Feed Sift

-1-

Skyscraper Slums: Insider Tour of World’s Tallest Tent City - This is fascinating, video is totally worth watching. (WebUrbanist)

-2-

Disney Research makes paper cool again by turning it into a generator - This is pretty neat. Another short video worth watching. (Engadget)

-3-

I love my Contigos

I was surprised to see that my wife's post about Contigo on her blog has gotten a lot of traffic.  I thought "I want some traffic. Maybe I should write about my Contigos because I love them." I've raved about them on Facebook but never written a blog post about them.

What makes Contigos really cool is this thing they call AutoSeal.  The opening has a spring-loaded sealing valve inside the screw-on top.  The valve is operated by a large button at the back of the lid.  That allows you to use one-hand to take a drink.  This is handy when you're on-the-go.  It can tip over, fall out of your hands, be dropped and nothing spills.

Paying It Forward

Mom and Dad gave me one of these as a gift. You can jumpstart a car, inflate tires and stuff and charge a cell phone with it. I'd used it plenty of times to inflate tires and other things around the house, worked quite well.

Once a week Lori has lunch with me at work. If they're out of school, it's all of us having a nice family meal in the work cafeteria. Recently we decided at the last minute to meet some place for lunch instead of coming to the office. The kids were having a slightly rough time of it and Lori wasn't feeling like preparing lunches or trying to stop somewhere with them and pick up something. So we met at Wendy's instead.

While we were eating, we watched someone messing with a dead car two over from Lori's. After awhile, another car came. The dead car was a newer model Toyota sedan of decent size. The helper car was a tiny mid-80's I dunno... maybe a small Yugo or something. It was a tiny car. I just imagined them hooking up jumper cables, cranking over the Toyota and seeing the little car explode. After a while the small car left and the couple was still there with their dead car.

So when we came out, we were loading up the children and they asked if we had cables. We started to pull them out and then I thought that maybe I should bring my car around instead. No sense in having the little ones sit in the hot car. So said goodbye to the family, they left, I jogged a few rows over to my car. By the time I had gotten back around, the space next to them was now open. (They had pushed it out some to try to get the cables to stretch to the little car.)

Feed Sift

Some interesting stuff I've come across recently on the internet...

-1-

Activating Streets: The makeover of Pioneer Square - great comments as well

-2-

'Transit' Might Not Be Essential to Transit-Oriented Development - interesting - the notion that you need light rail or something to create demand might not be true

-3-

In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity - boy, that's gonna be tough to write off

-4-

Photos That Captured the Best Moments in People’s Lives - a feel good read/view

-5-

Escher + Inception: Tour a Digital World that Defies Physics - someone please hook this guy up with Robyn and Rand Miller. This messes with my brain but I'd sure like to be able to virtually walk around in the space and take it all in.

Attention to Detail: Pink (@VSPINK)

Apologies if this is a repeat.  While I am not their demographic, I snapped this with my camera last month because I think it's pretty awesome.  Once a year I spend most of the day in Tukwilla at the mall or surrounding areas - shopping for Christmas presents, walking or jogging, taking a little time to myself.  It's usually early in the first week of December and this year I headed up after dropping the children off at their schools.  So I got to the mall before most shops (save Starbucks) had opened.

So I grabbed my coffee and began to wander.  So where lots of other stores have ugly roll-down or roll-out gates, PINK has something far different - a series of wood and glass panels.  The wood is distressed and varied in color/finish, the glass ranging from clear to frosted to stained glass.  Most people will never see this and it probably cost more than a standard metal bar gate but it's a really nice touch. I think this speaks to me in terms of beauty and richness.

Stupid FedEx is Stupid

Stupid FedEx takes far too long to deliver a stupid package with even if you pay for stupid expedited shipping and then try to deliver the stupid package during the tiny window when no one's available to pick it and and then takes 3 stupid hours to update their stupid website which defaults to stupid mobile which doesn't have the stupid option for stupid in-store pickup and then you click over to their stupid full-size website and it forgets your stupid tracking information and you have to start all over again.

FedEx is stupid.

Postal Brilliance

I meant to mention this a few months ago but I thought the photos were poor so I don't think I posted it.  If I did and this is a repeat, my apologies.

Anyhow, these showed up a few months ago at our post office.  Brilliant.  I pick up the mail in our post office box once a week and there's always a bunch of garbage.  I used to take it all home so I could pull off my name and address and drop in our burn bin.  But now, I don't even need to take it out of the post office.  It's great, a locked recycling bin.

Odds and Ends 62

-1-

GOOGLE -- The World is Full of Interesting Things - 120 slides of videos and websites and art and stuff. (Plan some time before visiting this link.)

-2-

CNET NEWS -- Empire State Building refaced for savings

-3-

MASHABLE -- What Kind of Geek Are You?

-4-

INHABIT -- Microbes in the Gulf May Eat More Gas Than Previously Thought

-5-

HOLLAND AMERICA -- Sweepstakes for a 7-day Alaska cruise (does mean requesting a copy of the Alaska vacation planner)

-6-

CROSSCUT -- Checking in on Seattle's Giving -- Seattle (at 7) is one of 15 cities worldwide with more than 5 charities in Chronicle of Philantropy Top 400.

-7-

ENGADGET -- Bus that travels over traffic longs for US embrace, designer seeks stateside collaborators

-8-10- Videos after the break... Bashed bumblebee, mimic robot and lego creation builds lego creations

Odds and Ends 37

-1-

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

-2-

LIFEHACKER -- Seven myths about grilling

-3-

SEATTLE MET -- Google Map of Seattle Street Vendors

-4-

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.

-5-

*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.

-6-

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

-7-

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?

Pretty Cool Video

from Engadget

Cool Business Card

How cool is this?  This is someone's business card.

Or more to the point, everyone who works for lego has business cards like this.  It might be hard to carry several pocketfuls around a convention, but still cool.

(from Andy Sernovitz)

hehehehe

Watch the entire video here.

Quick to the Beat

This is really cool - seven songs made entirely by mixing and layering YouTube videos.  Something about it makes me think that there's a chance it'll get pulled for some reason, so go check it out quickly.  Neat stuff.  I've only had a chance to listen to a few of them so far, but good stuff.

I Spy with my Eye-Fi

I scored at the conference I went to earlier this month.  There were some great giveaways... PureSend gave away these great little notebooks and really solid stainless steel water bottles... ExactTarget did "room drops" of $10 iTunes gift cards and Subscribers Rule! pins and hats.  (Had never heard of a "room drop" - where they pay the hotel to leave gifts in our room for us when we're not there.)  e-Dialog hosted a small intimate dinner and I was one of the people they invited.  One session on SMS had a contest where we texted them the answer to a question and they gave away a $50 gift card which I ended up winning.  (I used it to get gifts for the family and pay for some of the incidentals meaning less to have to ask for reimbursing on.)  And then they also had a "vendor tour" - I didn't do it last year, but I figured I could act like a grownup, I could go talk to salespeople without accidentally agreeing to buy anything.  Anyhow, you visit vendor booths and they stamp a little card.  After you've gotten all your stamps you turn it in.  Pretty much all of the vendors were giving away iPod Touches.  Except PureSend which was giving away a tiny 8mp digital camera and an Eye-Fi card, which I also won. 

I've played around a little with the camera, but I didn't get to play with the Eye-Fi card until today.  It's really pretty slick. The box contains a small card reader and a tiny 2GB SD card.  You plug it into the computer and it's supposed to bring up the installer program.  (Mine didn't, I had to go onto the card and start the setup program.)  Then it installed some software, and then it updated the software.  It tried to connect, got stopped by the computer's firewall.  I gave it permission, it tried again, and succeeded.  And then it didn't do anything.  And if I tried to get it to do anything, it just kept opening new tabs in Firefox asking me to sign-in to my account, even though I hadn't yet created an account.   I had to look through their forums, and finally found a link to register, but it said it couldn't find the card and so it wouldn't let me.  So I saw someone else that said to just remove and reinsert the card.  I did that and it indicated that it recognized a new card and proceeded to let me register it.

It needed to access the wireless network in the house, so I entered in the non-broadcast SSID and the WEP key, but then I ran into another roadblock.  My router only allows authorized devices to connect.  I couldn't figure out how to find out the Eye-Fi card's MAC address, so I had to go into my router settings and let all devices connect to it.  Then restart the connect process, which it did just fine.  (And then go back into the router, find out the MAC address of the newly connected device, authorize it and then re-lock-down the router.)

After that, it was smooth sailing.  It's a very cool little device.  You insert it into a camera (It worked perfectly in both of our computers) and as you take pictures, they are uploaded, via the wireless network, to your computer.  You can also simultaneously upload them to a photosharing site if you want, which is pretty slick.  If the camera turns off or you go out of range of your wireless connection, it will just resume as soon as you go back in range, even mid-photo.   (You can pay $15 a year and then be able to do the same magic from any AT&T/Wayport WiFi connection which is most McDonalds and Starbucks.)

Powermat (Video)

Kinda cool if you can overlook the awful hosting job.

Get The Windex

So... vertically mounted rear-projection touch-screen for narcissists.  Ok, kinda cool.  Is it multi-touch? 


Interactive Mirror from Alpay Kasal on Vimeo.

Holographically Delicious

Drool... makes that flickering Death Star in that old movie look cheesy. (Though it is apparently 2D... can't see the other side by standing somewhere else.) Still, freaking cool.

Up Late / Brand Tags

I've been seeing this on the blogs but never got around to looking at the site until tonight. Brand Tags - the site shows you a logo and invites you to type in the first word or phrase that comes to mind. It's really interesting to see how well companies do (Apple) or don't (Blockbuster) have a good handle on what people are saying about them. It's hilarious to sit there with another person scrolling through these. I'm picking on Blockbuster because I think so many people have really nailed it with terms like "archaic" and "dinosaur" and "antiquated." It is crowdsourced and unmonitored, so language warning blah blah.

Clever Online Store

Check this out. Apparently there's an actual store and they decided to have a little fun and turn it into a rube goldberg machine.

Cool Site: Songerize.com

This is a cool site, Songerizer.com. I don't know how it works (or if it won't be gone tomorrow for running afoul of copyright laws), but you type in a song and an artist and hit "Play" and a few seconds later the song begins.