the usualy sense of the work hunting. Instead of creeping about on foot, I took my bike. Rather than moving steathily from copse to copse, I wore a bright orange fleece sweather as I moved from boucherie to boucherie. Actually, I only found two, so it didn't actually take that long.

Anyhow, the French tend to only order turkeys around the french holidays. Strange, but anyways, it makes it difficult to find turkeys for Canadian thanksgiving. Eventually (read: at the second boucherie) I was told that they might be able to get turkeys, but that they wouldn't me any larger than 4 kg. 4 kg!! That's 9 pounds! A capon turkey, if you will. When I asked for a 10-15 kg turkey, the dude laughed and said they didn't exist. grrrr.....

Sigh...

France: where everything is smaller.

(p.s. boucherie = meat shop. Think European Meats in Kensington)

stupid and mean

dangerous combination

As part of our introduction to seismology course, we will be giving informal seminars on famous historical earthquakes (San Francisco 1906, Sumantra, etc...), or the seismology of a particular region, all in an effort to give us some background on the subject.

Yesterday, at the beginning of class, three brave souls volunteered to give to inaugural presentation. However, by the end of the class, two of them remembered that they didn't have internet and at the thought of doing research at an internet cafe, their bravery failed them, and so the prof decided to ask for volunteers who had internet access.

Those of you who know me (which is probably everyone who reads this) will know that paying careful attention to everything that goes on in class is not my forte. When I heard that a volunteer with internet was required, I assumed it was because my classmates were having trouble downloading the course materials. So fools leap in and all that, and I stuck my hand up and told everyone that they could come by my room with a USB key and I would happily give them the files. I suspect the prof was a bit puzzled by my response, since it had nothing to do with what he was actually asking, but he wasn't about to let an internet-enabled volunteer slip through his hands.

And so, it dawned on me that I had just volunteered, not to download files for people, but to give a presentation. Dumb.

But this is not the end of the story. Don't worry, it's not time to stop procrastinating, not yet. After the true import of my actions had sunk in, I realized that Prof. Campillo was staring fixedly at me, and saying that he needed one more volunteer. If I was being offered the chance to choose who I would work with, I wasn't about to let it slip through my fingers. Ignoring the fact that he wasn't paying the slightest bit of attention to the proceedings, I said "George!", and this was apparently funny, since everyone laughed. Mean.

Watch out world, not only am I stupid, I'm mean. Who needs enemies with a friend like me?

percolatr

slow-drip photographic goodness

If you keep an eye on my flickr page, you'll know that I tend to add a whole bunch of pictures all at once. I don't really like doing that, because it means that you get overwhelmed with tons of pictures at irregular intervals and don't have the time to fully appreciate the splendour and beauty of each one. (Q: is dave full of himself?)

Anyways, I thought it would be nice to set up a queue of pictures and write a program to upload them once a day. At first I thought I'd write a huge program that would store pictures in a queue and let me give them tags and names and descriptions, and then I'd write all the code that talks to flickr, and so on. However, all those things have been written by other people, so my motivation to write them from scratch was approximately nil.

Then I realized that the only thing I really wanted was the queue. If I could somehow get the computer to pull one picture from a queue each morning and put it in my way, then I could just upload it myself. This, it turns out is much easier...

I added two albums to iPhoto: "flickr queue" and "flickr". Then I wrote a script that grabs the first image from the "flickr queue" albums, copies it to the desktop, does some processing to prep it for flickr and then moves the image from the "flickr queue" album to "flickr". Then I told launchd to run the script every morning and I'm all set. Everyday there will be one picture sitting on my desktop screaming to be uploaded!

Here's the script, if you're interested:

tell application "iPhoto"
 set queue to the album named "flickr queue"
 -- (count photos in queue) is equal to 1
 if (count photos in queue) is greater than 0 then
  set photo_of_the_day to the first photo in queue
  set path_of_the_day to the image path of photo_of_the_day as POSIX file as alias
  tell application "Finder" to set fresh_copy to duplicate path_of_the_day to the desktop
 else
  return
 end if
 
 add photo_of_the_day to the album named "flickr"
 remove photo_of_the_day from the album named "flickr queue"
 
 tell application "Image Events"
  launch
  set image_of_the_day to open (fresh_copy as string)
  scale image_of_the_day to size 1200
  match image_of_the_day to destination profile "sRGB Profile"
  save image_of_the_day
 end tell
 
 
end tell

amphibuity

the quality of being amphibious

I have a new theory of amphibuity: things spelled with 'ph' are amphibious.

For instance, phrogs, as we all know are amphibious, so that's one point to my theory right off the bat.

Now I know what you're thinking: Phones. Phones are spelled with 'ph', but are they amphibious? Well, the latest research says yes...

I was sticking my feet in a cold mountain stream today and decided that I would put my mobile phone in my shoe to keep it from falling out of my pocket and into said cold mountain stream. You see, I too did not think that phones were amphibious. But I underestimated the amphibuity of my phone and it took a dive right out of the shoe and into the stream. I retrieved it, dissasembled it and let it dry for about 5 hours. and then...DUM DUM DUM!!...it worked as if nothing had happened. Ergo, phones are amphibious and my new theory is going to revolutionize zoology the world over.

The only bummer is that for about five hours I was convincing myself that I would have get a new phone but now that my old one works....no new phone for david :( NOKIA!!! I'll get those quality finnish engineers one of these days...

ooohh! shiny

new subway trains

The TTC is displaying mock-ups of the new trains. Those of you who aren't in Italy should definitely go and have a look. And, perhaps, take some pictures for me ;)