Tag Archives: Interesting
whatsinyourbag flickr community
Posted on 14. Mar, 2005
Excellent community Flickr album of what people (err.. geeks) carry around in their bags. [via Boing Boing]
http://flickr.com/...
Electrifying your scalp improves your language skills
Posted on 06. Nov, 2004
Maybe this will help with my Japanese classes:
[via Boing Boing]
http://www.boingboing.net/...
Harnessing the Hacker’s HeckleBot
Posted on 18. Feb, 2004
Justin Hall on ETech's backchannels:
#etech was a rowdy reflection of the content on stage, people often mocking or doubting the official presenter. It took an unusual presentation or smart delivery to quell most of the "peanut gallery," as famed Tokyo businessman blogger Joichi Ito called it.
http://www.thefeature.com/...
Watch out for your jobs, folks!
Posted on 18. Feb, 2004
From MetaFilter:
Desk Rage
Posted on 18. Feb, 2004
From SMH Radar:
"It is a state of increased autonomic arousal," Samson says. "They are automatic reflexes and they are quite uncomfortable sensations. When you blow off at someone, all of that comes down. You feel like you have had a release and all of those factors come back down to resting level."
The problem is, because blowing your top is beneficial for your body, it can become a habit. "Part of the problem is that, in the short term, it can be very rewarding, and you often return to rewarding experiences. But you have to anticipate what the longer-term repercussions are."
http://radar.smh.com.au/...
98 Tons Of Buried Plant Material To Produce Each Gallon Of Gasoline
Posted on 29. Oct, 2003
http://www.futurepundit.com/...
Balloon altitude record attempt
Posted on 06. Sep, 2003
It's a shame the UK manned helium balloon altitude record attempt was aborted due to technical difficulties the other day, as by sheer luck we arrived in St Ives the evening before the rescheduled launch attempt. The balloon was to be launched off the back of a large ship moored in the bay. A cliff five minutes walk from our B&B offered an excellent view, so we were ready to head up at 12pm to see it go up. We'd only heard about the record attempt on the radio a few hours before, and knew it was somewhere in Cornwall, but didn't realize it was in St Ives until we arrived at the B&B and the owner asked us if we were here to watch the balloon go off
Useless factoids
Posted on 09. Feb, 2003
- One estimate says there may be as many as 40 million unused pianos around the world gathering dust in peoples living rooms.
- Chapin's Social Status Scale uses the objects one has in their living room to determine their social class.
- I appear to be the top hit on Google for marijuana smuggler resume
- Problems with literal translations in International Marketing: Using English in Japanese advertising is cool, well it was in 1992 when this happened. It doesn't matter so much what the words say just as long as there is some English on the packet, so a Japanese coffee marketer added the slogan: "it eases your bossoms", referring to the relaxing qualities of coffee taking a load off your chest.
- According to CNN the Space Shuttle is capable of travelling at nearly 18 times the speed of light. Bugger Einstein. [via jwz via bifrosty2k
The Degree Confluence Project
Posted on 03. Jan, 2003
Now here's an interesting project: "The goal of the project is to visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location. The pictures and stories will then be posted here."
I've had a look at quite a few of the Australian confluence pics, and as you'd expected most of the them are in the middle of nowhere, generally baron land or a bit of bush, nothing majorly exciting to look at. The pic of the GPS showing for example S 36.0000 E 147.0000 is a nice touch at each confluence though. [via ??]
Here is the Albury confluence for Grudnuk.
http://www.confluence.org/...
Disused stations on London’s Underground
Posted on 09. Dec, 2002
Put your train spotting prejudices aside, this site on the London underground has lots of errie pictures of abandoned stations and tunnels. The underground is quite amazing, and almost makes me think of creepy Dr Who episodes.
MetaFilter: What is Evil?
Posted on 24. Oct, 2002
Interesting collection of links on Evil, including the Top 10 Evil people of all time.
http://www.metafilter.com/...
Checker-shadow illusion
Posted on 03. Oct, 2002
Nice optical illusion! I didn't believe it until I loaded it up into Photoshop and eyedropper sampled the A and B squares, they are definitely the same colour/shade of grey. [via G'day Cobbers]
http://www-bcs.mit.edu/...
My Big Compaq Adventure
Posted on 06. Apr, 2002
Mitch's experience with his new Compaq notebook, interesting read. I had a Compaq notebook about 5 years ago and found it ok, but not great. The Compaq pales in comparison to my current Dell notebook, this is possibly the crappiest laptop ever made and has seriously turned me off Dell on the whole. Never EVER buy a Dell notebook. If only my employer still issued IBM Thinkpads, I've had three so far and they were fantastic machines. [via Camworld]
http://www.drive-thru.org/...
Referrer Bombing
Posted on 01. Apr, 2002
More and more people seem to be referrer bombing my site with their Curriculum Vitae. Had these ones today, interesting form of self promotion.. I guess. I wonder if these are specifically targeted at me, or are just set to bomb every URL they visit. Hmm.
Brief WCIT wrap up
Posted on 02. Mar, 2002
Just posting some disjointed thoughts and quotes from WCIT:
In the lead up to World Congress on IT there was a fair amount of Alston and Government bashing over IT and Telecommunications policy. How could the government hold its head up high at the WCIT as it presides over our duopolistic overpriced communications infrastructure? With the poor pay TV, digital TV and broadband take up slipping Australia's rank in comparison to other OECD developed countries.
My basic Telstra services, a mobile phone with moderate usage, two fixed lines and 5GB of usage on Bigpond ADSL costs me on average $420 per month! At 5GB I still have to carefully ration my now firmly entrenched broadband style usage so I don't go over that amount. Anyone who argues the Telstra residential market is not grossly overpriced is dreaming. And my readers wonder sometimes why I'm so bitter about Telstra.
The $50 million broadband stimulus package announced by Switkowski is clearly a smoke screen, thrown in by Telstra to distract the government from suggested regulatory reforms.
It was Alston's big speech day on Friday, a friend at WCIT told me Alston was still running around hyping up his favourite smoke screen at the moment, convinced that 802.11b was the solution to rural broadband. Oh dear. One of the articles I liked the most was in Tuesday's AFR (26/02/02 pg. 63) by Alan Kohler. The best quote: "Richard Alston will stand before the world's IT hotshots at the Adelaide Convention Centre this week, not as an architect of a system to be proud of but as one of the players in a colossal stuff up."
Commonwealth Bank chief executive, David Murray's speech at WCIT was quite a bold one. He blamed the IT industry in the United States for single-handedly wrecking the world economy over the last couple years. I guess he is referring to the single largest mis-allocation of capital in history.
"In a speech littered with sniping criticisms of software giant Microsoft, Mr Murray told a gathering of IT leaders they were responsible for the current downturn because of the hype of the technology boom."
http://www.worldcongress2002.org/...
“EverQuest” spins its own economy
Posted on 27. Jan, 2002
" 'Edward Castronova, associate professor of economics at California State University at Fullerton, recently completed a study of the economic activity surrounding "EverQuest," a popular online role-playing game. In "EverQuest," players control characters that acquire skills and possessions that can be bartered within the game or sold for real money on online auction sites such as eBay.
Based on a review of thousands of completed auctions for "EverQuest" items and in-game currency, Castronova concluded that players earn an average wage of $3.42 for every hour they play the game and collectively produce annual gross "exports" of more than $5 million.' " [via CM via FoRK]
http://news.com.com/...
