en Case You Missed It

This next bunch of advertisements I have never seen on television but then again I’m not a big TV watcher.  Sony came up with very creative (and expensive) ways to advertise their BRAVIA televisions.  There is no sign of the television in the commercial until the name is mentioned at the end so you can only sit and wonder what is being advertised.  The commercial shown here is an extended version so you can see all of the work that must have gone into this ad instead of a regular 30 spot.  Imagine having to clean up after this was finished!   The other three ads are titled Paint, Rabbits, and Pyramid.

There are just 12 days left to take part in this promotion.  $399 will get you one of these XO laptops to keep and the other is sent to a child in need.  T-Mobile is also giving participants in the United States a free year of access to their Internet Hotspots.  Thanks goes to MIT, AMD, Google, Brightstar, and Red Hat for making this great device possible.

These laptops are amazing!  Here are some of the features:

• Extremely durable against environmental factors (high heat and humidity)
• Can connect to other laptops in the community (to chat and share projects)
• Tons of games for learning valuable skills or just for fun

And much more!

So what are you waiting for?  Learn more or donate at Laptopgiving.org.

One of the recent Mac commercials from the PC vs. Mac campaign shows the chubby and nerdy PC character warming up for a boxing match.  He states, “I’m not going down without a fight.”  Well, I found some PC vs. Mac spoof videos where PC comes out the winner each time, which is fun twist.  The Work video is shown below and three others can be found here (Money), here (Girl), and here (Music).  Gotta love the line about Mac’s cat.  =)

When I was a kid, we didn’t have the Lego figurines that kids have today.  If they did exist at the time, my parents must have been hiding the advertisements.  When Lego people were needed to inhabit the huge castle or city that I had just built, it was time for–pause, wait for it–imagination.  This would be a good time to queue Handel’s Hallelujah chorus.  The first image shows a Lego person that I would build in my youth.  That is why these new Lego advertisements make sense to me.  The second image is one of four new advertisements made by Blattner Brunner and can be found here.

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Sorry, no horoscope here.  Astronomy is not to be confused with reading the stars (Astrology).  This year has been jam-packed with amazing spectacles and events in the heavens. 

Perseid Meteor shower – This meteor shower returns every year in mid-August to dazzle our little eyes.  It is caused by the earth passing through the trail of the Comet Swift-Tuttle.   I usually set my alarm for about 2 or 3am to step outside the house for about 30 minutes.  In those thirty minutes, I see about 10 meteors if the sky is clear.  This year I decided to go a step further by driving into the mountains and away from the city lights.  There, the view of the stars by itself is amazing.  About 30-40 meteors were seen that night for the couple of hours that I watched.  It was even clear enough to see the trails left by the larger meteors.  This video basically shows what I saw that night.

 

Complete Lunar Eclipse – I have always heard about the moon turning to blood but never thought that I would see it.  A lunar eclipse is when the earth passes in between the sun and the moon.  On August 28, I sat in a lawn chair stunned by the view.  This video shows the complete eclipse in a couple minutes.  A must see!

5 planets in a distant Solar System – Last week it was announced that a 5th planet has been found in a Solar System that is similar to ours and 41 light-years away.  This is amazing!  However, they haven’t found an earth-like planet in that system.  Not yet at least.  See this article for more details.

Comet Explosion – Late October 23rd a comet exploded.  This occurrence was so big that it was visible in the sky to the naked eye for several weeks.  It looked like a bright star but with a pair of binoculars or a telescope the details of this explosion could be seen.  See this article for more details.

Keep watching the skies.  That sounds like a catch-phrase that I’ve heard before.

Men, don’t like asking for directions? 

Well, Google is there for you.  How about Google Maps at the gas pump?  When nobody is looking, quickly find directions and print them out.  In one swoop try to get both the directions and your gas receipt into your pocket before whistling your way to the car door.  

There is a possible downside though.  Hopefully while you are waiting in those long gas-shortage lines like back in the ’70s at Costco someone isn’t struggling with Google Maps.

To learn more, check out this article.

In recent months, I have stumbled upon some hilarious Michael Jackson “Thriller” videos that have almost brought me to tears of happiness.   So, en case you missed them, here they are in all their glory.

Note:  If you need to take a quick look at the original Thriller video  please feel free to do so now.

First, Cebu Provincial Detention & Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines treats their inmates quite differently than other similar facilities.  Instead of time out in the yard or pumping weights, they dance.  This is one of their many dances, which you can find out there on the net.  When I first saw the girl, I thought, “Wow, that’s a weird-looking g-GOO!”  You’ll see what I mean.  J

The next video comes from the other side of the world, where most of our technical support jobs are being outsourced.  They gave “Thriller” a techno beat and some hilarious new moves that Michael Jackson might want to practice for his comeback some day.  The version that I show here is with subtitles that someone added.  They wrote what it sounds like is being said in English.  Enjoy!

Our last piece of tribute to Thriller is a record-breaker, literally.  Operation “Thrill the World” took place on October 27th of this year breaking the Guinness World Record for the largest simultaneous Thriller dance.  “1,722 people in 52 cities on 5 continents danced ‘Thriller’ at exactly the same time,” according to the official website.

We have all probably had this experience at least once.  I know it’s happened to me too many times.  Out of nowhere appears a gorgeous goddess (or a handsome hunk for you ladies out there).  Just as soon as he/she appears, they disappear.  After daydreaming about that incident for the next half an hour, you come back down to earth and realize that you must let it go because there is nothing you can do at that point.  One man dared to say, “No!  I will not go quietly into the night!”

This brings us to our Web 2.0 story of determination.  And I’ll make it short because my intro took longer than I thought.  =)  So, guy sees girl on a crowded subway train in New York City.  They both get on at the same stop and both get off at the same stop.  The crowd continues to prevent them from meeting each other so he goes home.  An hour later, he creates nygirlofmydreams.com with all the details that he could remember about her, including what she was doing on the train, which was writing in a small notebook.  This site shows up on the web November 4, 2007.  Many probably read the story finding it interesting, laughed, and then continued to surf the web never to think of it again.  I decided to check back on Thursday and to my surprise, HE FOUND HER!  It turns out that a friend of the girl saw the page and they have now contacted each other.  It took only 4 days for that webpage to work.  This is an interesting story of social networking at its finest.

However, just because this worked for one guy, I hope the web does not get saturated with (place city name here)(place gender here)ofmydreams.com domains.  Although, that would be pretty funny.   

To see photos of the girl (Camille), click here.  There is also a video here in which Patrick talks about the Camille.

I never thought that I would be doing this, but here is my attempt at blogging.  The first thing to do was to get rid of the Hello World post that displays when loading this blog up.  The norm is not what I’m going for with this project.  Finding a lot of cool stuff each day by sifting through a lot of worthless clutter, I intend to show off the gems of the web and maybe some of my own interests.

If you see something that should be mentioned here for the entire world to see, leave a comment to this post.

Wish me luck!