The MythBusters website offers a ton of quizzes to test your ability to determine fact from fiction.
Here are some geeky ones worth a few minutes of your day.
A ton more are available on their website.
Archive for November, 2009
Jimmy Fallon impersonates Neil Young performing the theme song of the much beloved “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
I know Jimmy is very hit or miss, but this one is gold.
Sadly it won’t embed, so you’re going to have to click through to Jimmy Fallon’s website to watch.
Thanks to my buddy Chris for sharing it.
29
Nov
09
Smoking Voids AppleCare
This is a “WTF?” story if I’ve ever heard one:
Apple has refused to fix two registered AppleCare (Apple’s protection plan) users’ computers because they are smokers.
No shit.
Apple claims that the machines’ exposure to tar from the cigarettes makes them both uneconomical to fix, and a health hazard to handle in accordance with OSHA regulations.
Both excuses are clearly a crock of poo.
Either Apple is looking to save some money by cutting a few corners, or they are trying to social engineer their users’ health choices. Neither option is good.
I can’t stand smoking. I’m an asthmatic, I don’t understand the practice, I think it’s a waste of money, it smells dreadful, and it is a generally poor health choice. That being said, it’s a personal choice. Leave smokers alone, and fix their damn computers if they paid for the AppleCare protection plan.
One of my favorite advocacy groups, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a new website called Copyright Watch. The site allows users to see the latest news in copyright law. The effort is to inform the general public about the threat that looming copyright laws poses to individual freedom, and maintaining an open Internet.
In other related news, here’s a quote from BoingBoing for you… I can’t improve upon their words:
“Two US Senators, Bernie Sanders (I-VI) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH), have written to the US Trade Representative demanding that the text of the secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement be made public. This is the treaty that allows for criminal sanctions against noncommercial file-sharers, demands border-searches of laptop hard-drives and personal media players and phones for pirated material, requires ISPs to spy on their users, and gives movie and record companies the right to take whole households off the Internet with unsubstantiated allegations of piracy.”*
This secret copyright treaty is pretty black and white to me; we must crush it. The consequences of this treaty are unimaginably dreadful.
For more information you can visit the following links:
The Geek Whisperer: Scary Secret Copyright Treaty: From Music to Purses, This is Bad News
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
* BoingBoing: Two US senators demand publication of secret copyright treaty
26
Nov
09
Happy Thanksgiving
Have a very happy Thanksgiving, and remember that the tryptophan in turkey doesn’t make you tired.
This guy is accused of attempting to rob a bank. He allegedly handed a note to a bank teller demanding money. The video picks up with his arrest and subsequent search.
Enjoy.
24
Nov
09
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Aside from being a very knowledgeable guy, Dr. Tyson is a top-knotch communicator. He has the rare gift of being able to break the most complicated scientific concepts down into very simple language. I started following his writing and presentations because explaining the complex in digestible language is what I always strive for.
Here are some choice selections of Dr. Tyson from YouTube. The guy really is a master of explanation, and he’s funny too.
On UFO’s:
On 2012:
On Death by Meteor (this one is kind of scary):
On Intelligent Design:
Who is more pro-science, Democrats or Republicans? The answer may surprise you:
My favorite book of his is Death By Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries.
23
Nov
09
Turducken
Two weeks ago I went to my parents home for a gathering of their cooking club. Every six to eight weeks they get together with five other couples and cook food from a given region or within a theme. The food is always excellent.
Their last theme was basically Thanksgiving on steroids.
With the help of one of the other cooking club members and former butcher, Nello, my father made a turducken.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with turducken, it is a turkey stuffed with a chicken, that is stuffed with a duck, and three types of stuffing. If you’re keeping score at home, the stuffings are made from andouille sausage, cornbread, and the Spira Family stuffing which is largely crackers and mushrooms.
The meal was breathtaking.
The turkey was the best turkey I’ve ever had.
The chicken was the best chicken I’ve ever had.
The duck was the best duck I’ve ever had.
Together they were perfect.
My conclusion: Duck fat makes everything better.
I just got home from seeing Grace Potter & the Nocturnals, Brett Dennen, and Sean Bones at Terminal 5 in New York City.
Grace Potter rocking out
Sean Bones
Sean Bones opened strong enough. He played in a fairly unique pop-rock/ reggae style that successfully held my attention through a thirty minute set. He had a couple songs that were strong enough that I considered buying his CD, but ultimately decided that I probably wouldn’t listen to it.
He’s really young, and pretty talented. If he can find a way to write songs that are a bit easier to distinguish from one another, he could do big things.
Last thought on Mr. Bones… his bassist needs to chill-out with all of the hopping on one foot, it was seriously distracting.
Speaking of distracting…
Brett Dennen
Brett Dennen played his brand of folksy pop/ acoustic pop for a little over an hour, and I found the experience rather painful. Brett’s albums never excited me, but I really was trying to give him a chance.
As it turned out, the biggest problem with his performance wasn’t really his music, but his stage presence. There’s no reason to beat around the bush… Brett comes across as one strange dude. The six foot five, bare foot vocalist/ guitarist danced through his set in the most unbelievably awkward fashion. I couldn’t look at him without laughing, and I wasn’t alone. All six people in my immediate vicinity felt the same way. There was a lot of awkward gyrating.
His band was really talented, but even during their solos Brett’s constant dancing detracted from their work.
The second half of his set he lost the audience. The roar of side conversations overpowered the music.
I won’t be seeing him again.
Grace Potter & the Nocturnals
Thirty seconds into their Grace Potter & the Nocturnals’ set, I completely forgot about the first two acts; they killed.
Grace & Co. were my reason for going. I’ve been following them for about two years, and had high expectations. They annihilated my expectations by the third song.
They are serious musicians, and they play in a number of different styles. Blues, rock, jam, and soul are in any combination are all fair game for Grace and her band. Not only are they supremely talented, but Grace has an excellent stage presence, and is really easy on the eyes… come to think of it, no one minded the gyrating when she was on stage.
They played a number of unreleased songs that will appear on their next album Medicine, due out in Spring 2010. Every song they played was good, but Oasis stood out in a major way. The duel guitar melodies in Oasis were incendiary, to steal a phrase from Almost Famous.
Grace Potter & the Nocturnals are talented, inventive, and fun. I wish there were more emerging bands like that.
The encore kicked off with Jefferson Airplane’s psychedelic anthem, White Rabbit. It was great, just like everything else they did, but the stage lighting was pretty trippy; props to the lighting guy.
The night concluded with a long jam on the seriously soulful Nothing But Water. Clearly they blew the audience away because as I walked up 56th Street on my way to Penn Station, I was singing the lyrics, and so was everyone else. The song was haunting on its own, but imagine hearing person after person sauntering through Hells Kitchen quietly singing:
Take me down to the river
Take me down to the lake
Yes, we’ll all go together
We’re gonna do it for the good Lord’s sake
It was the strangest departure from a concert that I have ever had, and it served to illustrate the power of the performance.
This show is pretty early in her touring schedule. If she will be coming through your area, I strongly recommend you see her.
You can find Grace Potter & the Nocturnals’ albums and touring schedules on their website.
20
Nov
09
Tauntaun Sleeping Bag!!!
Yes my friends, that is a sleeping bag that looks like a tautaun from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and this is no joke.
Remember when Han and Luke were stranded in the snowy desert of Hoth. Han used Luke’s lightsaber to cut open a tauntaun and sleep within it’s warm guts. Now your child can experience that awesome moment with the Tauntaun sleeping bag.
It comes complete with a lightsaber zipper, because there is absolutely no other way to open up your tauntaun. It also has a printed organ pattern on the inside for that extra bit of detail.
You can sleep in a tauntaun for $99.99 on ThinkGeek.com.
So you’ve read all of this?
You must be a Star Wars fan.
Here’s a little something special for you. The deeper you get into this video, the funnier it gets.
I love how pleased the guy is with himself. Superb.
19
Nov
09
A Hole in My Ceiling
That’s not a metaphor, there really is a hole in my bathroom ceiling.
Last year my upstairs neighbor’s toilet leaked in to my ceiling. Awesome right?
The plumber fixed it from her apartment. And there was much rejoicing.
A few days ago, my ceiling started getting wet in the same place again. This time the plumbers opened up my ceiling and found…
drum-roll…
this is going to be crazy…
you’re never going to what they found…
NOTHING!
They found absolutely nothing. It’s bone dry up there.
So I get to wake up early for the fifth straight day tomorrow (two for the conference, and three for this big waste of time). Someone is coming to patch the hole that I apparently didn’t need… but nothing has actually been fixed.
Speaking of the Future of Web Design Conference, I will get my post about day 2 up soon.
First, I would like to issue a very special thanks to Melissa Penta. Melissa your absence from this conference is my gain… but I think you would have gotten more out of the jQuery session that you signed up for than I am. More on that later.
The Millennium Broadway Hotel, New York
I’m here. I was able to find my way through the hotel to the conference by following the trail of dudes dressed like bums in the nice Midtown Hotel.
My first impression is annoyance. The Future of Web Design Conference doesn’t have wi-fi because the hotel charges for it.
Cheap bastards.
Seriously though, it is pretty pathetic and it reflects poorly on both the Conference and the Millennium Broadway Hotel.
Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy Session
Kristina Halvorson is the President of a content writing/ information architecture agency known as Brain Traffic based out of Minnesota. Coincidentally, my childhood friend Chris Farrar works for Kristina.
Kristina’s session was enlightening. I do a lot of web writing and information architecture, so this was right up my alley. I didn’t feel like I learned much that was new, but she put a lot of things I know and do into concrete terms. I found the whole presentation rather soothing.
Here are a few key takeaways about content strategy and information architecture:
- People read print differently than they read the Internet (I will be writing more on this at a later date).
- Readers of your company’s website don’t care about your company. They don’t care about your “about us” page, or all of the time and effort you put into creating everything. They want what they are looking for.
- All to often pages are designed for the company, not the reader.
- Content is often an afterthought. It should be part of information architecture and design.
- It’s very hard to make good content out of processed, legalistic, techno-babble or other forms of soulless garbage.
- Good web content doesn’t win awards. It conveys information efficiently.
- You aren’t a copywriter on the web, you’re a publisher. People expect you to take care of what you create and publish.
Like I said, I didn’t learn a lot of new things, but Kristina did point out a few things that I would like to improve in myself. So you should see some small changes and improvements in my writing.
The Group Project From Hell
Kristina broke us up into groups to redesign Quicken’s homepage. I was grouped with three designers. They were very nice, but they didn’t seem to understand information architecture (or at least their understanding was different than mine), and they especially didn’t get writing. After 16 minutes of circular debate where they never articulated anything past their initial ideas, or made any decisions we rushed to finish something… and didn’t finish much. Fortunately no one actually looked at our “finished product.”
This made me really appreciate the team I work with, especially our lead designer RJay. He designs with copy and architecture, not around or over them.
Karl Swedberg – How to Use jQuery to Enhance Web Design
To pull a bit from Karl’s blog, “In the words of jQuery’s principal developer, John Resig, ‘jQuery is a simple JavaScript library that helps you to write the code that you want to write and really simplifies the interaction between JavaScript and HTML.’” Basically jQuery helps developers code cool stuff.
I’m not a web developer. At all. My coding background was pretty much limited to desktop software, and I haven’t seriously coded in nearly a decade.
Needless to say I didn’t get much of anything out of this session. Karl seems like a very nice and knowledgeable guy. The people in the room seem like they are learning. He is making code jokes, and people are laughing… and I’m scratching my head wondering what was so funny. Everyone has limits.
At least this session is giving me a chance to write this post. Unfortunately I will have to publish tonight because of the aforementioned wi-fi situation.
Learn more:
I’m off to the Future of Web Design Conference in NYC with a few of my coworkers.
I’ll write about all of the interesting happenings and misadventures I have along the way.
16
Nov
09
Dollhouse Sent to the Attic
Apparently Fox announced the cancellation of Dollhouse five days ago and I missed it.
Boobs increase readership... sometimes you've got to pander to your audience
I’m annoyed. Not because Dollhouse was canceled; I expected this.
What really bothers me is that this show never had a chance, and they kept it instead of giving Terminator The Sarah Conner Chronicles an opportunity to shine. Terminator had a devoted and growing fan-base, much like that of Firefly. Dollhouse, while it has devoted fans, they don’t have the same passion, simply because it isn’t as good as Firefly or Terminator ever were.
Making this even sadder, is the fact that Dollhouse finally started hitting its stride in the last three or four episodes; it was starting to shine. Too little too late.
Fox should have canceled Dollhouse last season and let Terminator live for a little while longer.
Dollhouse will eventually air its remaining episodes, then it will be sent to the attic.
The new first-person shooter, Modern Warfare 2 has smashed the entertainment industry’s sales records selling 4.7 million copies on its release date (Crosswalk). A new sequel is already in the works. The Onion News Network has the scoop on their next war game; this time it’s as realistic as it’s ever going to get.
