Games
Last night I was reading
this piece and its related links about the rise of "alternative medicine" and corresponding compromise of actual science based medicine. Then
I saw Bob in the office today. He was booked to go on the air to talk about new credit card scams and the fact that hard economic times make people more susceptible to scams. After he came back to his cube we chatted about the psychology of suckerness and how interesting it is and then, waddayaknow, tonight I come upon
this summary of a book called Predictably Irrational, which is about that very subject of suckerness. (The summary is actually an outline, which I'm a little embarrassed to say makes it much easier to read and digest and if it had been a long bit of text I probably wouldn't have made it as far as I did.)
If texting costs the phone company
next to nothing, why does it cost as much as it does? I know the answer is that it costs what the phone companies can get, but why hasn't a price war brought that price down further?
I sent
this photo to one gal in cube farm and listened to the cascade of "awww"s as it was forwarded across the floor.
Random thing to play with of the day:
cloth physics simulatorI'm listening to The Black Keys because
their song Lies plays in the background of a commercial for Big Love on HBO. This particular song is pretty bump & grind, but a lot of the songs (the earlier ones?) are strikingly reminiscent of old Black Sabbath if any of you are Tony Iommi fans. (And yes,
the original is still around.)
The file name says "
oarfish" but since the bulk of my marine biology knowledge comes from reading the tags on pet store fish tanks I'd say that's a seriously huge arowana.
I didn't understand why so many people were linking to what looks like a pretty crackpot article about the U.S. dissolving into civil war in two years until I saw mention of
the map at the end (I hadn't bothered to read that far into it myself). Still utterly crackpot but fun in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi way.
Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home - Relax! What could possibly go wrong?
I've been calling this the
awesome zombie game but looking at it now I realize it doesn't actually say zombie on it anywhere. For some reason, maybe the colors or the way the bad guys swarm, it reminds me of zombies. Anyway, awesome. One note: it's much easier with a mouse than a laptop touch pad.
Rex has once again rounded up
the year's list links in a link list.
I had a great time last night playing Draw My Thing with total strangers. I didn't register or sign up for anything and it all loaded pretty quickly. Surprisingly, there were no trolls or jerks either.
More in the mood for an old fashioned time killer? I lost most of a Saturday night to Body Ladder. I don't think the scoring system works but there are levels to strive for. For all the time I put into it, I never got past the axe level but it's the kind of game that makes you think that with just one more play you'll pull off that technique you think you're perfecting.
In no particular order today:
What I'll be doing tonight while I listen to the debate on TV: the eyeball game. My first try was a 4.08 but I had a couple of 11s that were just dumb mistakes so I know I can beat it.
If tonight's debate leaves you unfulfilled, consider trying out your own third party candidate.
Literal A-ha is actually better than original I think.
Dark Knight trailer by way of Toy Story.
Apparently Iceland is having a hard time with this credit market freeze. I thought Iceland had reached utopian status because they power the country with water and geothermal so they aren't saddled with heavy energy costs (or dirty energy)? Not to take pleasure in others' misfortune but that currency problem they're having may make it an actual affordable vacation for Americans who are priced out of Europe.
The Breathing Earth counts births, deaths and CO2 emissions while you watch. I was expecting the births and deaths to pop a little faster.
I confess I'm one of those people who eats peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon so the idea of peanut butter packaged in sheets like cheese singles offends my sense of propriety (as did that squeezable tube of peanut butter - do they still make that?).
Earth from above - Another winning series of photos from The Big Picture.
I see lots of folks enjoying these tilt-shift time-lapse videos. (Tilt-shift has a specific meaning but it also generally describes that blurry-on-the-edges compressed effect that makes things look miniature.)
The amazing bendy TV screen that folds up to fit in your pocket
The cool thing about a magnetic air car isn't that it is (or would be if they built it) air powered. It's cool because it's got a magnetic motor. I'm not sure what that means exactly but I read last week about free-piston engines that use magnets so that's where my head is going. UPDATE: I read more of the magnetic air car's press material and they insist it uses no fuel. There's some suggestion that the magnets produce electricity which produces heat to build air pressure but it seems like the company is being a bit cagey on the details.
The good news: Solar powered motorcycle. The bad news: U-G-L-Y. (Actual story: It's battery powered and the batteries are charged with attachable solar panels.)
As long as I'm getting jeeped about hot alternative cars, Lamborghini is considering a new hybrid.
Speaking of driving cars, the idea of photographing people while they're driving has occurred to me but frankly the results are kind of boring and overall it feels like a creepy thing to do. But this guy had real success putting together a gallery that actually made me laugh at how well he'd documented some classic car/driver combinations.
Speaking photos, if you can't bear to read another thing because you've been up to your eyeballs in political and economic analysis articles, let's take a bit of a visual detour:
Another one of those sites that is vital to share with your adolescent who may be developing a self image. Click on Portfolio in the top nav. "No dear, even the model in that picture doesn't look like the model in that picture." I wish I'd kept a folder of these as they come up.
It's funny that I'm grumpy about seeing these tricks done in the media but I'm always interested in seeing how to do them: 40 Cool Beauty Amplifying Photoshop Effects
Speaking of Photoshop, Sumo Paint, in beta still but looks like a promising Web based free Photoshop-lite.
30 Amazing photoblogs (and a few tips for creating one)
I also found myself on Dripbook a few times last week. It's a place for creative types to display their portfolios and do some networking. NOTE: Contains some art/model portrait photography, some of which falls into the category of "some guy got a bunch of women to get naked and make pouty faces for the camera" so while it's interesting and good inspiration, pay attention to who's looking over your shoulder. UPDATE: Link fixed. Sorry 'bout that.
Celebration Of Smoke Photography and Smoke Art - Interesting similarity to these light trick photos.
OK, back to the headaches of politics and the economy:
The Web lately is full of "one of the best pieces I've read on the economic crisis" recommendations from bloggers. For a while I was trying to collect them but ultimately I had a lot of links and no new insight (that is to say, I never got around to reading all those links). Thankfully, TheMoneyMeltdown.com does a nice job of keeping it all organized.
I gotta say, even though I'm not a fool for that anti-celebrity line of political coercion, weird passive aggressive nagging from celebrities actually makes me want not to vote just to spite them. Tsk, Jennifer Aniston and that dude from the stoner movies telling me what do to. Please.
The "silence yourself" ad campaign, however, is just creepy.
I will say, Google's voter registration map is potentially handy. Enter your address and it tells you when your voter registration deadline is. Not surprisingly they plan to add voting locations as well.
Tina Brown launches a new online magazine, The Daily Beast.
100 Skills Every Man Should Know: The Instructions (With Videos!) (Yes, it does seem like there's a new one of these out every month. It's enough to make a man wonder if someone out there thinks we're not skilled enough.)
The atlas of the real world - Wow! 18 slides that redraw the world map based on stats other than simple land mass. Some pretty amazing insights here.
I don't hate the new James Bond theme but I have a feeling both of these performers (Jack White and Alicia Keys) will do better versions on their own when they're on tour. Not a very smooth mix.
Microsoft's Viral Video Adventure: Seinfeld/Gates vs. I'm a PC - They note that the Seinfeld/Gates commercials saw considerably more viral traffic than the "I'm a PC" ad. Not really too surprising if you think about it. Does that necessarily mean the Seinfeld/Gates commercials were better even if it seemed like more people didn't like them?
I noticed Yahoo has the first five minutes of that new Blindness movie available online. I thought that was unique but it turns out they have a whole list of opening scenes you can watch for free. I guess it's like offering a free chapter from a book. Pretty compelling actually.
How do bloggers make money?
And... Big blogger pay cuts - What's interesting to me about this item is the addition of press mentions of a blog as a measure of success. That's a pretty mainstream standard that doesn't fit the typical "link and be linked" blog strategy.
Search Google's 2001 database. The cool thing is that they partnered with the Web Archive so that some of the search results actually render to old Web pages. Go back to the days when Baja Picante was a new Dorito flavor.
Folks in New York City on Halloween may want to participate in a reenactment of the parade scene from Ferris Beuller's Day Off.
This might make you feel better if you're in some of the more weather stricken parts of the country. (Potentially NSFW finger gesture.)
Our old friend Desktop Tower Defense in a slightly different (and is it just me or is it also slightly harder?) whiteboard version.
A commonly held conception is that any problem can be solved if it's given enough thought. I admit to generally imagining future solutions in terms of how much time it'll take to think them out. Turns out, I'm being "thinkist" in holding that faith. Thought alone doesn't solve problems. (Though it may seem anti-intellectual at on its face, this is probably the opposite of anti-intellectualism. The point is that solutions require more rigor than just thought.)
Metal Gear Solid Rubber Band Gun Is the Most Badass Way to Take Someone's Eye Out - (If this feels familiar, it's because we met the Disintegrator back in January.)
I hope to have a real post up today, it's been a busy week, as you know. But I had to share this game that absolutely crippled any chance of post-work productivity for me last night.
Fantastic Contraption - I could not get past level 16 last night.
NOTE: On levels that took longer to complete I did see some browser lag. At first I closed the browser and it thankfull remembered me - even when I switched from Chrome to IE - but then I clicked the "light graphics" button and that worked too.
I have installed Twhirl and it makes a world of difference in using Twitter. Essentially it turns your Twitter account into an instant messenger. Different people feel comfortable with different interfaces but for me, perhaps because of my chat background, I like IM so this suits me well.
Twhirl isn't new but Dropbox is and though I haven't tried it I plan to install it on both my home and work machines. I've mentioned before the problems I have with doing work on my home machine and then coming in to work and having to figure out how to get the previous nights work back in front of me. (You'll recall Instapaper was one solution I was liking for a while.) Dropbox is for more than just links, you can drag photos and whole folders into the thing and it synchs up with your other machines. Actually, it's probably less about synchronization and more about Dropbox being a middle man, but the demo video looks like what I want to be able to do: on the way out to work, drag whatever I'm in the middle of into a folder, get to work, open that folder and there I am. No e-mailing stuff to myself, no plugging in flash drives. I'm going to set it up Monday so I'll let you know if how it works.
I didn't hate the Seinfeld Microsoft commericials but I agree the point of them was a little difficult to discern. I do, however, really like these new ones that are apparently going to replace the Seinfeld ones.
I just added this as an update to yesterday's post but since it looks like it could be a new story on it's own I wanted to surface it here. Someone claiming to be the person who hacked Sarah Palin's e-mails posted a confession/explanation of sorts on a message board. The message was deleted but not before there were grabs taken and the username and the associated e-mail address were noted. At the time (long, long ago, yesterday afternoon) the thinking was that it would surely be a dead end because how could the guy be so stupid as to post that long confession and use something that could be so easily traced? I should add a note of caution here that as far as I know, no one has been charged and of course the person who owns that address is being investigated because it's an obvious lead. But at the same time, it appears that the hacker may actually have been that stupid. I'm sure there are a lot of people blogging it but I clicked Gateway Pundit.
Something that didn't occur to me that of course makes sense is that Internet justice in a case of invasion of privacy will be a complete and thorough invasion of privacy. I expect this will not be pretty.
In the Light Bot game you program the robot to make it move. A nice level of challenge without being too discouraging.
Am I crazy or does the alligator in photo number 6 look kind of happy? I actually tried to use the Bird's Eye View in Live Maps over Gilchrist, Texas to see if I could find the house in photo #11 but I can't make it out. I did learn from a colleague where Jeff Ranieri was standing when he shot this video. If you've got two monitors you can pan Google street view at the same time he pans his camera for a before/after perspective.
Speaking of using Google Street View to explore the real world, Google Street View goes mobile
Speaking of new stuff from Google, they launched audio indexing. The software can translate the audio in YouTube clips and offer that translation to search. That's cool in itself but if the thing can understand audio, why am I still typing into it? Is it time for the audio revolution?
Speaking of audio, I was watching the Bandcamp video here when I saw the adjacent link to this cool Droste effect video. From the Flickr category I saw the mention on this photo of GIMP plugin MathMap. (Reminder: GIMP is a free open source photo editor.)
Mr. and Mrs. Vader
I enjoyed this collection of computer generated art. Each photo links back to a gallery of the artist on computer generated art site called CG Hub.
If Wikipedia was a college professor...
How to switch back to the old Facebook layout if you hate the new design.
The Bike Of The Future: Vetrix Electric Super Bike - Yes! All this talk of electric cars is making me crazy. Why not put a battery in a motorcycle to introduce the technology in a much lighter form? Vetrix already produces a "maxi-scooter" so how far away can a proper motorcycle be?
The anti-theft lunch bag is a brilliant idea. I bet you could do something similar with food coloring on the bread itself.
YouKnowster lets you make your own "You know you're ... when/if..." lists.
Ninja cat comes closer while not moving!
Ze Frank has updated his memory game. Funny how the basics are so satisfying.
The new Sticky Note Experiment video from the Diet Coke & Mentos guys.
Company to help content owners "monetize" illegal content - Assuming the "monetizing" isn't completely obnoxious, this could be a great idea. Instead of yanking illegal clips from YouTube, the clip automatically pulls in an appropriate ad. Everyone wins.
Differences between liberals and conservatives and the foundations of moral psychology. Nearly 20 minute video but contains interesting ideas. The temptation to personalize or politicize what he's saying may undermine its value but it's good food for thought as a context.
More than 20 million homes have cut the cord on landline phones - Wow, that is way more than I would have guessed. We hear about this more often lately because every time a poll comes out someone points out people with cell phones instead of landlines can't be reached by pollsters. I'd always dismissed that as an academic argument but wow, 20 million.
You may have heard about the scandal that an Mtv reality show taping left the natural setting of the show in shambles but did you know there is such a thing as the Tree Climber's Coalition?
"...Astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of." According to Femia's Law of Schlocky Science Reporting, whenever scientists admit they can't explain something we are free to speculate not only about the explanation but also the implications of any imaginable hypotheticals. And so it's my duty to report that the mystery object has been speculated by some to be an alien race of life farmers, returning to seed-planet Earth to restock supplies before heading back out into space to spread life through the galaxy. Should this possibility prove correct, they're going to be pissed when they find out we're all out of Tasmanian Tigers.
The Internet has blessed us with the original recording of that John McCain interview in which he appears not to know the leader of Spain. Sorry, but I'm giving this one the "non-scandal" stamp. That lady is wicked hard to understand. Maybe he should have asked her to repeat herself but I could barely make out what she was asking and I had the notes in front of me.
At this point the Palin e-mail hack story is probably mainstream enough that I don't have much to add. It's interesting to note that, as Bob Sullivan warned about a few weeks ago, the common suspicion is that the password was obtained through research, not decryption or other kind of technical hacking.
I also notice Bob's report from earlier this month about some of Palin's SS# being revealed. That's not really a big crime but it makes me think back to when she was first announced as McCain's running mate and everyone was fighting about whether she'd been vetted. Almost immediately someone had copied photos from her kids' MySpace pages and I remember thinking that she must not have known the announcement was coming because her family didn't have time to set their accounts to "private." But maybe living our lives online is too new for there to be such a thing as a "digital lockdown" performed on a person suddenly entering government life.
It's funny to see Gawker bearing the brunt of so much pro-Palin rage for posting the contents of the hacked mail account. They were hardly the only place to find that material. NOTE: If you click that voicemail link, put on your headphones, it's curse-laden.
More compelling will be whether there's any follow-up with Ctunnel on who actually did the initial hack and whether they can be caught.
UPDATE: Gateway Pundit is blogging the heck out of the tracking of the hacker.
Also, Obama's G-mail was hacked.
It's been fun to see all the new ideas and technologies roll out to the trumpeting of tech heralds but a theme of making it easier to express oneself online has created a moment of reflection in some parts of the blogging community. If maintaining a blog is too much trouble for you, you can try a Tumblr blog (tumblelog) which is just like blogging but easier. Still too much? Just use Twitter, it's only 140 characters at a time. Can't be bothered to Tweet a sentence? Friendfeed will collect the feeds from your various social accounts and put them all in one place for you so all you have to do is play with some bookmarklets to generate a presence on the Web. But who wants to bother with a presence on the Web? A lot of discussion lately has focused on leaving remarks on other people's sites and the amount of notoriety one can generate as a nearly anonymous commenter. Of course, you could always just tinker with your Facebook status and play online Scrabble.
While none of these developments could be described as blog killers they've definitely taken some of the enthusiasm out of the idea of blogging revolutionizing media and taking over the world.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the blogging stage, reading blogs and other online output has also become easier. Instead of reading blogs directly you can follow their RSS feeds in your aggregator. Or follow the feeds of blog searches in your aggregator - why be bound to specific blogs? Or don't bother setting up your own aggregator; sites like Memeorandum will do the aggregating for you so you just get the good stuff. Better yet, a social aggregator site like Digg will give you the good stuff - or at least the popular stuff, which is sometimes good if you shovel through enough of it.
It would be wrong to say that the value and significance of online citizen media has decreased but clearly its character has changed.
Further contributing to the pallor of disquiet is the recent departure of Jason Calcanis from the blogging scene. Obviously just one blogger quitting is not a big deal no matter who he is, but his reasons did serve as fodder for discussion. Calcanis is part of a generation of bloggers who are reaching a point of success and fame at which some of the properties and principles of (inherently small-media) blogging begin to give way to those of big media.
I'd planned to pepper this item with links, but as Clicked is more of a link-list blog, I think it's more fitting to share some of what shaped my conclusions above as a reading list. Let me know if you see something else in these tea leaves:
The song from
that Reebok ad with all the football players walking through their respective cities is
"Train Song" Vashti Bunyan. Not really as cool as it sounds in the commercial.
Speaking of ads, that Snickers commercial that has folks up in arms plays on the opening of the "
Get some nuts" site. The
site also has a little game where you drive around shooting Snickers at
people. If you haven't seen it already the soccer player one is in the
site's video tab.
In case you aren't surrounded by enough nerds to get your fill of post-Dark Knight discussion, I recommend the
Kevin Smith chat on /Filmcast.
It's full of spoilers and curses and as such does a good job of being a satisfying "what was so great about that movie" conversation.
Speaking of Batman, since these comic book movies so often take on the gray areas in the definition of justice and good and evil, in my mind they always make good metaphors for the War on Terror. So I walked out of the theater last weekend drawing parallels between Osama bin Laden and the Joker and even Harvey Dent and Barack Obama in terms of their image of squeaky cleanness (and of course the obvious FISA wiretapping parallel). But is there a Batman parallel? Is it George W. Bush? For all the conspiracy theories about the Bush administration is the room for one that would have him playing the role of vigilante outcast? It's a tenuous argument and more of a mental exercise than a serious position but I was excited to be tipped off to
an essay on Salon.com touching on that very theme and by way of links leading me to an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal called,
What Bush and Batman Have in Common.
Speaking of Bush and Batman,
Bush or Batman?
And by the way, if you saw Batman you saw the Watchmen trailer and if you didn't you need to
watch it right now here. "Eagerly anticipated" does not begin to describe the atmosphere online for this film.
Speaking of trailers that inspire head-popping excitement,
The new Caprica (Battlestar Galactica prequel series) trailer is out. It looks about a close to a Bladerunner TV series as we're likely to get.
Speaking of building publicity online for upcoming shows, did you see
the vampire dating site meant to tease that new HBO show?
Speaking of trying to keep up with new HBO shows, I stayed up late this week to get caught up on Generation Kill. Here's
what Generation Kill gets right about the invasion of Iraq.
Seemingly every other week there's a story about some powerhouse company with plans to pay a ridiculous amount of money to buy Digg.com. The new one that folks seem to be taking seriously is a rumored offer from Google supposedly in the $200 million range. I read this item because of its headline:
Why doesn’t Google build its own Digg like Yahoo and AOL did?
Be the missile - Harder than actually playing this game is playing it without bobbing and ducking your head.
Johnny Depp's Island to be Solar and Hydrogen Powered - Follow
that Ecorazzi link for some video.
Credit to reader Phil for spotting
a more ridiculous version of the other day's "cancer cured" headline.
What would compel a famous astronaut to make up
stories about aliens? That is to say, if he's not telling the truth, what would his motivation be? Is he making fun of UFO believers? Has he lost his mind? Has someone played an elaborate joke on him? If you don't think he's joking or the victim of a prank and you don't think he's lost his mind, then...
There's nothing like reading
someone else getting yelled at to remind one to pay better attention.
Baby's first internet -
NOTE: Not for babies.
Groverfield - See also the link to
the mysterious new Muppets videos.
Cake Wrecks, the ugly cake blog.
Lastly, I have to mention
the political campaign of Sean Tevis. The idea of an "Internet candidate" is tossed around loosely by the mainstream media, generally applied to anyone who manages to raise money online. A better demonstration is the
Netroots activism of sites like Atrios who pinpoint local elections, find like-minded candidates that need help and rally the strength of a national audience through the principle of micro-payments. But what we see with Sean Tevis is the kind of Internet candidate that makes futurists giddy. On his own he told his story, described his platform and presented himself to his online peers. Those peers responded with enough financial support to secure his candidacy, if not his victory.
I haven't had time to poke through the local Kansas media to see what the folks there think of having their politics influenced by outsiders. Tevis is a local guy, so it's not like some carpetbagger is sweeping in on them but part of the story (and part of the point of Netroots) is to bring support to someone who doesn't necessarily have it from the local political scene.
(As a tangential but not insignificant point, when you view the source code of the Tevis site he has included special messages for programmer nerds in the comment tags.)
Folks who've spend any amount of time on a basketball court understand a brick to be a non-scoring shot that thuds awkwardly into the rim. I think I've heard "brick" used to describe particularly and unfortunately unintentionally dense bread. And "brick" or "bricked" is becoming an increasingly common term for gadgets that for one reason or other don't work. Previously I'd heard the word using mostly in connection with tampered-with gadgets. People would try to tinker with the software on a phone or camera and end up bricking it either because they did something wrong or because of company safeguards. But since the iPhone 3G debacle at the end of last week I'm seeing
"brick" as the word of choice for the shiny, heavy rectangular box that hundreds of thousands of people waited hours to buy only to have it do nothing more than be a shiny heavy rectangular box.
NOTE: Contains one pretty distinct F-bomb.
How to beat the claw game - I don't find this in Snopes so it might actually be real. Y'know how every once in a while there's a news segment that shows a little kid trapped in one of those claw games? This video shows how that happens.
Photojojo has instructions on
mounting a regular pocket camera on your bicycle handlebars. I'm not sure you really need instructions for this but there ya go. The problem I've had in trying to do this sort of thing is getting the camera to see what I see. That said, "jittery handlebar cam" video does have its charm. And what a good excuse to re-watch
this exhilarating NYC bike messenger race video from a few years go. (And hey look there's such a thing as
The Bicycle Film Festival.)
I've never been able to put AllTop to good use because it's a little too broad for my purposes at Clicked. Their new
Frienderati feature is worth a look though. They took the Friendfeeds of big names in tech blogging a put their 5 most recent items all on one page. It's still not a "top links" aggregator but you can spot trends as you scroll through it.
It doesn't do any good for one word to have
a really specific meaning if the word has so many syllables that it might as well be a sentence-worth of words.
I spent a bit of time last week playing with
Flowgram. I didn't try to make one, I just watched a couple of the
already built ones in the list but it's a really neat idea. It's sort of like an audio slide show but the slides are clickable Web pages. Actually, it reminds me of the "buddy surfing" idea I remember some of the instant messengers offering that let two people share a live browser window. In this case a Flowgram can allow you to give someone else a guided tour of Web sites while still giving them the freedom to click on their own. Can you imagine a Clicked like this?
Feist counts to 4 on Sesame Street. The two top favorites in my house right now are
Norah Jones and the
Goo Goo Dolls.
This is obviously wicked dangerous and if I catch you doing it you're grounded but what a great fun idea it is to
drive along side your RC plane and pilot it through a tunnel. I wonder how well it handles the turbulence created by other cars.
A big story I didn't get to mention last week is the judge's order for YouTube to
give its user traffic data to Viacom as part of Viacom's lawsuit against Google. The stand-out line for me: "Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement." I'm
less convinced than Helen that copyrighted bootleg material isn't the main appeal of YouTube. I think a lot of YouTube's success comes from the fact that traditional content producers were so slow or otherwise clueless about making an online video service as useful as YouTube. Separate from Viacom's lawsuit, what I'm wondering is whether traditional content producers will starve YouTube to death now that they're coming up with video solutions of their own. And if they (with sites like
Hulu) can add a user generated/social element to their legal video libraries, does that spell the end of YouTube?
Hey look! It's a recommendation from Ralph!
Battle of the Bands: Rock Band
Build your rock band and compete for the record contract. But be careful to hit your notes at the right time, or the audience will boo you off the stage!
This one's pretty fun. Maybe now, when I get Rock Band for my Nintendo Wii, I'll be ready for it! Hope you enjoy it too.
-Ralph
Will closes the browser in shame: Wow, I never play those guitar hero games and I seriously suck at this one.
I'm away from Clicked this week but I hate to let it sit idle and obviously I'm still going to poke around the Web so hopefully I can do a few light updates this week.
I lost some time this morning to
Star Fighter. It's interesting how it doesn't need an instruction mode because the control keys are labeled in the screen readouts. The one bit of advice I didn't realize until my second game is that you want to shoot like crazy with the space bar, not selectively.
Portable Autonomous Sentry demonstration - Tell Sarah Connor to trick-or-treat at a different house.
I feel like there's something I'm missing about
this rental car rally. You pay 150 bucks and rent a car and drive to Montreal. And there will be parties.
"
100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You’ve Never Heard Of"
Watching this commercial I have to wonder how well Sylvania light bulbs are selling in Bangkok.
Solar saves the deay headline of the day:
How a Giant Solar Tower Could Power the Future - The idea is that the temperature different between the top and bottom of a huge tower causes a natural updraft that turbines can then turn into energy. As the commenters note: dubious.
Pharrell's tattoo removal:
"It's basically like getting a skin graft, but you're not taking skin from your ass or your legs. These guys actually grow the skin for you," he explains. "First you have to give them a sample of your skin, which they then replicate. Once that's been done, they sew it on - and it's seamless."
New pictures from the
next Harry Potter movie.
The title of this is "
Stripper Fail" but it's more like a belly dancer. There's no explicit nudity and even the front of her top is blurred out but it is a wiggling dancing lady so be aware at work. Anyway, you'll see the disaster coming from a mile away.
