Conceptual problem
How do people create accidents? Very difficult to do. But after some thought I figured one can increase the possibility of accidents. That's the route I chose with this task.

Process
First, I had to get the right picture. I opened my photo library and soon found the right picture: one of our cat, snapped accidentally on the night I was setting up to complete Exquisite Corpse (digital) with the folks via conference call. I was going to take pictures of the art gallery I was in and I actually took an accidental picture of Lukey. It's kind of haunting, actually.

Next, I had to arrange it so that I wouldn't know that I was uploading that specific picture until after I was done. I placed that photo into a directory along with eight other images.

I figured I'd better make it harder to get the right image, so I set about randomizing the names. This was simple enough, just open the folder, press the up and down cursors on the keyboard a few times, click return, and type. All without looking. I did this process over several minutes, eventually changing the names of all the photos. I deleted non-alphabet characters from the names and made sure the preview pane was turned off.

Then I opened my livejournal gallery and set about to upload three pictures. The first time I did this I had the browser preview pane opened, which meant I saw the images. So I had to stop and go back a step, re-randomizing the names. I also turned off the preview setting in the browser upload dialog box.

Finally I hovered the cursor over the upload button and arranged an accidental device (not unlike a sword of damocles I suppose) to fall on the keyboard. I chose a box of business cards balanced on a waterglass. First I had it positioned over the return key, but that wouldn't have worked (I accidentally dropped it while setting up and nothing happened) but I figured out I should balance it over the keypad button.

It took about an hour of working normally at my desk from the time I set it up until I legitimately bumped it while standing up. The box fell and I was startled! Then I saw it said "uploading". It took me to the "just uploaded" screen and there was my cat. YES!

Enjoy, along with the other pix that went up, and an earlier shot of Prince at the Super Bowl for your...titillation?

Upon reflection, I got very lucky. If that hadn't worked, I believe it would have been disingenuous to keep knocking the thing off until the image uploaded. I would have had to arrange a completely different process. I had been brainstorming processes for getting a happy accident, and if anyone else is out there thinking about it, feel free to try one of these methods. First I was going to use some kind of accidental image of the cat from my phone and phone message it to a blind-selected cell phone address entry, hoping to nail the SF0 entry I have among the 166 numbers I have in the phone. If that failed, I was going to try to dial the SF0 phone number accidentally and record the sound of my cat into the speakerphone, creating a sonic image. Then I thought about d20 for a while. My last idea was to multitask this with the disintermediate the submit button task and physically mail a collection of random images in hopes of getting some other player to accidentally submit it. Luckily I had bumped the trigger box by that point, because that's when I was running out of ideas.

I think a person could also do a low shutter speed time lapse like I did for Pants Observation and train it very close on one particular spot and run the images back to a computer or somehow transmit them direct to a flickr account or something.