The All-Alone Punchbuggy Emotion

It seems the psychologists have identified six basic emotions that are experienced by people everywhere. These big 6 emotions are: anger, fear, disgust, amusement, sadness and surprise.

Of course, there's big competition to identify other emotions and expand the list to the big 7 or the even the big 15. The New Scientist has an article exploring 5 less famous emotions that could be added to the list: elevation, interest, gratitude, pride and confusion.

But they've missed that emotion you feel when you see a VW Beetle and there's nobody around to punch.

I got punched four times today. Twice by Manon and twice by Kathy A. Sure I spotted punchbuggies, but only when I was all by myself. Including this Star Trek fan's bug that I think should have been worth two punches.

Hate to be slow?

I've seen this car with its H82BSLO plate in a handicapped spot a bunch of times. It always makes me wonder how often it gets pulled over for speeding and how the conversation between the traffic cop and the driver goes.

Snowboards at the Skatepark

I'm fascinated by the skatepark between Ben Franklin Place and Baseline Station. I've taken hundreds of pictures of it and the kids who use it. Unfortunately, it doesn't get much use once the snow sticks. I imagine that even aggressive shovelling wouldn't make it suitable for the skateboards and bikes. I don't think you could turn it into an ice skating surface because the ice wouldn't stay on the sloping sides. In short, I have no solution for how it can be used in the winter.

But these two fellows have the answer. Snowboards. They were cruising down the slope and around the basin and then doing this funny hop to get back up to the top.

If I wasn't so shy, I'd have asked them how they were finding it.

I might also have asked if they were using the skatepark because the toboggan hills had been shut down. When they shut down the toboggan hills, probably they didn't think to also shut down the skateparks.

My Current Preoccupation: Face Tagging on Picasa

I haven't played Mumu all weekend. Why? I'm too busy identifying faces in my digital photos with Picasa.

It's addictive. First Picasa looked at all the photos on my hard drive. Then it spotted most of the faces. Then I told it who some of the faces were. Then it started guessing at matching faces. That's when it became obsessive.

What's especially fun is when it guesses wrong, but is weirdly close. Like when it thinks Manon is her mom or one of her sons.

There's a quick intro to Picasa 3.6 and its face recognition at MakeUseof.