This is a bit “english” (polite) and “american” (upfront) at the same time…
Normally, if I get spammy cc-the-world mails from people I rant about how they are human spam-virus propagators. They tend not to do it again, but equally I don’t have as many friends as I used to 😉
This is a bit more polite, personal and – well – it’s just quicker than the effort of being nice…
Best of all, the effort of saying “stop it or meet my spam filter’s blacklist” is now roughly equivalent to the time they took to spam you in the first place. Balance. Zen.
Stunning! There can be no higher purpose to software!
Just as I was wondering why I’d bothered spending cash on a MacBookPro for minimal speed improvements, this guy has taken advantage of the inbuilt motion sensor and commandeered it to trigger light-sabresque sound as you move the laptop around:
Introducing MacSaber 1.0 Beta. Using your Mac’s sudden motion sensor, this software turns your computer into a Jedi weapon almost worthy of taking on the real thing by making authentic lightsaber sound effects. It senses speed for the lightsaber movement sounds and acceleration for different levels of striking sounds.
Should be fun getting through airport security with this enabled…
“You did not hear that noise”
“He is a service droid”
“Go about your business”.
We’d been at the Royal London today for an ante-natal class and while walking back to the car we passed some of the more, ahem, “run down” bits of the hospital. These are the streets of houses-converted-to-offices that normally attract the soubriquet of “crumbling NHS”. I think these bits have been moved to the posh, new bits (as the hospital is renewed in situ over the coming few years) but leaving aside the rather unpleasant name-plate, the handwritten note conjures thoughts of unpleasant deliveries (and maybe also explains why some samples seem to ‘disappear’ in the system…).
For the occularly challenged amongst us the topic of LASIK laser eye surgery is that’s bound to have occupied some thinking time – especially as prices have reduced over the years. Also, with summer here (until the weekend, of course) then one’s thoughts turn to sunglasses and the annual curse of “shall I get prescription lenses or wear contacts etc blah wibble” fires up again.
Imagine the jubilation, therefore, with which I greeted this email link from Al (fellow goggle-wearer and member of the Blind As A Bat club) – DIY LASIK. At home. For £100!!! Yes – it’s true.
Or maybe not 🙂
This is a case where you just have to click on the google ads just to give the creator of the site some small recompense for a sterling effort.
How cool is this? Spotted today at Rotterdam Airport, just in front of the taxi rank.
This is a place to drop off loved ones, with a strict 5 minutes limit: drop and go. With humour and good observation I suppose the area’s called the “kiss and go” area. Wonderful.
I admire someone who’s that combination of arch procrastinator and structured thinker… leading to a theory and practice for the “agile” and “extreme” procrastination.
I sense the need for a professional association… 🙂
This is a total classic. I found it while researching a Skype-compatible headset that’s also going to work with OSX.
This guy, however, would have no truck with seeking solutions: just build your own!
His “lessons learned” section is fun, but this point gives a flavour:
I saved a great deal of money in comparison to actually buying a headset. Based on current retail prices, I could buy an acceptable headset for Skype for about $60. Instead, I built my own for only $95 + $149 + a few cents for tape, newsprint, and ink = $244.
$244? Never mind: just feel the pride!
It’s also a great way to ensure that those Grado cans don’t go to waste (in this day of in-ear, noise-cancelling buds). Ahh – I remember the days of open-design headphones, and letting the whole office hear the ‘ker-tsh tsh flrrr” overspill of my music… 🙂
Courtesy of Mr Winter and his (rather tasty new look) blog, a lovely link to the ‘colour scheme of web 2.0‘. Excellent.
By my humble estimation there seem to be more parodies of W2.0 than actual businesses – maybe that’s a critical success indicator? Or maybe we’re just getting cynical in our post-web1.0 dotage…
Well well well – with charming inevitability, we have (after Web 2.0, Marketing 2.0, eCommerce 2.0, Business 2.0)… “Lunch 2.0”.
This concept, according to the latest lunchors (those excellent folk at Meebo) is as follows:
Lunch 2.0, to give a bit of background, was a cool idea that a few folks from Plaxo had. They bring together people interested in new emerging technologies around the Bay area and have them chat during lunch.
[the ‘about’ page at lunch20.com still has the out of the box ‘about’ page].
It’s a pity that they didn’t take the opportunity to radically reassess the lunching paradigm, to denote the phase change from Lunch 1.0 (so yesterday, dahlings) to Lunch 2.0. There’s no historical nod to the sandwich houses of L2.1, nor the late-90s “soup craze” of L2.2, redifining, as it did, the notion of a ‘liquid lunch’ – reappropriating the term for vegetarian tee-totallers the world over.
I’d have liked to see some key components of Web 2.0 showing up in the lunching, to whit:
* modular, not monolithic. A pizza’s just too old school. Mezze, tapas or even sushi would have had a more component-oriented approach.
* API/service-oriented. While take-away certainly counts as Service 1.0, I think a more personal, one to one, and individual service approach should be encapsulated here. Maybe cooking at the table for the person next to you? chopping their food? Pre-mastication?
Seems like there’s plenty of room for people to build on this ‘modern lunching’ notion: that is, before we all tire of “me too” namings and/or Web3.0 necessitates Lunch3.0!
UPDATE:
Darn, an even more cunning take on the ‘nutrition/eating 2.0’ bandwagon: Cake 2.0 or ‘Cake on Rails’. Thanks to Chris Lake for this.
Helen of Troy’s beauty was such that it could launch a thousand ships. What is the quality therefore of Web2.0 that it can launch a thousand parodies??
