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 ;)

insurance

co-op style

Gambling is a Bad Thing, so when someone described insureance as gambling I started to think and decided that there are two ways to look at insurance.

Insurance as a gamble: you buy insurance because something might go wrong and instead of maybe paying a large sum, you pay–for sure–a smaller sum. Essentially, you're gambling that something will go wrong.

Insurance as Capitalist-Communist Mashup: Given that calamity generally doesn't strike everyone at the same time, we all chip in a fixed amount of money on a regular basis. When problems occur, we dip into the kitty. Sometimes we're helping others and sometimes we're being helped.

If we look at it this way, insurance clearly isn't gambling. However, two questions remain: How do the insurers look at it? and How would a different point of view affect insurance policies?

I won't pretend to answer the first question, since anything I say will probably be too simplistic. Moving on to the second question, here's an idea for a new kind of insurance business: co-operative insurance.

In co-op insurance, the premium is not fixed. Every month, the total cost of claims approved is divided among the policy holders. If no claims are approved, no one pays more than the basic administration fee. In a month with a higher number of claims, everyone's premiums jump up.

The idea here is that the cost would be lower because the insurer is not being paid to take a risk. The uncertainty is spread across all the co-op policy holders, not concentrated in one insurance firm.

This is simply the germ of the idea. It would be interesting to flesh it out a little to see what it might look like in more detail. It would also be interesting to contrast it with Lloyds of London's insurance market.

At any rate, it's an idea that moves insurance away from gambling, and may even result in reduced costs.

severe

potential

as in "Have you heard the debut release from Mimico Molly? It's a bit rough around the edges, but it's got severe potential!"

Has anyone noticed that I like making up random phrases? aaahhh.....