A lot of fish, bubbles, customer service, monitors, laterals, music

Here's a little link potpourri for you on:

• Plentyoffish: 1-man company might be worth $1 Billion. OK, that's impressive. In the article you find that he recently hired a second person.
• Bubblewrap, now in electronic form! And it is refreshable, so you can pop it over and over.
• The Ultimate Consumerist Guide to Fighting Back. I haven't read through all of it yet, but looks like it might be a good resource for those unfortunate times when you don't get the service you need.
• Make the most of dual monitors. Some neat tips and freebies for those of us with two (or more) monitors.
• I'll close with a couple videos:
• Here was an amazing football clip showing a great (but unusual) use of laterals:
• And this last one... all I can say is brilliant:
• 
  

The electric company

I'm not generally a huge YouTube scavenger, but occasionally I link to it from some other forum or site and get sucked into chasing a nostalgic path. Like today, when I ran across a link to a video from the old "The Electric Company" children's show from my youth (it was "Billy Lick a Lolly"), and that started me browsing for more. I was pretty sure I had watched this show, and now that is confirmed because in seconds of video, or just from the video titles, it all comes back to me. (What a strange and awesome show this was!) Other good ones:

• It really blew my mind
• Steady Freddy
• Whimper and Whine
• Freeze
• T-I-O-N (shun, shun, shun, shun), which is a song I never really forgot, along with
• Eleven Twelve (this one is a bit of a remix) from Sesame Street
• Lost Kid and Yo-Yo Master - another one from those trippy 70s episodes of Sesame Street

Browse around YouTube and you'll find tons more (just be careful about getting the songs stuck in your head).

Five differences

Remember those activities in magazines when you were a kid where you had to look at two pictures and identify the differences in the two? Well, someone used the power of the Internet to make an updated version with nice animations. Five Differences is a neat little time waster.

IT vision, student vision, future vision, bleak vision

Here's a small set of items for today:

• 10 little secrets you should know about working in IT - as an IT person myself, I saw some truth in these, though I thought it was a bit pessimistic.
• A Vision of Students Today (YouTube video) - I thought this was an interesting class project, but I'm not entirely sure the point they were trying to make, if any. I'm guessing it was that classes are too impersonal, but there was a little bit of students-are-slackers-that-don't-pay-attention-or-study in there too.
• The Smartest Futurist on Earth - a short article on Ray Kurzweil (someone most IT geeks have probably heard of already). His vision of the future is fascinating, and I'd like to hear more about the ethical aspects of how these technologies would be applied.
• Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time - This is a good list for fans of this type of movie (like me), but I completely agree with several of the posters that the author is really loosely using the term "dystopian". Many of the movies don't belong on the list.
  

Current and recent inputs: music

I covered books last time, so now here are some recent music purchases:

• James Blunt "All The Lost Souls" - I enjoyed his first big release, and like this second one as well, though I think it lost some of the naivety and simpleness that made the first good. I definitely need to listen more before judgment, but it also has a bit of the "every song sounds the same" syndrome to me.
• Queens of the Stone Age "Era Vulgaris" - I think QOTSA continues to produce solid rock albums that are consistently good and consistently evolving. I never quite know what the style and theme will be, but I'm pleasantly surprised, as I was with this one.
• Linkin Park "Minutes to Midnight" - I used to be a big Linkin Park fan, and I definitely think this is a good CD, but it just doesn't capture my attention like their older albums did. It is definitely a more mature album, and there are some nice touches in style.
• Shiny Toy Guns "We Are Pilots" - This is a fun one; some discotheque beats and synthesizers, with some wailing lyrics and voices. I like the combination of the great male and female lead vocalists.
  

Current and recent inputs: books

Thought I'd go over some recent things I'm reading:

Books:

• The Fourth Bear is the second book in the "Nursery Crimes" series (and I'm currently reading it). It is good literary based humor about a detective agency that investigates crimes by nursery rhyme characters. So far it seems a little more busy and chaotic than its predecessor, The Big Over Easy (about Humpty Dumpty's murder).
• The Surrogates is an interesting graphic novel set 50 years in the future, where most people stay home and conduct their life through a robotic 'avatar' (like Second Life in a physical world). The main plot is a pretty simple detective story, but the book does a good job fleshing out the social and judicial aspects of a Surrogates based world.
• The Futurist is about a popular futurist that "comes clean" about how his work is all a guessing game, and it plunges him into turmoil and adventure. It's definitely not one of the best books I've read, but it provides some thinking material.
• Snow Crash is a classic cyberpunk sci-fi book that introduced a lot of concepts (like avatars, Second Life and The Surrogates owes it for this). While in the virtual world, hackers are getting infected with the Snow Crash virus, turning them into babbling fools or comatose victims. This is a rich and creative vision of the future, and I really enjoyed the out of the box portrayal.
  

Changed the blog template

Changed the look of the blog. A friend pointed out that it was all messed up in Internet Explorer 7.0 (looks like that LibraryThing badge wasn't rendering right), and I noticed other odd spaces show up there in IE and Firefox. So, I decided to just use one of the Blogger templates to keep it easier from now on. Hope you like! I think it is much simpler and clean.

Misery, email comprehension, year 2000, einstein

Hi there! Here's a random variety of things:

• 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable - an article from Cracked.com that has some nice insights and food for thought (and some not suitable for work/rated R language).
• From that article, I also linked over to this one about why emails are so easily misunderstood. Another interesting one that puts a pretty low rate of actually comprehending emails correctly.
• Paleo-Future has another good find with these 1910 French postcards that depicted what life in the year 2000 would be like.
• Check out this amazing speedpainting of Albert Einstein (4 hours condensed to 3.5 minutes).
  

US Americans don't have maps

Ah, America's youth. Here is a fine example in this year's Miss Teen Intellect Contest, er Beauty Pageant...

Miss Teen South Carolina answers "Why do you think a fifth of Americans can't find the US on a world map?"

Now, she was probably very nervous at the moment, but even if you don't have an answer, you can spin this into some practiced speech about education. But hey, at least she is pretty.

Tigers, smoke, and the final countdown

Just a mish-mash again today since my posting is so few and far between...

For you Calvin & Hobbes fans, here's a site where you can find every comic strip in the series in order of publication. Very cool, but I don't know if that site has the rights to it, so it may not last forever.

Frozen smoke will change the world says scientists. An interesting article on something that sounds straight out of science fiction.

And I'll end things with another goofy YouTube video. This one is of the worst "Final Countdown" rendition ever; even worse than the one by band Europe (I kid; I actually used to really like that song).

News bloopers, boomshine

I ran across this Yahoo! article today about TV anchor mishaps caught on video. The article has many links to YouTube videos of said goofs caught on tape. I didn't watch all (or most) of them, but the couple I did were funny.

Before I link to some examples, I've also been playing this simple, little web game called BoomShine. Easy to learn (and really the whole game wasn't that difficult) but fun.

On to a couple news videos, and I don't know if they really count since they are University news channels. The first is an old favorite (Boom Goes the Dynamite!):



This other one is very similar; a painful awkwardness. I hadn't seen this one before today (Bad Weatherman):

Doh, simpsonize yourself

In another use of picture face recognition, you can use the Simpsonizer to create a Simpsons character version of yourself. However, I'm not sure it even uses any of the photo recognition, as the first attempt looked nothing like me at all. I had to customize the heck out of it to get remotely close.
Here's what I ended up like:


The site was pretty buggy, and took many attempts for the page to even load, so the other alternative is to build your character from scratch at the Simpsons Movie website. Here's what my total-from-scratch Brian looked like:

The end all pizza

I saw this monstrous beast of a pizza from a post on Plastic Bamboo. It is the "Double Roll" from Pizza Hut Japan (check out their website menu here; it shows a lot of other wonderful creations).

According to one poster on the Plastic Bamboo comments, the translation says the ingredients are:
the bacon-weiner/cheese-stuffed crust, hamburgers, edamame, corn, red pepper, Italian sausage, ham, bacon, bacon bits, sliced mushrooms, onions, green pepper, garlic chips, basil, and black pepper. It also includes maple syrup to drizzle on the cheese crust.
The page also apparently says "Recommended for children"!

Now that's a pizza!

My celebrity look-alikes

Hello! I haven't had much interest in blogging much lately, but I'll still try to throw a little something up here every once in a while.

For instance, here is my "MyHeritage.com Celebrity Look-Alikes". I've done this a few times with different pictures, and I get all different celebrities, so I'm not sure how good it is.

Facts, exams, polls on positions

Hello! Spring is here! Mowed the lawn for the first time today. It is always a great feeling, until I realize "Wait, now I have to do this once a week or more!".

Some links:

• 301 Useless Facts. While many are useless, a lot of them are interesting.
• Comparison of a Chinese high school test question with a British college one. Ah, it's just math. You'll never need to use that again... In reality, I find this disturbing. (Not that the Chinese are educating their kids well, but that the British and Americans are letting education slide.)
• This political poll states that three quarters of Americans like leaders that will compromise, and two thirds of Americans like leaders that stick to their positions, even if unpopular. I very firmly believe in this and will stand strong on it, but I'm willing to change my mind.

Monkey business, plumber problems, future visions

Hello there. Here are some stories for you to review:

• That whole hundred monkeys on a hundred typewriters thing? Probably not likely to produce the works of Shakespeare.
• Rookie plumber burns down $12 million mansion on his first day. Now that is sure to affect his performance review.
• AT&T "Visions of the Future" videos from 1993 (see links to parts 1 through 6 below). I actually remember seeing this way back when and thinking it was cool. Now I just mourn that it hasn't materialized or I dread that fashion and hair style will revert in the near future when this tech is available.

Super computers, double standard, double image, kong

Hello! After last week's blizzard, it is starting to actually get nice again here in whitmarshall. Crazy weather this spring. So whether you are huddled in to stay warm, or indoors escaping the heat, here are some links for you:

• Something only the geeks like me will appreciate: Things computers can do in movies.
• With Don Imus gone, critics turn towards rap. I saw another blog post where the author went through the Billboard Hip Hop top ten and found all kinds of examples much worse than what Imus said. I hope this criticism continues, because we've had a double standard for too long. I know rap supporters say that the language reflects the tough life and childhood of the performers, but allowing it in song just spreads that attitude instead of combatting it.
• Hybrid images may possibly creep you out. They are images that change as you distance yourself from the picture. I didn't have a lot of luck backing up to see the changes, but it worked OK if I took my glasses off.
  
• Some Post-It happy fellows at USCS created a work of Donkey Kong art on one of the campus buildings. Go Mario!
  

Feud disease, spy program, power point, robots, spoons

Happy Easter to you! Hope you are enjoying your day.
Here's some quick links:

• Rare, inherited disease may be underlying cause of Hatfield/McCoy feud. That, or the article also mentions inter-marrying. Hmmm.
• Ex-Wal-Mart employee claims he was part of elaborate surveillance program. So that's how they find ways to rollback prices?
• Power Point presentations are bad for your brain. I would like to see this article summarized in several easy slides.
• Finally, robot technology has caught up with our grandest imaginations. Sega's robot chicken.
• Help complete the feeding time illusion with this baby spoon with airplane wings.
  

Sea city, pyramids, senses, four square

Hello,
Here's some stuff to read:

• See the marvelous Sea City of the Future! coming in the year 2000!
• Has the ancient riddle of the Great Pyramids' construction been solved? Interesting new theory.
• Hacking your senses for cool new uses.
  
• Buying a new car? This former car salesman explains how the dealership uses the Four Square to rip you off.
  

Wisdom, oaths, rats laughing

Hi there!
Some links to welcome the start of Spring:

• The Wisdom of Children - funny, but I'm not sure this is real, or if it is an adult interpreting what children would interpret adults saying.
• Funny Things People Say In Court - some real gems caught while people were under oath.
• Speaking of under oath, subpoenas authorized for talks in the federal prosecutors scandal. And the White House will fight it! So, it is OK to let aides talk as long as it is not under oath and what they say can't be written down?
• Rats laugh when tickled or playing. Who knew?
  

Home alone, master song, optical confusion, stupid test

Hello there. Just some more quick links today:

• Home becomes an island when they refuse to sell to developers. But at least they won! They did win, right?
• Master's thesis hits the Billboard top 10 single list. Overachiever. Way to ruin it for everyone else in the class.
• The Neave Strobe optical illusion will make you dizzy. It's cool, but be sure your PC speakers aren't turned up too loud.
• I did well on the Stupid Test, or rather I did poorly (less stupid):

Burgers, ads, time, teens, tech

Hello,
Here are some quick links for you today:

• McDonald's tests bigger burger, the Angus Third Pounder. I sure hope they make a Double Third Pounder.
• Subliminal Ads shown to work, or "wasn't this known years ago?". Liminal ads however are more effective - READ BRIAN'S BLOG DAILY.
• Scientists say you can't travel back in time. What a buzzkill! I'll show them! I'll go back and beat them up in high school.
• 73 percent of today's youth ineligible for the Army because they are “are morally, intellectually or physically” unfit for service. Ah, that's reassuring.
• Top 5 future technologies. What? Time travel isn't on the list? I particularly liked the sketch understanding system and touch hardware. Now only if they'd invent robot replacements for today's unfit youth.
  

Dolls, animatronics, pricing practices

Hello,
I'm back from a nice vacation in Florida to find that Minnesota was buried in snow while I was gone. It was nice to avoid the huge storms that hit the Midwest in the last week and a half.

Anyway, I'm watching "The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll" as I write this; I am further convinced that this country is retarded. The "contestants", the dolls themselves, everyone involved, they are all vapid, clueless, two-dimensional people. There is so much focus on the veneer and none on the substance.

A couple quick links:

• Disney reanimates theme parks with "free-roaming, interacting audio-animatronic Muppets capable of 'seeing' and 'talking' without a human puppeteer in sight". Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker are the first up. Please, oh please tell me one of these will be running for president in '08!
• Best Buy web site pricing probed. Apparently there is an in-store employee site that looks like BestBuy.com but with different pricing. I'm a Best Buy shopper (use the RewardZone program) but this sounds awfully shady.
  

Anna Nicole! Britney! Idiots! Copernicus!

Hello,
A little warmer here, but with some more snow now. This weekend is giving a little warmth that is starting to hint at spring. (Maybe that groundhog was right after all!)

Anna Nicole, Anna Nicole, Anna Nicole. Argh! I ran across this article about how television is failing the public because of the obsession on non-news disguised as important news. I could not agree with this more. It is unbelievable how her death has taken more air time than President Ford's death, or even the North Korean six party talks, the "Scooter" Lewis Libby trial, Iranian nuclear news, bombs in Thailand, or anything else that is, well, news.

I just saw the movie Idiocracy this weekend. It deals with a man frozen until the year 2505 where he wakes to find society is so dumbed down due to celebrity worship, commercialization, mass media/entertainment, and larger number of children from lower intelligence families. While it was mainly a dumb comedy (and a pretty funny one at that), there was a hint of horror there because you can really see things moving that way. I recommend the movie, but be aware there is a high amount of very bad language and sexual and bathroom humor. But it fits in with the analysis of...

...oh wait! There's new Britney news! Hooray! Let's see what top celebrity psychiatrists say about her bald headed, rehabbin', tattooin', partying like she's crazy lifestyle! We need a replacement when this Anna Nicole stuff dies down anyway!

Other bits:

• A different kind of crazy: Texas Republican Chairman Warren Chisum believes the earth stands still and the sun rotates around it. And he's distributing memos to legislators pitching this knowledge.
• A bit of fun: the Line Rider is a fun little online diversion. Give it a try and check out some of the saved movies.

Books and other links

Hi,
I'm giving an online site called LibraryThing a try. It is essentially a tag-based online cataloging tool for your books. You can then share links, review, get recommendations, and so forth. I've been plugging in my books (far from over) before realizing there is a 200 book limit for free accounts. If I like it enough, the lifetime membership only costs 25 bucks, so that's a pretty good deal. You can find my library by following this link.


Other stories:

• The big story today is Anna Nicole Smith's death, I guess. It's sad, but I'm not quite sure if I'm watching a soap opera or not at this point.
• The CSPI picks the best and worst fast foods. Bad news, Burger King. Not only is your mascot creepy, your food is dangerous too.
• Now that the Super Bowl is over, what happens to all those losing team championship shirts and hats? I've actually wondered about this in the past, so I was pleased to run across this article about it.
• And finally, for you deep thinkers, the 11 most important philosophical questions. Why eleven? Good question... think on that.
  

Boston police work, oil profits, shared spelling

Hello!

More ranting by Boston on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force publicity stunt. They've been talking about suing them for the "hoax" (which there is no hoax that I can see. The devices aren't intended to look like bombs.) If these devices looked to be a threat, then I think the people of Boston should sue their city for not reacting until three weeks after these things were placed. That's some top notch policing. But, I also don't see how the Lite-Brite like devices would be thought of as a terrorist threat. What terrorist puts colorful LEDs in the shapes of cartoon characters on their bombs? Is Boston more used to dealing with the Joker and the Riddler instead of Al Qaida?

Other stuff:

• Exxon Mobil posts the biggest profit ever in US history. Whew! I was so worried that those fluctuating oil prices would hurt them!
• Tonight, I spent way too much time on WannaSpell.com, which is a shared whiteboard with "magnetic" letters you can drag around. It was fun and frustrating. There were bits of collective comedy laughs, but you are also always fighting everyone else's agenda on it (and then eventually a group of people start dragging all the letters into a corner). Check it out to see what I mean.
  

Coffee, ATHF scare, big boss battle

Welcome from the cold in Whitmarshall!

Here are a few items for today:

• Coffee taste test, and who beats Starbucks? McDonald's wins. I'm not a coffee drinker myself, but how can McDonald's be better when it is obviously much cheaper than Starbucks?
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force viral ads cause Boston bomb scare. Hey, what do you know? Viral marketing does work!
• Think it's time to pack away that old generation Playstation 2? You need to check out this video of the first boss battle in God of War 2.
  

Applebee three, hogfather, computer interfaces

Hello!
I went to Applebee's the other night, and the meal was fine. The one thing I don't understand is why, every time I'm there, they have three girls standing by the door. Are they extra employees in case there is a rush? No, because it was busy there last night, but there were still always three or four of them there. They even sometimes send two of them to seat new patrons. So are they trainees? I don't think so, because it is always like that. I'm not sure why a manager would pay for them all to just stand around there. Maybe I don't understand the restaurant business.

Links for today:

• Terry Pratchett Discworld fan? The UK Sky One adaptation of Hogfather is online (not sure how official the links are, though).
• There are some interesting new interface projects out there, like the Bumptop (video on YouTube). I certainly think this one is cool, but I don't really see it as practical.
• Something else is the D'Fusion system of integrating CGI realtime with video. Very cool.

Idol authenticity?

I'm watching "American Idol" as I write this (please forgive me), and something about it has bothered me (past seasons as well). And maybe I should say there are many things about it that bothers me, but I'm going to bring up one in particular. In the later half of the show, they show a little bit of strung together clips of losing auditioners singing the same song (tonight's was Lionel Ritchie's "All Night Long"). This montage includes some of the losers that stormed out in high emotion or in a rage. So I'm to believe they were willing to come back to sing a little bit for comedic purposes? Or do they film that song before the people audition? It all seems a little phony to me. I don't doubt that there are people so delusional that they think they've got a chance when they can't sing, but I suspect that a lot more of them are phonies or plants.

Plus, I think that Ryan Seacrest might be a muppet.

Activist judges, average iq, villager villains, punch out

Snowy day here in Whitmarshall. Thought we'd miss most of it this winter, but snow is now all around.
Links:

• Attorney General Gonzales raps 'activist' judges, saying that federal judges can not make rulings (or judge, ahem) matters of national security. He says they should defer to the President and Congress. But wouldn't that be disabling one of the checks and balances from the three equal parts of government? I don't know what to say: I'm torn between my confusion on how we have cabinet members that don't understand the basics of government, and my obedience of Big Brother. He's double-plus good! All hail Oceania!
• Average IQ Map of the World. Uh-oh, changed my mind: All hail Eastasia! (This Wikipedia page is flagged for possible deletion, so view it before it goes away.)
• Entire village suspects in mayor's murder. Wow, must have been a well liked politician. Darn those activist villagers!
• Sorry to link another live-action video game recreation, but this live action Mike Tyson's Punch Out was pretty humorous for those that remember the game.

Uncanny Orville, below average children

Hello!
I watched bits and pieces of the Golden Globes (though I usually try to avoid the big awards shows), and the thing that disturbed me most was the new Orville Redenbacher commercial. Yikes! That's creepy. Why do we always need to use dead spokespeople? I'm more or less OK with it if it is an animated cartoon capturing the trademarked image, like the animated Colonel Sanders from a few years back. But integrating old footage of a celebrity or creating a computer generated version of a dead spokesperson is just weird and seems kind of disrespectful. Did these people say from their deathbed "Please, if technology provides a way to milk my image for corporate gain, please do so!"

Switching topics: I ran across this article that says you can't blame schools and teachers for American woes because intelligence, not education, is part of the problem. The author points out that half of all children are below average, and I guess I can't argue with that. I think there are definitely problems in educational systems (and discipline and parental guidance, and such), but the article has some interesting points.

Apple phone, singing, sodium, virtual reality

Hello on this cold January weekend. A small potpourri of links for you today:

• One of the big tech stories recently has been the (currently named) Apple iPhone. Check out Gizmodo's Macworld 2007 iPhone coverage for details and pictures. Pricey, but I got to admit I checked out Cingular's website to find that, alas, they have no service in my area. That's probably for the best; I'd like to see this thing in the real world for a while to see if it lives up to the hype.
• Speaking of the hype, Conan O'Brien's show has captured it in this iPhone parody commercial.
• While we're linking videos, here's a couple more.
• An older one, but still good. Amazing splicing creates George W. Bush singing 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'.
• Here's an even older one; old newsreel footage of the government disposing of sodium by dumping it in a lake. What, didn't they pay attention in chemistry class?

• Lastly, here's an article about businesses embracing virtual reality. It has a mention of the Iowa State University facility. I saw a predecessor of it years ago, but I'm sure the new one is more impressive. (But not as impressive as the iPhone.)
  

College saga video

Hello!
I ran across the following video from Kotaku. The website it was linked from looks like it is down (must have been too much traffic), but I found the 4 episodes in the series on YouTube. It is a live action parody of the Final Fantasy games (with a little Zelda and other pop culture references thrown in). If you weren't a Final Fantasy geek like me, you'll probably not get it. I thought it was funny, but the story gets really pretty lame as it goes.
Enjoy! (And episodes 2 - 4 are on YouTube, if you want to continue. It is called "College Saga".)