NYT’s John Tierney: Pleasure yourself, now.
John Tierney’s latest column covers the phenomenon of procrastinating pleasure. Just last night I was complaining how I didn’t use any vacation time (except for a trip home on Thanksgiving, which is barely a “vacation”) this year. But it was my own fault for not going through the motions of picking a place, date, and flight, thinking that I’d get around to it next month. And now it’s a few days till New Years.
For once, social scientists have discovered a flaw in the human psyche that will not be tedious to correct. You may not even need a support group. You could try on your own by starting with this simple New Year’s resolution: Have fun … now!
Then you just need the strength to cash in your gift certificates, drink that special bottle of wine, redeem your frequent flier miles and take that vacation you always promised yourself. If your resolve weakens, do not succumb to guilt or shame. Acknowledge what you are: a recovering procrastinator of pleasure.
It sounds odd, but this is actually a widespread form of procrastination — just ask the airlines and other marketers who save billions of dollars annually from gift certificates that expire unredeemed. Or the poets who have kept turning out exhortations to seize the day and gather rosebuds.
I thought this was the most eye-opening revelation about prolonged pleasure-procrastination:
Once you start procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process if you fixate on some imagined nirvana. The longer you wait to open that prize bottle of wine, the more special the occasion has to be.
…
Remember the advice offered in the movie “Sideways†to Miles, who has been holding on to a ’61 Cheval Blanc so long that it is in danger of going bad. When Miles says he is waiting for a special occasion, his friend Maya puts matters in perspective:“The day you open a ’61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.â€
Flickr photo: Vietnamese Rice Fields (Yên Bái: Ä‘Æ°á»ng và mảng)
This photo, from Flickr user Toan-IMV, makes me want to book a flight back to Vietnam pronto.
Flickr Snowball Fight post-mortem: A lesson in being first
The photo that briefly led the Flickr blog
I’ve had a basic Flickr account for about a year now and before this past weekend, I don’t think I had more than 2,000 hits across the 150 random photos in my stream. After Flickr spotlighted my photos of the Times Square snowball fight at the top of its blog, I received about 71,000 hits and hundreds of comments in three days:
The funniest part of it is, is that I had uploaded pretty much the exact same set of photos more than 30 hours before. After work, while at the office, I noticed that CNN had spotlighted freelancer Doug Kim’s excellent B&W photos of the incident on his blog; I didn’t realize until I saw the reaction he got how amazing this event was to anyone who hadn’t been there that night, possibly even more interesting than for even those of us lucky to be there. I re-uploaded those same photos at a slightly larger size so I could post them “Big Picture” style to my blog. I’m pretty sure the important tags (“snow”, “snowball”) were in both versions (in fact, the picked-up version lacks “snowball fight” as a tag, which is the term that the Flickr blog post links to.
Apparently, I had good timing. Maybe ten minutes after I uploaded the larger-sized photos, I started noticing a stream of comments…and when I finally noticed that the thumbnail of my photo was not just showing on my Flickr page, but on everyone else’s…I hastily did a quick edit of the hundreds of other snowball fight photos I took that night and uploaded them. My two favorite of the secondary bunch…actually, of the whole bunch period, and I only bothered to look at them again because I figured Flickr users were OK with slightly more quantity than quality.
According to the NYT’s City Room Blog, one of the earliest popular mentions of the event was on BoingBoing, which linked to a Tweeted mobile phone photo. It wasn’t the clearest, but making something known is more important. I’m kicking myself a little for editing my photos when I got home but then only posting them to a private online album for friends. I’m glad Kim’s excellent photos got huge play when CNN’s iReport gave it a spot on CNN.com’s homepage.
Two days after the snowball fight, I didn’t have much to add to from what Kim’s photos had shown, so I figured the least I could do was license my photos under Creative Commons so that everyone could freely share them. I’m lucky enough to have a steady job now, so I’m just happy to show as many people as possible the cheery, smiling side of New Yorkers (or, at least its tourists’).
Some of my favorite comments, on Flickr and this Reddit post, which made it to the top of r/photography. I forget that not everyone knows what Times Square has been like since the pedestrian-calming measures took effect (and now I realize that this snowball fight probably wouldn’t have taken place any other year beforehand), or even what a snowstorm is.
jocemalyn
This made me feel a little bit better about the world, so thanks! When I think of NYC, the last thing I expect to see is people laughing and having fun! 😛Cpt2Slow
Gets way too much crap for being an unfriendly city. Glad these photos show how untrue that reaction can be sometimes.kevinbhookun Pro User says:
Reminds me of a Scene from Gangs of New York, except this is much cleaner
judo_dad1953 Pro User says:
I’m listening to Franz Schuberts Unfinished Symphony No.8 in B minor; as I’m wandering through your photostream. Its a perfect combination; it draws me to the image, making me wish I could pass into it and experience the moment wholly. Still, doing so vicariously is no small thing. Its an enviable record of an enviable moment. A tip of the hat to you for posting such a beautiful photo!
Kyle_Butler Pro User says:
I was so excited when I saw this picture I did a back flip. However, I was in a sleeping bag…so it got really weird. My cat looked at me as though he no longer accepted me as his owner. Then I realized I had no cat, and wondered why this creature was in my home!
See, your photo has set off a chain of events that not even Ashton Kutcher could fix!Eric Austria Pro User says:
i was just there last nov. what a difference a day of snow is. if i’m gonna be stranded from a snowstorm this would be the ideal place.Ta_nya says:
hah) “snowstorm”…for us it’s really fun to hear such a word. I know that you are not used to the weather like this and it’s really a storm for you, but here in Moscow we would have called it like “huh, snowy again”)) anyway, amazing pics)
Well, if spotlighting my photo was Flickr’s roundabout way to get me to sign up for a Pro account…well, it worked. I had a vague sense of the Flickr ecosystem work…but when no one stops by your photostream, you don’t see it in practice. Having interacted with dozens of other photogs and spending some time seeing the other great work out there…I’m seeing a lot more utility for a Flickr account than just providing people a repository for the random CC-images I have. And I’m going to try it out as the hosting service for my images. Dreamhost’s recent spottiness as of late didn’t give me confidence that it could handle serving up pages with multiple large images to thousands of visitors.
So lesson learned: when you have a nice camera, don’t keep the good memories to yourself. Happy Holidays.
Times Square during a snowstorm: hunker down and throw some snowballs
Snowball fights, slow traffic…if Times Square was like this everyday, the Manhattanites would fight to take it back from the tourists. See a bigger version of these photos on this page, where I’m slowly experimenting with WordPress’s templating…ouch, php, ouch. Also, my photo made it at the top of this Flickr post.
I hadn’t used my 5dm2 since I got the S90. I love the S90 but I became accustomed to not getting decent images in any kind situation where the ISO was at 800. In the snowstorm, I had a rain-jacket improperly fitted on the 5d2 and blindly hit the autofocus button…I didn’t expect to get anything but these didn’t turn out so bad.
Update: Some reflections about the “social media” aspect of what I thought was just a good-ol fashioned large-scale snowball fight
Snowball fight in Times Square, Dec. 19, 2009
Snowball fight in Times Square, on 12/19/2009, during the big blizzard of 2009 from dan n on Vimeo.
Some video of the spontaneous snowfight, mostly among patrons who had just gotten out of their Broadway shows, using my 5dm2. Not exactly the best quality considering I was sloppily using a rain jacket and haven’t ever really used the video function. But I was impressed that it’s slightly in focus.
Apple has 46& of Japanese smartphone market
From TUAW:
Impress Corporation of Japan is reporting that Apple now controls almost half the smartphone market in Japan with over 3 million iPhones sold to date. Keep in mind, it has taken the iPhone little more than a year to accomplish this.
Impress reasons that the major shift towards the iPhone is because of its ease of use and the Japanese App Store.
One of the predictions I distinctly remember an analyst making a the iPhone announcement launch was that it would reach Apple’s 1 percent of market share goal but it would have no impact in Japan, where the phones were so allegedly advanced.
579KYYDE98A6
Technorati claim code 579KYYDE98A6
Using PDFTOTEXT to convert a batch of PDFs to text and splitting them by page
I can’t believe how hard it was to find this (also, I know basically nothing about bash scripting), so maybe the next person who Googles this will find this post and save themselves a few minutes:
(replace ‘999’ with the number of pages in a document)
for f in *.PDF;
do
for i in {1..999};
do
pdftotext -f "$i" -l $l "$i" -layout $f "${f%.PDF}_$1.txt";
done;
done
Or:
for f in *.PDF; do for i in {1..999}; do pdftotext -f "$i" -l $l "$i" -layout $f "${f%.PDF}_$i.txt"; done; done
The above script will tell pdftotext to take every .PDF file and convert each page into a separate text file in the format original_file_name_pagenumber.txt
22 million Bush White House e-mails found
From the AP:
Computer technicians have found 22 million missing White House e-mails from the administration of President George W. Bush and the Obama administration is searching for dozens more days’ worth of potentially lost e-mail from the Bush years, according to two groups that filed suit over the failure by the Bush White House to install an electronic record keeping system.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/12/14/national/w120825S68.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0ZhjtALTt
An interesting tidbit from a Jan. 2009 Talking Points Memo article:
But it doesn’t sound like we’ll get everything. The new email system that the White House switched to four years ago allowed all staff members to access storage files and delete messages — unlike the previous system, which was designed to preserve all messages containing official business. Fuchs said that the White House has still declined to make a forensic copy of the records, so any emails that were deleted likely won’t be recovered. And since we’re talking about millions of emails, it may be impossible to know what we don’t have.