Tag: thoughts

Re: digitally tagging height

This is my response to this post in Sanjay’s blog. I originally wrote this as a comment, but before I pressed “Submit” button, I thought that it would be better to have it here, with all the crosslinks.

Sanjay noticed that pictures like the one of Maxim on his birthday are a cool new way of saving height measurements. That is instead of using old ways of pen, rule, and wall. He regrets only that there is no date and time information on the picture.

Well, that’s not a problem at all, my dear friend! Most of the modern digital cameras save a lot of meta information in the image file. With right tools that information is trivial to extract (Google search for “EXIF”).

I put a bit more thought into the idea and realized that it can actually be much more fun. With data and time of the image available from the image file itself, we are missing only one bit for a complete picture – the age of a child. Since there is no automatic way of getting it, a human interaction is necessary.

And where there is human interaction, there is social interaction. Flickr comes to mind. Consider this for a moment:

Parents make pictures of their kids against a height meter. Then, they upload these images to Flickr. Then, they tag these images with three tags. One tag for the age of the child, say “age14month” or “age2years”. One tag for the height itself, say “76cm” or “132cm”. And one additional tag to make these pictures easy to find, say “kidsgrow”. Maybe an image pool or user group would be a better way of goind about it.

With setup like this, there is a central location, where all such images are stored (backup). People can then easily find all pictures of their own kids, as well as other kids of the same age or the same height.

There are also a whole bunch of third-party applications that can utilize data from Flickr, like, for example, fd’s Flickr Toys.

How do you like the sound of that?

Adult thing to do

More and more often I am getting reminders that I am an adult and should act like one. Having been childish on my life (and enjoying that too) acting like an adult is tough for me. Even when I do it just to make fun of it.

Anyway, I was thinking over some things that I, trying to find a way to substitute one or another with an adult alternative. And I guess I found at least one.

Drunk driving no more. If I can predict that I’ll be drinking anything more than a glass of mine or a pint of beer – I’ll take a cab from now on.

And I did it today. I knew that I’ll have some vodka with friends in the evening, so I just called in for a taxi and it took me where I wanted to go. About eight hours later I called for another one, and it took me back home. I have to say that it felt good. It was better than I expected. Not only I wasn’t streetracing my way back home intoxicated, but I didn’t even have to think about if I was still capable of driving while drinking. I was totally focused on vodka and on having good time. And guess what – I had much more of both than I usually get while having considerations about getting back home. There is a minor price tag on that though, but I can manage.

In fact, I liked it so much that I’ll do it regularly from now on. And I recommend you do the same.