120: Overplan

Martin looked at the wall. He'd printed out "Sunday" and "Monday" and the next 6 days after that on pieces of paper which he'd then carefully cut out and taped to the wall with painter's tape. Below each one, a blank sheet of paper. And below that, maps of the area. To be sure, he was just preparing for some vacation time, but were something to happen to him right now, if he were to suddenly expire in his little one-room apartment (cleaning would take up several days of his vacation, but he'd not written that down yet), whoever found him might have worried that he had been planning something far more sinister than a methodical tackling of all the chores he'd neglected in the three years since he'd last felt confident taking any time off of work from his job at the insurance company.

Eye-Fi is so cool

I may have written about Eye-Fi before, but I don't care. If you have a digital camera that uses SD cards (like most cameras these days) and you don't have an Eye-Fi card, you are missing out on some great potential for your camera.

Eye-Fi cards plug into your camera and make your camera awesome.

First off, they have a wireless antenna in them.  So as you take photos around your house, they are instantly transferred over your home network back to your computer.  (Or, if you're out and about, as soon as you get home, turn on your camera and your pictures are whisked to your computer.)

Some cards don't need a wireless network and establish their own in order to let you move photos to a laptop while you're out.  There's even a way to combine that with a slideshow program

Odds and Ends 39

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FAIL BLOG -- Answer Win

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CROSSCUT -- How a quiet culture war is dividing Seattle - I Love Crosscut

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ANDY SERNOVITZ -- Zombies On My Doorstep -- End the Phonebook Spam - In the first 12 months we lived here, we received 14 phone books. We had requested two, most of the rest of them were Tacoma in Pierce County instead of the Seattle/King County books that included our town.

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SETH GODIN -- Getting Unstuck: Solving the Perfect Problem

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MASHABLE -- 10 Great Geek Tees For Kids

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ENGADGET -- Porsche 918 Spyder plug-in hybrid headed for production - 78 mpg, 500hp, $650k (but it does qualify for $7,500 tax credit!). Oh, and it's a nice looking car, to be sure.

-7-10- VIDEOS

After the break - Google's latest search story, the Coke Hapiness Machine, Darth Jobs and Minority Report's gloves were stupid (and unnecessary).

Hey @Nintendo, why do you still not get it?

When my alarm goes off, I roll out of bed and the iPhone springs to life before my feet have even hit the floor.  I'm checking email, Facebook, Twitter and some games I play.

My very next step is down to the basement where the big TV is and the Wii Fit.

Odds and Ends 38

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ENGADGET -- Blockbuster avoids bankruptcy for now, but not NYSE delisting

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MSNBC -- Fla. fruit stand begun by boy celebrates 50 years

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UNCLUTTER -- A Thing a Day Challenge Get rid of one thing every day. Interesting, but seems like it would take forever.

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LIFEHACKER -- The Five-Second Rule Could Actually Apply, But Mostly Outdoors Not your kitchen. Where your toddler is eating everything he can find off the floor. Gross.

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TODAY'S BEST THING -- 100 Greatest Movie Insults of All Time. Way too much strong language for me to post a link here, but there are some true gems in there if you feel like Googling it.

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INSIDE YOUR SEARCH -- How Google Works - a behind-the-scenes look at what happens when you search on Google

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SETH GODIN -- But Who Will Speak for the Trees? - why bailouts for newspapers is a bad idea.

-8-10- VIDEOS

After the break - 3D holographic images (getting there), a parrot who does 20 tricks in 120 seconds and Super Mario scored live by a violinist.

Odds and Ends 37

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ENGADGET -- Community-developed Pivot Power strip now available to order - clever - allows every power outlet on the power strip to accommodate a big bulky power brick

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LIFEHACKER -- Seven myths about grilling

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SEATTLE MET -- Google Map of Seattle Street Vendors

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INFOSTHETICS -- Zoom Into Your Roof - In Belgium, a small plane carrying a thermographer recorded heatloss through roofs of a large part of Belgium. You can now go online and see how much energy/heat is being wasted through your roof and get help in minimizing heat loss.

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*church friends - tread carefully, but still important*

FAIL BLOG -- Understanding of the Internet FAIL - Wow... this... wow... major failures all around. So, backstory. Girl (11?) posts video full of cursing saying how she's better than everyone (scroll part way down the page to see it. Or don't. It's 4:30 of swearing no one needs to see.) So then she posts it to YouTube after having apparently never ever ever read a single comment ever posted on that site. Flash forward to the second video (at the top of the page, remixed with autotune in the middle of the page and also re-enacted poorly with legos near the bottom) where she's crying because of the mean things people said and her dad gets in on it (by kneeling so that he can appear in the camera) throwing around useless threats about calling the cyber-police and that he's "back-traced" and knows who it is and "consequences will never be the same." It's one of those really tragic, but at the same time funny (because they brought it on themselves) type of things.

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WSDOT -- Washington announced 'Electric Highways Project' (part of 'West Coast Green Highway' with Calif. and Ore.

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MSNBC -- Calif. city fires all staff, outsources everything (many staff - not including police force - were hired back on a contract basis)

-8-10- VIDEOS AFTER THE BREAK
Google, exoskeletons and a rickroll replacement?

So Long, 15th. Ave.

Saddened to learn via Crosscut that 15th. Ave Tea & Coffee is being re-renamed Starbucks. (If you look at the Street View for Google Maps, it's still showing Starbucks from before they renamed it as part of a test.) That was quick, articles from July 2009 talk about the pending change from Starbucks. Whiplash. Oddly enough, the domain for 15th. Ave. is streetlevelcoffee.com. Brand confusion, much?

The article from Crosscut, is, um... weird... treats Starbucks as a 14-year-old girl that the writer seems to fancy. Hey Ronald Holden, you're creepy!

Read more: The Starbucks siren and her many costume changes