These People Conquered The World

Maybe y'all already saw this, but it was just too precious to pass up.  This is the original Microsoft family in 1978.  Check out Bill Gates in the lower left.

Link (from Engadget)

- Seth

Wovel

I think I saw this on Boing Boing a few weeks back. Maybe you guys saw it there too. In case you didn't I'm mentioning it here.

There's this novel being written online in which the author writes about a chapter a week and at the end of each chapter there is a choice to be made. Once you read it you vote on which choice you prefer and the next week the choice with the most votes is where the author picks up for the next chapter. I've always thought a wikifiction concept would be cool. It turns out they tried it already and it didn't work out as well as I would have hoped. This idea is less free form and so far the book is pretty good. It seems to be well within the category "zombie book." Anyway, if you like choose your own adventure books, like dark stories and like zombies you should go read this from the start so you can keep up as it gets longer.

link

Matt

p.s. They call it a "wovel" which I think is a stupid name.

Sounds Like A Winner

This posting just came up on my "Wanted in Chicago" Craigs List RSS feed. This guy seems like a real winner. You gotta love the fact that he sees inviting a stranger to this wedding as a real alternative to his wife. "I'll just take someone else and by the time I get back she'll be over it."

link

Matt

Counterpoint

...

The Tales of Beedle the Bard

Have you guys heard about this? 

J.K. Rowling wrote and illustrated seven copies of this book by hand. She gave six of them away and auctioned off the last one for her charity. It was purchased by Amazon.com for almost £2 Million. For those of you not familiar with the Harry Potter universe, "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" is featured prominitly in the plot of the final book. Rowling just made it real. I would love to hold one of these. If nothing else, they are incredible pieces of art.

Matt

I had heard about this, but I hadn't seen any pictures of it.  As you may well know, in 2005 Andre Agassi and Roger Federer played a tennis match on the helipad of the Burj Al Arab hotel.  The Hotel is the tallest/second tallest in the world.  Of course, the title of tallest anything seems to change every other day now that Dubai has decided to take over the world.  (Note: 1991, 2005)  Anyway, these tennis pictures are great.  My favorite part is the cones.  Look out!

Link

As if the place needed some more advertising (aren't there enough bloggers who will do that for free?), Tiger Woods earned $1M by hitting some golf balls into sea.  Shit, I'll do that.

Link

- Seth

Very Cool Idea

Today's xkcd has an algorithm that, given a point on the planet, calculates a random point within a certain distance of that and outputs the coordinates accordingly. The random point is based on the DOW Opening that day so each day it is, essentially, impossible to predict where the next day's coordinates will be. They call this geohashing (I always wanted to use that term for something else but whatever). I think the whole concept is very cool. What a cool way to meet people. Here's the implementation of the algorithm in Google Maps.

Matt

A Religion For The Rest Of Us

I've been looking for my true calling for quite a while. My Catholic baptism didn't really take. Then, I got sent to a Southern Baptist church for some reason when I was a child. In due corse, I found myself surrounded by Quakers for a long, long, quite time. Since, I've tried embracing the ideals of Pastafarianism, and Bokononism, with moderate degrees of success.  Today, however, I may have found my destiny: The Church of the SubGenius.  

I quote now from the Book of SubGenius:

The Church Of The SubGenius is an order of Scoffers and Blasphemers, dedicated to Total Slack, delving into Mockery Science, Sadofuturistics, Megaphysics, Scatalography, Schizophreniatrics, Morealism, Sarcastrophy, Cynisacreligion, Apocolyptionomy, ESPectorationalism, Hypno-Pediatrics, Subliminalism, Satyriology, Disto-Utopianity, Sardonicology, Fascetiouism, Ridiculophagy, and Miscellatheistic Theology.

I guess I'm a little slow on the uptake, as this is nothing new, but that's the story of my life.  I haven't read the whole wikipedia page about them.  Basically, I'm looking at the list of people who subscribe.  Check it:

• Pee-Wee Herman
• Ash Williams
• Dave Barry
• Timothy Leary

And, perhaps most importantly 

• David Byrne

of Talking Heads, who is responsible for these amazing music videos.

Okay, so I've been wasting a lot of time recently watching old music videos.  That's only because I didn't have access to the MTV machine until it no longer played music television.  So, here're a a couple of cool ones: A-Ha and the White Stripes.

- Seth

Something I Made is On TV

About two months ago I worked for some time on a project in Andersonville here in Chicago building this kick ass counter top and sales station for an eco-friendly children's store. I'm really proud of the work we did there. One of the materials we used was this kirei board. It's a pretty funky material. There is a TV show on NBC that was doing a short segment on this board and so they interviewed my boss and showed the piece we made on TV. It's pretty exciting really! Here's the link to the video. In case you are reading this more than a week after it aired it is in "Season 3, Episode 58."

Matt