Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

An Australian artist, Justine Cooper, created the marketing campaign for a non-existent drug called Havidol for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder. Both the disease and the drug are made up.
The marketing campaign included billboards, a website, and a booth set up in an art gallery in New York. The website and the booth are obviously parody, but they are done so well that many people have decided that the disease and the drug are real. So many people that pharmacies and doctors have been inundated with calls asking for the drug.
If you go to the website for Havidol you can read all about the symptoms that the drug is supposed to treat. It seems that the drug will fix every possible problem you might have. From physical strength, to popularity.
The claims are so outlandish and fantastic, that people should at least be skeptical. It’s kind of sad that so many people actually believe that the drug is real after going to the website.
You can read the news story here and go to the main site here

I don’t think I would want to have this guy for a neighbor. A lot of the experiments on his site seem a little dangerous. While he clearly has a rather unhealthy obsession with electricity, all of his experiments are very cool. The picture above is real, and I really recommend going to his site and checking out the other pics and experiments he has on there. Besides the pictures of his experiments, he also has detailed instructions and directions on how he did each of his experiments.
Check it out here

Ed Felten at Freedom To Tinker, a blog I read pretty regularly, wrote an interesting piece about the use of bandwidth. He questions whether or not we will ever reach a point where we have literally more bandwidth than we could possibly use.

If you are into computer tech, you will know that it is largely taken as a given, that no matter how much power and storage we have in our computers, it will never be enough. Every time a point is reached where we have more power in our computers than we need, a new application to consume that power is developed. The same goes for storage space. Just a few years ago, I would have been hard pressed to fill a 20 gig hard drive, but today, I easily max out the 100 gig hard drive in my computer at home. Simply having more space caused me to find more uses for it.
Most of the time, people assume that when it comes to bandwidth, the same rules apply. no matter how much bandwidth there is, people will find a way to consume it. In Felten’s post, he asks if this is really the case? He argues that there is a physical sensory limit to how much bandwidth a single person can consume. So in his estimation, we will eventually reach a point where adding more bandwidth to our connections, will not be useful or necessary. To be clear, he says we are no where near that point right now, and won’t be for years to come.
I would argue that while he is correct on the physical sensory limit, he is incorrect on the usefulness of increasing our bandwidth beyond that point. In the near future, I see every device in our house being connected to the Internet in some way. Whether it is for remote monitoring, or automatic updating. All of those devices will use bandwidth. On the entertainment or sensory side I see lots of new devices whose goal will be to gather, filter, organize, and update any information you might be interested in automatically. most of that info might be wasted, but gathered anyway on the off chance you might want to look at it in the future. this is already happening with our TVs. DVRs record shows for us that we may never watch, but we want to have just in case. As more of our media and news moves to the Internet, I think that will become more common.

Found this very cool site on another blog I read. Seriously cool looking lamps and art sculptures. I could even see a few of these in my house. Sadly, the entire site is in German(I think) and I can’t read any of it. So I have no idea if these are for sale anywhere, or just art in some museum. Either way, they are pretty cool looking. Check it out here

As many of my friends from college know, gummy bears have a special place in my college history. During the many long hours I spent in the computer lab doing projects, gummy bears were a major form of sustenance. Since we weren’t allowed to have any food (including candy) or drink in the labs on campus, the gummy bears were always a sort of open secret. Many people including some of the professors, knew that candy, cookies and even sodas were being consumed in the lab, but as long as you weren’t blatant about it they would look the other way. There was an exception made to the no candy rule, for breath mints. So jokingly the gummy bears were renamed “bear mints.”
Now, you are probably asking, what prompted this little nostalgic walk down memory lane? Well, I found a rather interesting flickr pool devoted to gummy bears. So check it out. Gummy Bear Pool

Well, the Superbowl is over. The Colts won and Bears fans are sad. I know, I had a bunch of them in my house last night. But for me, the fun of the Superbowl is the commercials. This year there weren’t that many good ones, but a few gems stood out. Check out this spot for blockbuster.

To see a list of some of the best spots, follow the link to Gizmodo and their list of favorite commercials.

Read an article about a woman who lost her arm in Iraq. Doctors have created a mechanical arm that is wired into her own nerve endings. So she can control and move the arm using her brain just like you and I would. Pretty cool. Follow the link for more info. Bionic Arm

Just started using LastFM. Yes, I know it’s been around for a while, but sometimes I’m a little slow on getting started with these things.
Basically it’s a big music statistics gathering site. It gathers data on every song you play, and allows you to categorize and tag each song. It then can build a tailored Internet radio station specifically geared towards your tastes. It will also recommend other similar artists and bands that you may not have heard of. You can post reviews, recommendations and any other info you want about the songs you listen to. All of the info you put into the system, is available to others using the system. So if I see that another user listens to a lot of the same music I listen to, I can browse his info to find new music. I can also read his reviews on new songs and see what he thinks of them. All in all, a pretty useful system. You can also specifically recommend things to other people. It has a lot of the usual social networking things that it seems every site has nowadays, but even if you don’t participate in the social networking aspects, it can be pretty useful.

Yesterday I started working on an old project that was put on hold about four months ago. At the time I worked on it, it was a big rush that had to be done “yesterday” So I pumped out a lot of code and worked a lot of overtime hours getting that code written. This went on for about two weeks. Then suddenly, the project that was such a rush got put on hold. I haven’t touched it since then, and neither has anyone else.
So Monday, another programmer and I were assigned to finish it off and deliver it to a pilot location. Again, it’s a huge rush. My problem is that I can’t remember much about what I did and didn’t do back when I originally worked on it. The other programmer and my manager keep coming up to me asking questions about certain modules that I wrote, and I have no idea what the answer is. It’s not that I didn’t document, because I did. I just never finalized the documentation or cleaned up the code. The original two weeks of coding sessions were so rushed, and the decision to put it on hold at the end of those weeks, never gave me a chance to do the finalization I should have.

So far, I’ve been surprised to discover that some of the modules I wrote have features and capabilities that I don’t remember writing. Furthermore, those features don’t seem to be in the original design documents. Other modules work differently or have more parameters than the design document specifies. So all I can surmise is that those features and changes were requirements added onto the project after the design document was written, and that the document was never updated to reflect them. I don’t remember adding them or why they were needed. Neither does anyone else who was attached to the project at that time.
I think the basic lesson here, is that I really should try to document more during the project development rather than leaving the bulk of the documenting for the finalization phase. I should also be more careful to update existing documentation as soon as the requirements or the code changes. Right now I’ve got a lot of documentation and code comments that are inaccurate or incomplete and do not reflect what the code actually does. LOL

Tuesday I purchased the new Mvix MX-760HD media player from ThinkGeek. It’s supposed to arrive today. So I’m really looking forward to it.
The device plays just about every media format you can think of. And it connects easily to any standard media playback device. It sounds really great. I’ll finally have a way to play all of my video and music files on my TV and stereo. You can get a detailed description of the device at the official website: Mvix USA
You can also find a user review of the device at the following blog: skippy.net