"The more I want something done, the less I call it work."
-Richard Bach, Writer from Chicago: Jonathan Livingston Seagul
Hey everyone, this was a big week for surprises: Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize over a couple of decently credible candidates, the moon didn't blow up when we bombed it (bonus: we still have tides!), the cardinals with two outs in the ninth only had to catch a pop fly to end the game and...the professional baseball player got hit in the nuts with the ball and dropped it--Cards went on to lose their 3rd straight game--Chicago Cubs style, AND I finished a weekend update! As always, I hope that you enjoy the selection of news and reviews that I plucked from the internet for you:
Some Things that Don't Suck:
Zip Skinny, If you have every wanted to compare your neighborhood with another by using a gauge more sophisticated than landscaping, this site is for you. It pulls together all kinds of public data to give you a pretty clear snapshot of a given demographic. And if this data gets your juices flowing, check out data.gov--one of Obama's promises of government transparency--literally all of the data that is collected by the federal government. Good luck sifting through it though.
Along those same lines, Politifact.com is one of my new favorite websites. It is a "neutral" website that does fact checking and rates bullshit spewing from politicians on a scale from 'True' to 'Pants on Fire'. So I am sorry Glen Beck, now everyone will know that most of the time you are talking out of your ass. Another fun feature of the site is the Obameter--which tracks the big guys progress on his 500 campaign promises.
This Shirt..., A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to see the "T-qualizer" shirt in action. It literally has a couple of equalizer bars on the front of it that respond to the beat of music around you. Kind of nerdy--maybe, but do I want to order it online right now--yes!
Google Powermeter, how would you like to visually see how much power your home is drawing from the utilities in real time--from the internet or your phone--and compare it with other homes in your area? I would! That said, I would probably take it too far and starting killing watts like it is Apollo 13, but seriously...this is really cool.
CanvasPop, If you are into decorating your walls (mine are mostly empty) with really cool pictures that you have taken--or want them in some kind of custom frame or with a cool photoshop filter--you would either have to call my friend Bob, or really get taken to the cleaners--until now. Canvas Pop (dot com) has all kinds of options, accepts any resolution and format, and gives you the pricing right up front. If that doesnt tickle your fancy, you are going to have to call that other guy I know and he will do it Lego.
Direct Charity, I am a skeptic--so I have never been fond of dropping money into cans and would never really consider any of those "Just a dollar a day..." campaigns, but oxfam gifts are different. Buy a goat-$50, Buy a cow-$75, buy a water jug-$18...they take a polaroid of it--which is mailed to you, and the gift is mailed to the people who actually need it. Kind of like Farmville, but real.
50 Extraordinary Billboards, This paint advertisement is pretty sweet...but a close second has to be the McDonalds sun dial...
The Yes Men Fix The World, who doesnt like a little satire--well apparently corporate America...expecially when you lie about being an executive of a large corporation and speak at a conference with live coverage...These guys have done that...and keep doing that to get their messages out there! Sometimes when you tell the truth, it is so ridiculous that it is funny, and then instead of sending your ass to jail, someone decides to make a movie about it.
Take down the Man, just like the Yes Men mentioned above, my two friends that started 'TDTM' are also liers--I mean they changed their names to protect their "law-school" identities. That said, I really like the stuff they have so far, but course work really seems to be holding them down because there hasnt been a new post in awhile. I encourage you to visit their site and poke around...maybe it will get them off their asses--much like the recent traffic to my blog is getting me moving.
Google Wave, There is no good way to describe this--yet. This very new "thing" replaces email, instant messaging, blogs, and online photo albums. There are so many features that the video explaining it is over an hour long. Last month Google invited 100,000 people to try it out--one of those invitation was sold for $27,000 on ebay the same day. This is huge--tell all your friends, the internet just turned upside down, got faster, more interactive, and takes up less space...Okay I will explain that last little point: instead of sending an email to someone and replying back and forth creating new copies of the same information, a 'Wave' is started out on a server somewhere--all the information is in one place. You can replay back anywhere inside the message and it will add a timestamp. Better yet, there is a playback feature that will play the responses like a movie in case someone is added into a long wave pretty far into it. Very sweet, google is taking over the world again.
Some Things that Do:
The guy who is trying to burst the A123 Bubble. A123 (AONE) is the battery company that I have been hyping going on two years now--they basically went back to the drawing boards and reinvented batteries to be lighter and to charge more quickly. Their IPO was two weeks ago at $13, and they have recently jumped into the $28 dollar range. I am loving it, and this journalist is trying to rain on my parade with his "facts" about how the company hasn't shown any signs of being profitable--whatever.
Some Things that Do:
The guy who is trying to burst the A123 Bubble. A123 (AONE) is the battery company that I have been hyping going on two years now--they basically went back to the drawing boards and reinvented batteries to be lighter and to charge more quickly. Their IPO was two weeks ago at $13, and they have recently jumped into the $28 dollar range. I am loving it, and this journalist is trying to rain on my parade with his "facts" about how the company hasn't shown any signs of being profitable--whatever.
Accidentally attacking a NAVY SHIP, the Somalians have struck again, and this time they really messed up...It was dark and in their tiny fiberglass pirate boats they mistook the 525' long steel Navy Cruiser for a freight liner. Oops. Good guys: 1 - Pirates: a lot. On a side note, they were lucky in the fact that it was a French Navy ship, so their odds of a surrender were decent.
Gov. Blago 'No Shame' Tour continues, as reported by the Sun Times earlier this week, the former governor and future inmate of Illinois is to be fired by Donald Trump on his fading-in-popularity TV show, 'Celebrity Apprentice'
Shameless Self Promotion, my website is getting more polished by the day, and I just got a new printer that will automatically print labels when new orders drop. If you want to to help me test it out, go ahead and order some of my sweet vitamins and I will give you a big hug the next time I see you.
Until Next Time,
Chance
