Month: July 2009

New Rules

Wired has a great little feature called New Rules for the Highly Evolved – it features contributions from Brad Pitt.

It’s a feature providing all sorts of tips for how to use social technology in a socially acceptable way. I’m sure there are some rules that I’m breaking. But here are my favourites.

There’s this graph on when it’s appropriate to reveal TV spoilers…

And these great little articles (there are more that I wasn’t really enamoured by…

  1. Don’t blog or tweet anything with more than half a million hits – I’m probably guilty as charged, though I see my blog as a repository of things I’ve found on the internet and while I care deeply about you, dear reader, I’m not worried if you’ve seen stuff before.

    “The things we forward, tweet, or post send a message about who we are,” Berger says. “And you don’t want the message to be that you’re behind the curve.”

  2. Delete stuff you don’t want on your wall from your online profiles – While I’m all for freedom of speech the thing that annoys me most (almost) is being misrepresented. I do enough damage to my personal branding on my own, without people sabotaging it.
    An example: people using my phone to send stupid SMS’s to girls I was interested in.
    You’re judged as much by your associations as by your actions so take heed of this advice:

    The only way out is to police your wall, even if that’s awkward. Don’t be shy about deleting untoward graffiti, eliminating your name from tagged photos, or even asking friends to remove incriminating pics that weren’t meant for public consumption. “You might damage a friendship,” Donath says, “but that’s one of the costs of the collapse of social circles.” Then again, you could migrate to MySpace. Nobody pays attention to anything written there.

  3. And lastly, the great social conundrum of our time – knowing which ringtone to choose – that won’t ever be a problem again thanks to this handy flow chart.

A bunch of links – July 20, 2009

  • 5 (useful) links #13
  • What I learned from the Mormons
    An interesting piece of reflection on some interaction with Mormons in Utah… point 6 was insightful:br”While they say they are disciples of Jesus and recipients of his grace, clearly they are not. I read somewhere that Mormonism is like an American form of Islam. There is something in that; it is a religion of works, self-improvement and legalism (Col 2:20-23), as opposed to authentic Christianity (Eph 2:8-10). They believe that orthodox Christianity, as we know it, is deficient. “

Catharsis

There is something cathartic about unsubscribing from an annoying blog you subscribed to on a whim. I can now appreciate the joy with which Strongbad yells “DELETED”. Though it’s a double edged sword because it hurts when the number of people subscribing to your own annoying blog drops…

Page turner

Woohoo. After a fair bit of frustrating experimenting with php I’ve got the “older posts” link to actually display older posts, rather than just the same 20 posts that appear on the front page. Now I just have to get the sidebar behaving correctly… But now I have a headache.

Guestimate

XKCD’s take on the craziness of Microsoft’s ability to analyse waiting time.

It’s much like calling the RACQ – which I had to do last week after leaving my headlights on for a day.

Graphical truth

GraphJam is awesome. And it appears that it has been overtaken by acerbic Christian wits and journalism graduates… such is the level of cynicism displayed by these posts…

A bunch of links – July 19, 2009

Soul Music

This GraphJam assessment of Christian music (not church music the "commercial" part of Christian music that is an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars per annum) reminded me of this classic South Park episode where Cartman starts a Christian band and writes songs by substituting "you" for "God" in classic songs… these may be offensive to Christian music fans…

Here’s John Safran’s classic segment on Christian music…

A bunch of links – July 18, 2009

For those who fold

Some are folders, some are scrunchers, some are readers…

Here’s one for the folders out there (via bookofjoe)…

And one for the readers (also from bookofjoe)

A horror novella printed on toilet paper… a few times over, so that you can pick up where you leave off…

Then there’s one for the “artistic”… from an Australian company called Crumpler… also via bookofjoe

 

If none of these excite you you can always print your own (also from bookofjoe).

Plushman

Pacman memorabilia is a dime a dozen. But plush pacman toys that will run around your floor are all too rare. You can buy the yellow guy here

You can get the ghosts too – and it doesn’t come down to your ability…

You can just purchase them here

Dillingeresque

There’s a new movie (Public Enemies) coming out about John Dillinger – amongst other achievements the guy managed to escape from prison with just a painted wooden gun (another time he escaped using actual guns).

He sounds so cool that a band called themselves The Dillinger Escape Plan – they’re a mathcore band… heard of mathcore? No?

“Much like math rock, mathcore incorporates heavy usage of unusual time signatures, jarring tempo changes and unconventional song structure. The influence of metal and metalcore is what sets it apart from math rock.”

I hope that has cleared things up.

Prisons are hotbeds of ingenuity. Prisoners have endless time on their hands (particularly the lifers). Over time prison guards have confiscated various pieces of prison grown technology – like this crucifix/sword…

A guy named Marc Steinmetz has photographed a bunch of these prison creations. They’re pretty interesting. Take this shotgun for instance…

SHOTGUN
made from iron bedposts; charge
made of pieces of lead from
curtain tape and match-heads,
to be ignited by AA batteries and
a broken light bulb.
On May 21, 1984 two inmates of
a prison in Celle, Germany, took
a jailer as a hostage, showed off
their fire power by letting go at
a pane of bullet-proof glass, and
escaped by car.

Fail to a T

FailBlog is mostly funny. Sometimes it’s not. This time it’s Mr T awesome.

Horrorble Shirt

Zombies are scary. They eat brains. According to Shaun of the Dead they can’t be killed by your old record collection – even if you play them U2/

Resident Evil is a computer game series (and movie series too). It’s about zombies.

Right, we’re on the same page… here’s a new (and awesome) Resident Evil t-shirt.

It’s free for people playing a demo of a game at a comic convention – that’s so many combinations of nerdness that it’s barely worth it. But the shirt is clever.

(potential) shirt of the day

Glennz.com is running a reader poll on the next shirt they may or may not produce… there are some crackers (though they’re always a little obscure without the caption)… like this one called – it’s a coffee serving robot from the future.

There’s also this Tetris Airdrop…

And these kung fu sumos…