Speaking of iPhoto, something I didn’t realize is that iPhoto has its own “Trash,” separate from the main Mac OS X “Trash.” This means that if you delete a photo, it doesn’t actually get deleted, it goes into the iPhoto Trash, and stays there until your empty the Trash (right click on the Trash in the sidebar and select “Empty Trash”).

Because I never realized this, every photo I’d ever deleted was hanging around in my iPhoto Trash, sucking up disk space — 7.5 GB of disk space as it turns out, as there were more than 6,000 photos there.

My copy of iPhoto ‘09 arrived this week, and I sat down this morning to take its new facial recognition features, branded Faces, out for a ride. While it’s not perfect, it’s pretty good. You train it for a while — not too long, as it turns out — and then it starts to be able to guess at the identity of faces on its own:

Some observations after an hour of work:

• So far it’s been unable to identify Oliver in any photos, perhaps because he’s growing so fast so he looks different in every photo.
• My father has proved the easiest to consistently identify: he has a distinctive beard, so this isn’t surprising, and I can imagine the only way iPhoto would get confused is if I threw a lot of David Suzuki pictures into the mix.
• I have twin brothers. This is problematic.

See also Polar Rose if this sort of thing interests you.

You may recall that I presented a talk-cum-performance piece last summer called Working for Free at reboot in Copenhagen. Somewhere between now and then video of my talk got released along with videos of all the other talks (my talk has its own Internet Archive page, as does the entire collection of reboot10 videos).
I was really happy with the way the talk worked out, mostly because I'd worked obsessively shaping and practising it for the days leading up to presenting it; I still have vivid memories of pacing around my Copenhagen apartment in the middle of the night working out my timing.

Featured at the beginning is Raise the Dead of Wintertime by Allan Rankin, who also features in the talk as a sample case. As do Casa Mia, City Cinema, Casa Mia, Brackley Drive-in Theatre, Charlottetown Transit, The Guardian, and Mark Leggott.

The best piece of junk mail I’ve ever seen came to a colleague of mine, a paleontologist at the ROM in Toronto who received a Publishers’ Clearing House-like package emblazoned with Mr. Royal O. Museum, you may have won $1 million! or some-such offer.

I thought of that this morning when the following email arrived in my in-box because I’m a subscriber to The New Yorker:

I usually throw email like this away without reading it, but I am, so to speak, unusually engaged with The New Yorker brand, so I read through it. What jumped out at me was the incentive offer:

As a thank you for completing this survey, you will be entered into a sweepstakes giveaway for a chance to win $50,000*.

Fifty thousand dollars seemed like an awful lot of money to spend to bulk up a list of “preferred subscribers.” I could understand $500. Or a chance at an iPod Touch. Or a free T-shirt. But $50,000 — from The New Yorker? And then I read the fine print (emphasis mine):

NO PURCHASE OR SURVEY COMPLETION NECESSARY. To enter and for full rules, including alternate method of entry, click here. Starts 12:01 AM ET January 12th, 2009 and ends 11:59 PM ET March 31st, 2009, when all entries must be received. Open to legal residents of the 50 United States/DC, 13 years of age or older as of the date of entry, except employees of Sponsor, Administrator, Promoter and their immediate families. Odds of winning depend on the number of Creative Presentations. If this Creative Presentation is selected, the odds of winning depend on the number of entries received through this Creative Presentation. Void outside the 50 United States/DC and where prohibited. ARV of Grand Prize: $50,000. Sponsor: ePrize, LLC, One ePrize Drive, Pleasant Ridge, MI 48069. Administrator: Equation Research, LLC, 453 E. Wonderview Avenue, #250, Estes Park, CO 80517. Promoter: The Condé Nast Publications, 1166 Sixth Avenue, 19th floor, NY, NY 10036.

So, setting aside that I’m not a US resident (something that The New Yorker should know, given that they mail me a magazine to my house in Canada every month), there’s the curious sentence “Odds of winning depend on the number of Creative Presentations.” But what exactly is a “Creative Presentation?” For this you have to turn to the contest rules. These say, in part:

Sweepstakes is offered in conjunction with multiple companies (“Promoters”) through different Web sites (“Creative Presentations”), announcing many different prizes. The Promoter for this particular Creative Presentation is The Condé Nast Publications, 1166 Sixth Avenue, 19th floor, New York, NY 10036. One (1) winner will be selected in a random drawing from among all entries received across all Creative Presentations. The prize for which an entrant is eligible depends on the Creative Presentation through which the entrant entered the Sweepstakes. All applicable federal, state, and local laws apply. ONLY ONE (1) GRAND PRIZE ACROSS ALL CREATIVE PRESENTATIONS WILL BE AWARDED IN THE SWEEPSTAKES.

If I’m reading this correctly it means that a whole bunch of companies are throwing in to run a contest together, with a single prize. And the prize is different depending on what door you walk in to sign up for it — presumably The New Yorker’s “a chance to win $50,000” could be “a chance to win $250” attached to a bag of potato chips, or “a chance to win a bag of potato chips” attached to a hot dog.

What’s even freakier is the way they pick the winner: first they randomly select one of the participating “Creative Presentations”, then they randomly select a winner from all the entrants who entered that way. The rules describe the odds of winning like this:

The odds of this Creative Presentation being selected depend on the total number of Creative Presentations. If this Creative Presentation is selected, the odds of winning depend on the number of entries received through this Creative Presentation.

Because information about the Promoters and the Creative Presentations, and how many of each there are is hidden it’s completely possible that there are 5,000 companies with 10 websites each, with hundreds of thousands of entries through each website.

In other words, the offer from The New Yorker that I will be “entered into a sweepstakes giveaway for a chance to win $50,000” is, essentially, a fake offer. Even if I were eligible to receive it, the possibility of millions and millions of other entrants makes my odds of winning small enough that it’s not really an offer at all.

So I’m not filling out the survey.

This.

After watching Eric Idle talk about John Cleese, I realized that in my mind I’ve been treating John Cleese and Michael Palin as one person. I know this is a serious Python crime, but it’s true.

Question for those from away: in your city do riders traditionally thank their city bus drivers when leaving the bus? Here in Charlottetown it seems the rule rather than the exception — most people seem to say “Thanks” or “Thank a lot” when getting off the bus. I find this both endearing and somewhat puzzling as a social custom.

Remember that 24 hour technology-less experiment we lived over the weekend? Well the “case study diary” is due tomorrow and even though, as a non-student, I can’t be graded on the written part of the project, I decided to assembly a diary anyway.

One of the freedoms of not being a student is that I didn’t need to heed any formal academic guidelines about 1½ inch margins and only writing in proper Edwardian English.

So my project is more of a graphic novel than an formal essay. Here’s a PDF file of it if you’re interested, and here’s what it looks like:

The first page of my fitness assessment. The red splotches are a result of cutting open my thumb on the broken zipper of my old Peterborough Canvas Company gym bag, an unfortunate end to an otherwise positive evening in the gym.

What with the mental workout I’m getting this winter, it seemed only appropriate to turn to the issue of the body and given that I’m on the UPEI campus three mornings a week, mere steps from the Sports Centre, it was hard to claim inconvenience as a way out.

So last night after supper I made my way up to the Fitness Centre for a rendezvous with Stan Chaisson the fitness man and an assessment of my current state of fitness (or lack thereof).

To start I had to fill out a form listing my fitness goals (the best I could come up with was “to decrease possibility of death”) and my fitness preferences (I have none, being completely ignorant of the items on the fitness menu).

Stan then took some basic baseline measurements — height, weight, BMI, bodyfat percentage. And then the gruelling tests began: a 12-minute stint on the treadmill for the Cooper Test, a push-up test (how many), a half-situp test (how many in a minute) and a flexibility test.

The result was a score out of 100: I scored 29, “below average.” The good news is, I have lots of room for improvement.

To my surprise and delight, running for 12 minutes (okay, it was more like “speed-tinged walking”) didn’t kill me, and I woke up this morning feeling just fine. This bodes well.

I meet with Stan in a week to go over my personalized training program; last night we set some modest goals for the next five weeks: getting my weight down 4 pounds (which will improve my BMI), increasing my minutes-per-kilometre on the treadmill from 17.5 to 18.4, increasing my push-ups ability from 10 to 15 and so on.

The plan is that I’ll visit the fitness centre every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning before my philosophy class, and Stan will take some new measurements in a month or so to see how I’ve gotten along.

As a point of privilege I will note that, as with UPEI’s general challenges welcoming the community, the Sports Centre could work to create a gentler landing strip for new recruits: it’s a daunting thing for an middle aged unfit guy to plunge into the midst of the land of spandex and free weights, and other than “the locker room’s down and to the right” when I first signed up, I was on my own. I still haven’t been able to find the locker room. Fortunately this will be mitigated somewhat by an “introduction to the fitness centre” session that I’ve signed up for tomorrow night; but including an basic overview and tour of the facility for all new members would go a long way to making people like me feel more welcome (and likely to come back).

If you’re interested in getting assessed yourself, grab yourself the 2009 brochure (cleverly concealed as “Personal Trainor Information” on the Fitness Centre’s website) — what’s you’re looking for is the “Basic Fitness Assessment” and it costs $30 for members and $40 for non-members. And, at least from my experience, Stan will not make you feel like an idiot or a layabout (even if you are one).

For anyone who’s doubted my pronouncements about the sky-scraping nature of the building that’s quickly being assembled next door, witness the following photo that clearly demonstrates that it is now as high as the Sun itself!