i think it's time for some more demolition

and i don't just mean the walls i recently tore down in my room (cracked foundation -> water damage)... no i'm talking about a neat video that is apparently an episode of a british tv show called brainiac... i believe the thermite video i blogged about before (but whose previous link got broken) is also from that show - which really makes you wonder, what other destructive things have they done for the camera?

this one involves dropping miniscule quantities of alkali metals into a bath tub full of water... i remember my highschool chemistry teacher demonstrating both sodium and potasium reactions with water, but nothing like what happens with these more obscure metals ever happened in my highschool chemistry class (at least not while i was present)...

as always, i love me some demolition... kaboom!

urinal based video games

more from boingboing... it seems that some folks are such compulsive gamers that they have to figure out how to play video games while relieving themselves, and this didn't just happen once but at least twice... i love how the second one has worked out a way for girls to play too...

now they have to figure out how to incorporate number 2... i'm envisioning a bird's eye view of military targets scrolling by down below, and of course the words "bombs away"... or perhaps instead of military targets one could see a more literal bird's eye view of cars and people's heads, but ultimately with the same interface...

biodegradable phones?

y'know, it's things like this that finally make me realize what the real reason for creating biodegradable consumer electronics is - it's the environmentally friendly (and thus politically correct) version of planned obsolescence...

i think the reason the cell phone companies want biodegradable cell phones is because people hold on to their phones for too long... if the phone starts rotting after a little while then you're basically forced to purchase a new one and thus pay more money to they cell phone companies...

very alien plants

i saw alien planet on discovery channel a while ago and i found its depiction of alien life forms very interesting (though the preference for bipedal creatures over quadrapedal creatures was a little unrealistic)... as such it's definitely worth a visit to boingboing to see this Video: plants with lots of eyes. Ew ew ew ew.... not just eyes, either, but also beaks and various other alien things...

and the graphics are incredibly realistic (much better an that alien planet show), which is part of the reason why the video is so creepy...

convergence in the animal kingdom

ok, so what animal creeps you out the most? is it a spider? a rat? a snake? maybe a bat?

i know that some folks are really afraid of snakes and now it seems they've got a whole new reason... flying snakes... ok, so technically they don't fly any more than flying squirrels fly, but still... check it out, they even have video footage...

personally, i'm not a big fan of anything that has the gift of flight, and the thought of a snake swooping down on me from some tree somewhere is kinda scary... it's like nature took an already imposing animal and mixed in one of the few abilities other animals have that could actually make it worse...

comment aggregation

i was chatting with a friend today and during the conversation i mentioned something that i later realized would make a good blog post...

i mentioned that i had been using the comment aggregation service co.mments... up until about 2 weeks ago i had no idea what that service was but now i know and i'm finding it very helpful...

essentially it's a way to track comments that you make on blogs and the replies you get all in one place (so that you don't have to go to a bunch of different sites to see if people have responded to your comments and what they've responded with)... it keeps checking those conversations periodically and the ones that have updates rise to the top of the list (so that new material is always easy to find)... also there's an rss feed for new comments in your list of tracked conversations so that you can keep track of them in a feed reader the same way you keep track of sites you enjoy reading... some sites have rss feeds for their own comments but how many individual comment feeds do you really want to subscribe to?

there are some imperfections of course... some sites it just can't figure out how to track (lack of standardization among blogs i guess) and some blogs have the comments for an article on a completely different page than the article itself so that you can't refer back to the original article when you follow co.mments.com link to the comments page... it would also be nice if i could re-read old comments right from the co.mments.com tracking page instead of having to go back to the original (right now you can only see new comments on the co.mments.com tracking page)... other than that though, i'm finding co.mments.com to be a good time saving device for participating in discussions in blog comments...

tank chair

i've heard of arm chair warriors but that's a little much, isn't it? and besides, where's the large calibre weapon that's supposed to be mounted on it? i mean it is supposed to be a tank chair after all...

ok, well, actually the tank chair is just an all-terrain wheelchair, but still - doesn't it look like there should be some sort of cannon in front?

[found on ohgizmo]

more from feynman

i've blogged before about richard feynman and well, here i am doing it again...

i stumbled across this interesting video on google that's basically an interview with feynman... it's not not nearly as heavy with the science as the lecture videos were, but still very interesting... at least it's interesting to me... he talks about his experiences and opinions, what he knows or rather doesn't know (at least not really) about the world - that sort of thing...

they call me google

you know you've become a rich source of valuable information when the people you work with start calling you google...

really, i can't think of a nicer nickname to have...

explosive chocolate bombs

yes, that's right, chocolates that actually explode... i couldn't let that pass, that's just too neat... found on boing boing...

problems at bloglines

bloglines is down at the moment... if you're not familiar with bloglines (i've mentioned it before) it's an online news feed (RSS, ATOM, others?) aggregator... that means it pulls in new content from a whole bunch of different sites (that the user selects) so that the user can read all that new content in one place instead of having to go to who knows how many sites (in my case about 150)...

i was getting a generic timeout message before and it was very frustrating, but now they're showing the bloglines plumber (this rotund guy in overalls - and really, i think we'd all be happier if plumbers wore overalls - and a pipewrench see the picture here)... i realize now that the plumber actually makes me feel better about the service outtage - it's really weird but i'm not so frustrated anymore... maybe because i know that now someone is actually working on the problem (even if it's not that guy)... i think maybe more sites should use something like the bloglines plumber when they're temporarily down...

useless inventions

here's an oldie i never got around to posting... it's from last year, i hope the links still work...

what's that word? shindogu? i think that's it... ok, this definitely qualifies as a useless invention... it ranks right up there with the motorized icecream cone... it's a motorized marshmallow stick...
T3 - Electric marshmallow toaster

i think i see a pattern here... i wonder, what can i stick a motor in in order to make a lot of money... i've got it - a motorized door knob!

[via Gizmodo]

so did anybody see a post that didn't belong?

i don't know why but it seems it invariably happens... i post an article to one of my blogs that actually belongs on the other one... for possibly an entire minute there was a post here that belonged on my anti-virus blog... oops... oh well...

i'm still alive!

yes, i haven't died and gone to geek heaven or anything like that... i've actually been a very busy beaver over on my other blog... yes, i have 2 blogs, this one is my personal blog where i can be goofy and weird and post about all kinds of crazy stuff, and anti-virus rants where i tend to be much more serious (usually)...

so anyways, yeah, i'm usually serious on the other blog, but not always... the recent post about a cellphone spyware rep complaining to me that some other company was getting all the attention from the av companies gave me a case of the giggles (yes, i giggled)... of all the ridiculous things they could do, they actually complain that their product isn't the one being labelled malware...

i've got a bunch of things i really should post here, actually.. stuff i've stumbled across on the net... some of it's been collecting dust in my collection of things to blog about since last year... i'll definitely try to get on that...

it's magically del.icio.us

ok, well, i've been meaning to do this for a long time so here goes...

del.icio.us is basically a site for storing your bookmarks online... for anyone who uses more than one computer, that kind of service is invaluable - if you use multiple computers i'm sure you've encountered the scenario where you're looking for something you bookmarked only to realize you bookmarked it on a different computer... things you bookmark at home aren't going to be much use to you at work and vice versa...

but wait, there's more... even if you only use one computer del.icio.us still has benefits... let's say you found a page you want to bookmark but it would fit equally well into multiple folders in your bookmarks/favourites - what do you do? you're only real options are to choose one and hope you look in the right folder the next time you're looking for it or create multiple bookmarks in each folder... del.icio.us recognizes that pages can fall under multiple categories and instead of giving you folders to put them it, it lets you tag your bookmarks (very much like gmail giving you the option of labelling your emails instead of putting those in folders)...

oh, but wait, there's still more... you can see other people's bookmarks... i know what you're thinking, yes that means other people can see your bookmarks and maybe there's something you don't want other people to see... well, as yet there are no private bookmarks in del.icio.us but it's my understanding that that's going to change real soon, and besides which it's been my experience that most of my bookmarks don't really need to be private (those that are i simply don't enter into del.icio.us yet)... the benefit of being able to see other people's bookmarks is that you can find people who have similar interests to your own - say for example if you had a bunch of bookmarks tagged "cooking" you could look at the "cooking" tag and see all the bookmarks that anyone has tagged "cooking" because maybe someone else with the same interest has found something that you hadn't found yet...

on top of that, if you wanted cookbook recommendations, you could go to the cookbook tag's page and look at all the links that people had tagged cookbook and look at the number of people that tagged each link... you see, making a bookmark indicates that one finds the page interesting enough to return later - the more people who bookmark the same site, the more people who found it interesting and the more relevant it's probably going to be to you...

personally, i just like the tagging... i find it a much more natural way to categorize things so it's much easier for me to find things later... in fact, i like it so much that i've made del.icio.us my home page - specifically, i've made the page showing all the bookmarks i've tagged daily my homepage because it shows all the things i use daily... it's really allowed me to become much more organized about the way i use the internet and i think has helped make me more productive...

this past saturday

this past saturday i went out with some people for the evening... it was a birthday celebration and we went out for what i characterized as 'food & funny' - dinner at the old spagetti factory and a skit comedy show at second city...

it was an interesting evening with lots of stuff going on... first and foremost, the comedy - i loved the comedy... i'm 30 years old and i've never seen live comedy before and boy have i been missing out... second city reloaded was a blast... i hope i get to see more live comedy in the future...

the food was pretty good too, though i found the spagetti a little hard to deal with on a plate that was more like a bowl than a plate... i generally don't bother with the spoon when winding up the spagetti on a fork (in fact, i don't recall ever doing it, i'm not even sure i know how - i'm so uncivilized) so getting it wound up on the fork in the bowl-plate-thing i had was a challenge because i kept getting too much, it was difficult to properly separate the desired amount of spagetting from the rest... having meatballs with the spagetti was a treat, though, i haven't had spagetti with meatballs in ages...

during diner there was a lot of interesting conversation... some of it about computers and some specifically about blogs... why do people write these things? your inner-most thoughts are inner-most for a reason... y'know, for the longest time i couldn't understand why people kept diaries and really i still don't... those really are your inner-most thoughts and feelings and gosh what always seems to happen to diaries on tv? they get read by people who weren't supposed to see them... a weblog isn't like that - a weblog is a journal but it contains things you actually want to share with people... maybe you haven't gotten around to sharing it any other way, maybe the opportunity just has never arisen, maybe you're just more comfortable with this mode of communication - whatever, but these are not the inner-most private thoughts and feelings of people, no, these are just the things that haven't been satisfactorily shared by other means...

another thing that came up that interested me illustrated that ordinary folks really are learning security best practices - but that's something for a different post in a different blog (yes, i have 2 blogs - check my profile)...

finally, and definitely most strangely, someone asked me if i was a plumber... they said i looked like a plumber, actually a specific plumber as it turns out... that was the strangest comment i've heard in a long time - my first thought was "am i showing too much butt cleavage?"... i assured her i was not the plumber she was thinking of - really the only plumbing i do is simple repair work, no new installations and nothing that might require an acetylene torch, just an amateur (hey, as red from the red green show says, if they don't find you hansome, at least they'll find you handy)... i didn't go out of my way to tell her what i really do for a living, however - a guy's gotta have a little mystery about him after all...

what is a guid?

ok folks... i've seen your searches, i feel your pain... you want to know what a guid is well just head on over to this wikipedia page and you can read all about it...

if you're looking to actually create guids even if just to see one, well, here's an online guid generator...

what does any of this have to do with me or my blog? well, i got tired of various online services telling me that the name i'd chosen (often my own name) wasn't unique enough so in an act of symbolic rebellion i decided to start using 'place guid here'... it's kind of like a threat - i figure if anyone ever tells me that 'place guid here' isn't unique enough, i'm going to start using real guids... a globally unique identifier better darn well be unique enough (at least until the aliens come - then i'll need a uuid)...

followup on snowboarding

it occurred to me that maybe i can write down some of the things i learned, just in case it's a while before i get back out to the slopes...

1. when someone tells you to bend your knees more, make sure you bend over at the same time... my natural inclination when bending my knees is to bend at the ankle as well and keep my torso vertical, however the boots used in snowboarding effectively prevent movement in the ankle so when i was trying to bend my knees i invariably would wind up leaning too far backwards and fall over... the only real way to bend your knees and keep your center of mass over the board is to bend your body forwards at the same time (this is something they don't generally tell you, by the way)...


2. although snowboarding is very similar to skateboarding, there are some ways in which it is very different - like turning, for example... on a skateboard if you lean to one side then the board turns, however on a snowboard if you lean to one side and that side happens to be the edge of the board that is facing down the hill you will fall... the leading edge of the board will dig into the snow and stop suddenly and you will keep going... not a good thing to do...


3. only ever lean into the side of the board facing up the hill... what this does is dig the trailing edge of the board into the snow and depending on how evenly you apply the pressure can slow your descent or adjust your direction... the more gradually you lean in, the more gradual your deceleration will be... if you lean in quickly you will decelerate quickly or even stop - you could even fall, but you should fall up the hill rather than down it and i find that to be the preferable way to fall if you have a choice...


4. weird as it may seem, twisting your torso can turn the board... hold your hands straight out from your sides and the board should pretty much go where you point so long as you're not leaning to either side of the board... once the turn has progressed to the point that the board is a little passed pointing straight down the hill you can lean on the trailing edge of the board and make the rest of the turn much more sharp or slow down or even stop if you so choose...


5. if you fall and find yourself on your butt with your feet facing the bottom of the hill it can be difficult to get up because the board will want to move out from under you as you try to stand - you can roll over on your stomach and get up much more easily so long as you don't mind having your back to the base of the hill...


6. if you do mind facing away from the direction you'll be travelling when getting up, you really need to get good at digging the trailing edge of your board into the snow while getting up off your butt (so that the board doesn't slide down the hill as you try to stand)... the more tired you get, the harder this will be...


7. the more you fall and have to get up, the more tired you will be... by far the most strenuous part snowboarding for us beginners is making and recovering from our mistakes... in that sense, the better you get at it, the more easy it will be both from a difficulty sense and from a pure work sense...


8. the easiest controlled descent down a hill is with your board perfectly sideways and the trailing edge digging into the snow just enough to slow you to your desired speed...

now hopefully i'll do a better job of remembering this stuff for the next time... or perhaps i'll just take advantage of socrates' observation about how reading and writing has given us the luxury of forgetting things (because we can just go back and reread what we've written when the need arises)...

i need to go snowboarding more often

that's the conclusion i've come to - i need to go snowboarding more often so that the things i learn don't get completely forgotten by the next time i go snowboarding...

i went snowboarding once something like 6 or 7 years ago? i don't remember how long ago it was, but it was a long time, so when i went to snow valley this past thursday with a bunch of guys from the office i had basically forgotten everything... now there are a bunch of kurt-shaped holes in the snow leading down the family slope from me bouncing down the mountain 5 times in a row...

it was fun, sure, and i did relearn what i learned the first time and then some, but after the cold wore off and i started being able to feel again i discovered i had become a giant walking bruise so clearly i'm going to have to either never go snowboarding again (which doesn't sound like fun at all) or try harder to stay in practice...

and i suppose if i do then i should probably get some equipment, like for example some sort of snow pants ('cause denim gets wet and cold pretty quick)... and a certain piece of protective gear that probably saved my butt from serious tailbone injury...

well then i guess i'll just have to post about pbwiki, won't i

i got an email today telling me that if i post something on the internet about pbwiki they'll double my free storage space...

what? who? how? when? huh?

ok, i understand, you need some backstory... pbwiki is a simple to use hosted wiki provider - how simple? well, the pb in pbwiki stands for peanut butter... they're supposed to be as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich... it's one of many, many online tools i've found over the past year or 2 that have really changed the way i use the internet...

so am i a big corporate sell-out now? well, no... i've been using pbwiki for a while now to hold and organize information that doesn't really fit in too well to things like online bookmarking sites or stuff like that - like a personal knowledgebase... i've also been meaning to post about all the cool tools i've uncovered and make use of online (often daily) and so a post about pbwiki was probably going to be coming sooner or later anyways, the email was just a little extra push... maybe now i'll also post about how easy it is to use blogger (you're reading my blogger blog right now), or how useful del.icio.us is, or any number of other things...