Comic - How to be ... Rich

  ▣

Click here to see Thursday-only posts.

Creative & Weird Photography

It's worth mentioning that this is actual photography ... but more like trick photography. Chinese Photographer Li Wei is not your typical photographer, but an artist. Think of these as visual treats, and as art, more so than photos.

Let's take a look at some of his work, and afterward, I'll let you know how I think he does it.

All these photos were shown here with permission.

I believe there are cables that hold the people and props, and Mr. Li Wei removes them with software. In all cases, the results are weird photos that are simply amazing. To see more of is work, go here (some of his work, towards the bottom, are NSFW).  ▣

Click here to see Wednesday-only posts.

Google Music Search (aka OneBox)

Google updated the music search OneBox, which used to include song titles, album names and some other information licensed from AllMusic. Google Music Search (aka Onebox) is a music search feature that appears inside Google search that will give you not a little 30-second clip, but a full song play.

Search for an artist, an album name or even some lyrics and Google returns a list of songs that can be played with one click. Full music previews are provided by iLike and Lala, but Google also links to other music sites: Pandora, Rhapsody and imeem. When you click on a music result, Google opens a player in a pop-up window, which isn't very user-friendly.

"With Lala, you can hear one full length preview per song. Each subsequent play will be a 0:30 clip," explains Lala. This limitation is very easy to bypass: just clear the cookies for lala.com.

Basically, as you can see in the picture above, you will see play buttons alongside different songs when you get search results. If you press play, a popup from MySpace (iLike) or Lala appears, letting you play the full song and giving you buttons to buy it or get more info. You will also have the chance to check out the band on other services/sites as I've mentioned above.

As you might imagine, there's no mention of iTunes in all of this. This (the lack of iTunes-mention), however, does make me wonder about Apple and whether or not they plan to use the server farm they're building to make their own search engine --Ultimately, this would mean that Google will not be the default search engine for their Safari browser. It can only get more interesting.

Back to what I was saying ...

In essence, Google isn't playing the music at all. It's up to MySpace and Lala to manage the rights of the full-song playback business, and to serve up the content. For more info, check out the YouTube video (below) or Google blog.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV24RBmy-2I

Around the same time this came out a month or so ago (October 2009), and not wanting to feel left out, Yahoo! reminds users that it launched a similar feature last year. "Since launching a partnership with Rhapsody in September 2008 and launching the FoxyPlayer last year, music has been an integral part of the Yahoo! Search experience as well. We have found that nearly 6 percent of all Yahoo! searches are music-related."

Here's the thing ...
(you'll shortly get an idea why I put this waaay at the bottom of this post)

I've been searching music on Google for a few years. And I've been able to "listen" to the results without a hitch. If you've followed this blog at all, it should come as no surprise that I use a bookmarklet. I don't want to give it all away, to be honest, but I'm more than happy to share it for a limited number of people. Let me know in the comments and I'll send you the bookmarklet.

So what does this bookmarklet do? It searches Google (and no other) for music based on a string you provide it (usually the name of the artist or the song ... not the lyrics). I simply manipulate the Google page (the search page and the results page) into something that caters to music. The results are mp3 & ogg files that I can "listen" to right there and then. And no, there are no third-party applications, other links (hidden or otherwise), etc. It's simply a Google search with some serious URL manipulation to customize the search and the results. Yes, it's that simple.

Heck, with FoxyTunes, a free browser plug-in I have on Firefox, it automatically adds the play button next to the results of the bookmarklet. Can I find all the music I want with this bookmarklet? Honestly, no. It's limited by what ... ummm ... I've said too much. Just know that you'll find more than 90% of what you're seeking. And again, if I send you the bookmarklet, you'll have its code to see exactly what it does. You'll even be able to modify it to do other things (hint!).  ▣

Click here to see Tuesday-only posts.

Bayan Sensation Aleksandr Hrustevich

Some time early last month, October 2009, Aleksandr Hrustevich's video on YouTube (see below) became an overnight hit. Aleksandr Hrustevich, also found as "Khrustevich" perhaps due to pronunciation/transliteration from Александр Хрустевич, put the Bayan (a Russian chromatic button accordion) by performing the third movement of "Summer" from Vivaldi’s "Four Seasons."

Featured on NPR's blog and submitted to Digg twice (here & here), viewers raved about his performance, and rightfully so. See for yourself:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Bn4m6dQbI

You can hear, and watch, more of Aleksandr Hrustevich at his YouTube Channel. Look for more of his inspirational performances for Tchaikovsky, Bach's "C Minor Passacaglia," etc.

I'm not sure if Aleksandr Hrustevich is related to this guy, who is also very much worth watching on the Bayan himself; and I'm not sure if Aleksandr Hrustevich is the same as this profile page (be sure to scroll down a bit) ... also available here in Russian. What I do know, however, is like many others, I found Aleksandr Hrustevich's performances very inspirational and moving.

Although different from a Bayan, this accordion performance also deserves a mention as it is equally inspirational & amazing. Be sure to check it out.

I'm always looking for inspirational material. If you come across any, please don't hesitate to share them with us in the comments.  ▣

Click here to see Monday-only posts.

Thanksgiving Camel Ad: Smoke After Each Course!

This advertisement for Camel cigarettes appeared in the November 23, 1936 edition of LIFE magazine. It earnestly demands that you smoke a Camel after each course of Thanksgiving dinner -- "for digestion's sake."

Some of our favorite quotes from the above ad include, "smoke a camel right after the soup," "By all means enjoy a second helping, but before you do -- smoke another Camel," and "My own personal experience is that smoking Camels with my meals and afterwards builds up a sense of digestive well-being."  ▣

Click here to see Friday-only posts.

Happy Thanksgiving Comic

It's not just because Thursday is my favorite day of the week, but because this particular Thursday held a religious significance and it's Thanksgiving. Speaking of which, happy gobble gobble everyone.

  ▣

Click here to see Thursday-only posts.

How Not to Market Your Restaurant

I'm not sure if this weird and bizarre ad is a newspaper's way of killing this business, or if it's the owner's way of building on his negative popularity in hopes of attracting new customers to his finger food selection (get it? finger food?).

What do you think of this bizarre ad? Let us know in the comments.  ▣

Click here to see Wednesday-only posts.

5 Useful Bookmarklets

It's been a while since I wrote about my favorite web "technology" ... bookmarklets. Despite the huge collection I have, I'm constantly coming across some awesome-written bookmarklets. I've also had the opportunity to write a couple for personal use (to help with blogging, etc.), and I wanted to share 5 useful everyday bookmarklets.

To learn more about bookmarklets and what they are, I invite you to read this past post. To summarize, a bookmarklet is a a term that may have originated as a result of the merge between "bookmark" and "applet." Browser-independent, bookmarklets add functionality to any web browser. Consisting primarily of JavaScript code, bookmarklets can be stored in the bookmark/favorite bar of any browser and used from there to perform useful tasks affecting (in most cases) the current page.

In short, bookmarklets allow you to temporarily modify the current page to do something you need. Once you refresh the page, or revisit it, it will be back to the way the web page designer intended it. For a more permanent solution, using the very same JavaScript solutions you find or write, you basically need that JavaScript to run on the specified page all the time ... automatically --And that's exactly what Greasemonkey is and does.

With services like Xmarks, which give you access to your bookmarks from practically any where there's an internet connection, bookmarklets are an excellent cross-browser way of performing some tasks without the need for toolbars (which can be a security risk). Here are 5 bookmarklets, which I'm hoping you find useful:

1. Linkify

My mother sends me all kinds of emails, which are usually links she's come across or forwards from other people. I guess Yahoo! Mail doesn't automatically convert links into ... well ... links. Instead, it keeps them as non-clickable text. That's where Linkify comes in. When I click on the bookmarklet while I've got her email up on the page, it makes what was once a non-clickable link into one that is.

Linkify

Simply drag the "Linkify" link above to your browser toolbar. Alternatively to dragging and dropping, you could right-click the link and click "Bookmark This Link" in Firefox (my browser of choice), or "Add to Favorites..." in IE. Of course, IE will present you with some blocks to running them, which's why most serious-net-browsers do not use IE.

2. List All Links

Sometimes it's handy to list all the links on a page. I use it on pages where music is listed, but don't want to fiddle with all the nonsense. I also use it to test pages and ensure that all the links work instead of scrolling or finding out if an image is a link or not. You get the idea.

List All Links

Like the "Linkify" bookmarklet above, drag the "List All Links" link above to your browser toolbar.

3. Edit Current Website

This bookmarklet turns the current page into a lite WYSIWYG, and helps me with productivity/blogging, but can also be for fun. Imagine changing the headlines at a major newspaper website with your own words, taking a screen shot, etc. Its best use, however, comes with altering text on the fly allowing for easier copy & paste.

Edit Current Page/Website

4. Favelet Suite

The Favelet Suite bookmarklet is the Swiss Army knife of the web design bookmarklet world. It includes the following features:

• Color List
• Document Tree Chart
• HTML Attribute Viewer
• HTTP Header Viewer
• Hidden Field Modifier
• Javascript Object Tree
• MODIv2
• Mouseover DOM Inspector
• Object Dimensions
• Page Info
• Remove Children
• Resize Fonts
• Ruler
• Show Source
• Style Sheet Tweak
• Style Sheet Viewer

Favelet Suite

5. Linearize

Reformats a page so that the entire contents is in a single column. It's great when you want to copy a lot of text from a page. I use it to more easily grab text from long articles with complex layouts, which you can dump into a text-to-speech reader when your eyes are tired (geeky, right?). (originally by Jesse Ruderman)

Linearize

EXTRA

Here's an extra tip, which builds on the same principle as bookmarklets but is not really one. Still, you may find this simple tip handy if you always have a web browser running on your desktop screen in maximized mode, which most of us do.

There are instances when you need to access program shortcuts and files placed on the desktop.

Now instead of minimizing the browser to access these files, you can simply create a shortcut in the bookmarks toolbar of your browser that points to the desktop folder. Click this bookmark and you’ll be able to browse through desktop content within the browser.

To create a bookmark pointing to the desktop, open this address file:///c:/Users/ (probably easier to copy & paste it instead) inside a new tab in your browser (Firefox?). Click your user name and then drag-n-drop the "desktop" folder to your bookmarks toolbar. I do this with my Desktop and with my My Dropbox folders.
  ▣

Click here to see Tuesday-only posts.

Inspirational Monday Quotes

It's been a while since I added any inspirational quotes, and given that it's Thanksgiving week, it's only appropriate.

I hope you enjoy the following 2 quotes as much as I have:

Photo from Flickr

There are many who are living far below their possibilities because they are continually handing over their individualities to others.
Do you want to be a power in the world? Then be yourself. Be true to the highest within your soul and then allow yourself to be governed by no customs or conventionalities or arbitrary man-made rules that are not founded on principle.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

Quote & Photo from Zeenat's Blog

It is by going down into the abyss
that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble,there lies your treasure.

~Joseph Campbell~

Got inspirational quotes to share? Your comments are always welcome.  ▣


Click here to see Monday-only posts.

Sitting On Tha Toilet

I got this from the Tosh.o show. I found it funny, and thought ... well ... to share.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYW6C44zo24

  ▣

Click here to see Friday-only posts.

Comic - Client Base

  ▣

Click here to see Thursday-only posts.

SC Man Convicted of Having Sex with Horse, Twice !!

This story is about two weeks old, but the fact that it took place TWICE landed this on Weird Wednesday.

By Steve Jessmore, The Sun News, via AP

It's only fair to mention up front that the man involved in this, 50-year old Rodell Vereen, has had some mental / medical issues. So what's the scoop? Well, in July of 2008, Vereen pleaded guilty to having sex with the same horse on Thanksgiving 2007. He was declared a sex offender, sentenced to three years of probation, ordered to stay away from Barbara Kenley's Lazy B Stables in Horry County, S.C.

Kenley told police she had videotaped Vereen having sex with her 21-year old mare "Sugar," staked out the stable and then caught him at gunpoint behind her barn.

A family member, back in late July of this year, told The Sun News of Myrtle Beach that Vereen was diagnosed with a "mental disease" more than 10 years ago and may not have been taking his medication.

According to MSNBC:

Vereen has had mental problems for several years, but seemed to get better after getting court-ordered treatment last year, said his brother, the Rev. James Vereen, in earlier interviews. The brother lives just down the street from his brother and the stables.

"He's done all right when he was on the medicine. I don't know if he is still taking it," said James Vereen in a July interview.

The fact that the man got caught twice doing the same thing, to the same horse, with medications deemed necessary by the judge should have raised a flag, and questions on whether this man should or should not go to jail should've been asked.

The serious stuff aside, it was funny reading many of the titles associated with this story. My favorite ... "Love for Sugar lands 'stud' in jail"
  ▣

Click here to see Wednesday-only posts.

The Mosquito Ringtone

I remembered reading about this a couple of years ago when I was describing it to a couple of people who have not heard or knew about it at all. But I couldn't remember what the name / reference of this "teenagers-only could hear" audio. So I started to look it up, and wanted to write about this technological ingenuity, its history, etc.

This technology was marketed back in 2005 as an ultrasonic teenager repellent, an ear-splitting 17-kilohertz (17.4KHz, to be exact) buzzer designed, by British inventor Howard Stapleton with Welsh security company Compound Security Systems, to help shopkeepers disperse young people loitering in front of their stores while leaving adults unaffected. Basically, the idea was meant to drive away teens through ultra high frequency sounds much like how a dog whistle would affect dogs.

“The Mosquito”, as the product was named, took advantage of a curious medical fact that most people are unaware of. The principle behind it is a biological reality that hearing experts refer to as presbycusis (a more accurate source here), or aging ear.

While most human communication takes place in a frequency range between 200 and 8,000 hertz (a hertz being the scientific unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second), most adults' ability to hear frequencies higher than that begins to deteriorate in early middle age.

"It's the most common sensory abnormality in the world," said Dr. Rick A. Friedman, an ear surgeon and research scientist at the House Ear Institute in Los Angeles.

But in a bit of techno-jujitsu, someone — a person unknown at this time, but probably not someone with presbycusis — realized that the Mosquito, which uses this common adult abnormality to adults' advantage, could be turned against them.

As with any inventive good idea, sooner or later someone is going to use it for something other then the original intended purpose. In this case, some equally inventive teens in the inventor’s hometown (Birmingham) caught on to what the company was doing and decided to put turn the idea into something they could use. They took the ultra sonic frequency and converted into to a cell phone ringtone which they aptly named “Teen Buzz”. As such, the “adult proof” ringtone known as the mosquito ringtone was born. The ringtone immediately caught on like wildfire in the UK, and has since quickly spread throughout the reaches of the Internet to teens everywhere. Teens learned they could hear each others phones ringing at school but their teachers couldn’t. The ringtone goes by many different names including Teen Buzz, Mozzy Tone, Mosquito Ringtone, Ultra Sonic Ringtone, and others. It has been used in several TV series here in the United States as well as in this (below) very clever KFC TV Commercial.

In April of 2007, KFC Featured the Mosquito Ringtone in a type of viral interactive commercial. They were giving away (1000) $10 gift cards to the first thousand people that could correctly state at what point in the commercial the ultra sonic sound was played. I don’t know if it is part of the YouTube conversion process, but it’s pretty obvious where the sound is played.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMWqIeb7b6g

"Our high-frequency buzzer was copied. It is not exactly what we developed, but it's a pretty good imitation," said Simon Morris, marketing director for Compound Security Systems, the company behind the Mosquito. "You've got to give the kids credit for ingenuity."

Since then, Mr. Morris said his company has received so much attention — none of it profit-making because the ring tone was in effect pirated — that he and his partner, Howard Stapleton, the inventor, decided to start selling a ring tone of their own. It is called Mosquitotone, and it is now advertised as "the authentic Mosquito ring tone."

To many, this whole notion of a group of people being able to hear something while another older one cannot is all hard to believe. But I assure you it's real. Here's a video that demonstrates this:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrewnzQYrPI

This ring tone comes in different KHz. Some are designed to not be heard by those above 50, or those above 40, or those above 30 and so on and so forth, give or take a few years. Its applications may go beyond teenagers and their cellphones at school. Can you think of an application or two? Share them with us in the comments.  ▣

Click here to see Tuesday-only posts.

Autistic Basketball Player

This kid never complained about being left off the roster showing us all that attitude is everything.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngzyhnkT_jY

Autistic basketball player Jason McElwain spent most of his high school days cheering his team on as a special ed. coach assistant / team manager. That is, until the final 4 minutes of his senior year final game.  ▣

Click here to see Monday-only posts.

Batman Vanishing Act Fail

You can run, but he can't hide.

Sure, Batman's "vanishing silently into the shadows" routine is impressive and unnerving 99% of the time. But what about those rare occasions when he doesn't pull it off? College Humor reveals what happens when the Dark Knight's mystique fails.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPxpo9Wyy7w

  ▣

Click here to see Friday-only posts.

Comic - Money is Greener in the Other Cubicle

  ▣

Click here to see Thursday-only posts.

Hmm Tasty Meat Hand

Think of today's blog post as part 2 to last week's Weird Wednesday one, which was titled "Human Bread: A Thailand Bakery."

After all, who in their right mind could resist a meat dish prepared to resemble a human hand? The complete recipe with lots of photos is available from Not Martha.  ▣

Click here to see Wednesday-only posts.

RJDJ: Technology Turning Music into a Drug

RJDJ is an iPhone application created by same innovator as Last.fm. The London-based technology company started by Austrian entrepreneur Michael Breidenbruecker recently launched the world's first iPhone-only album, allowing listeners to create their own real-time mixes.

The application creates a unique experience with each track, or "scene" as RJDJ calls it. I could spend several hours explaining how this technology works, and how addictive it can be, but I wouldn't do it justice. Most importantly, I wouldn't do the word "addictive" as it refers to this app justice either.

Personally, I hope that they'll make a version for Andriod phones.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPrIPcyemdM

What's your take on this new drug? I think it would be awesome for the kids, on a subway ride, etc. What's your take?  ▣

Click here to see Tuesday-only posts.

Kinetic Sculpture: 714 Suspended Balls

This video is a magnificent display of human ingenuity. 714 suspended balls are manipulated based on a specific angle, illustrating awesome depth, shapes in such a smooth and controlled manner. Simply great.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVhVClFMg6Y

  ▣
Click here to see Monday-only posts.

Funny Friday Prank Video

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI0Hl8xz15M

  ▣
Click here to see Friday-only posts.