everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: off topic

  • Hairball

    Hairball

    Some memes you just can’t seem to escape. They follow you around and track you down, mocking you from the corner of your desktop, infiltrating your search results and clogging up your feed reader.

    First Anil’s seminal post on Cat Grammar which popped up not only in my feedreader but then again on Techmeme and in various online conversations through the day. Next we have a quick history of blogging from Valleywag in which we find cats as the basic motivation driving each new publishing platform. Finally today, while looking for something totally unrelated to. . . cats, I see that the most popular slideshow on SlideShare is about. . . cats.

  • Justin.tv knock off caps to be released by V-Tech

    Justin.tv knock off caps to be released by V-Tech

    It was only a matter of time. The latest internet sensation, Justin.tv has been picked up will become commercially available this Spring. Guangzhou-based electronics firm V-Tech picked up to the trend and is planning on making “Justin Caps” available for sale for $29.99.To keep costs down, the camera has been replaced with a high-resolution CCD cam and a condenser microphone. Connectivity in the United States is going to be via an arrangement with Virgin Mobile who will provide caps with a pre-paid plan for 1000 minutes with a code that will allow cap owners to login to the Virgin Mobile website and purchase additional minutes as needed or upgrade to the Infinity plan subsidized by video advertising inserted into the live feed every ten minutes.

    Obvious Corp. is also in talks with V-Tech and Virgin Mobile and will connect their popular Twitter service to each Justin cap in a multi-media version of Twitter code-named “Snow” in homage to the 1992 science fiction book by Neal Stephenson. As a member of Snow, members will be able to clap their hands to activate a clapper-based shutter that will capture 10 seconds of video and sound and broadcast it to all their Snow network friends simultaneously. When asked why the beloved technology advertised on late-night television was used as the interface, the Twitter staff replied, “if someone’s clapping, it’s got to be worth broadcasting out to your friends.”

    Justin Kan, the Justin of Justin.TV could not be reached for comment. He was too busy running from a crowd of applauding teenagers.

  • Friday Flickr Fun with Dumpr.net

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    Original Image from Stabilo Boss

  • Just Squeezing By

    qe2.jpg

    photo by SunnyDis

    The buzz around the office this morning is the amazing entrance that the Queen Mary 2 made yesterday. It was a flickr moment as everyone with a digital camera flocked to the shore to document the event. Catch more amazing photos under the tag queenmary2.

    News coverage with details of how the QM2 cleared the bridge with just, “27 feet to spare” at in USA Today.

  • Feeling Lonely?

    oddcast.png

    I’ve been ambushed by Oddcast’s speaking avatars before. You know how it is, late at night, you’re browsing around the J. Crew website or something <click, click, clic. . .> and all of the sudden at top volume some chirpy, just-woke-up-and-am-here-to-greet-the-day voice comes blaring over your computer speakers, “Hi! How can I help you today!”

    Working from home on today I was looking for a little idle conversation to fill the empty space. No worries, the folks at Oddcast are here to save the day. Great fun here typing in random phrases and having them spoken back to you in various accents. You get about twenty tries until they lock you out. Clear your cookies and you’re back in business.

    My favorite? “Blistering blue barnacles and a thundering typhoon” in an Italian accent.

    Feature request: thick Eastern European accents and a “sassy” mode checkbox.

    Oddcast text-to-speech demo page.

    Thank you Aunt Karen for the distraction!

  • For the man who has everything – one huge swiss army knife

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    In celebration of their 100-year anniversary, Wenger, the makers of the original Swiss Army Knife, are putting out a special edition knife. It weighs almost three pounds and comes with 85 different instruments including the toothpick. Suggested retail is $1,200. Wenger Giant Swiss Army Knife.

  • 5 things you didn’t know about me

    Dave McClure tapped me (and Steve Goldstein) in this season’s Blog Tag meme. The whole round started off with a post from Jeff Pulver who wanted to see if he could get everyone to reveal a little bit about themselves and bring some color to their online personalities. I’m game so I’ll oblige:

    Five things you may not know about Ian Kennedy:

    1. I lived in Japan for 10 years (I am half-Japanese). In a classic case of poor timing, I showed up in Tokyo just as the Nikkei was crashing and then moved back to the US right before the .com bubble popped. I think I’ll stay put for awhile.
    2. While in Japan, one of my jobs was wiring up the Fixed Income trading floor for Lehman Brothers. It was during the late-night rollouts on the end of a T-1 to NYC that I discovered Usenet, Mosaic, and the rest was history.
    3. I love to snowboard and once spent 10 days carving turns up in Niseko, a resort in Hokkaido, where it snowed 1-2 feet of powder each night.
    4. I have over 1,000 hours of bootleg cassettes of the Grateful Dead in my garage. One of these days I’ll get around to digitizing them. A reeeeally loooong rainy day.
    5. I was captain of my Cross-Country running squad in high school. My wife’s cooking has slowed down my times considerably.

    Ok, that’s me. I now it my turn to tag. Let’s see how long it takes for them to discover they’ve been tagged:

    Susan Mernit

    Dav Yaginuma

    David Beach

    Daniela Barbosa

    Cody Simms

  • I’ve seen better UI design

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    Toshiba is working on a new display technology that allows you to get a 360 degree view of what’s on your screen. The downside is you’ve got to strap on a 6 lbs. helmet that makes you look like a bobble-head Neil Armstrong. I think they should have kept this one under wraps before releasing press photos of their prototype. (link to Daily Mail story)

  • Putting out fires with a 747 Supertanker

    Putting out fires with a 747 Supertanker

    Flying down to Burbank this morning I could see the smoke from the massive forest fire that has been raging in the hills to the North of Los Angeles since Labor Day. I heard that they beat back the flames using a DC-10 reconfigured for firefighting and while looking for a photo of this jet, I found this video of a 747 in a flight test. Too bad it’s not approved for use.