Regrow a finger with Pixie Dust
June 4, 2008
A friend of mine found this article – The man who grew back his finger tip. It is quite astonishing. You hear about stem cell research and artificial skin and all kinds of other medical discoveries, but this is pretty cool. I went to school for this stuff, and its amazing to see what we can do.
Here is an updated article about it – Regenerative Medicine
Book of Cool – All the Stuff You Wish You Could Do
June 2, 2008
Sometimes I will flip through the channels and come across a soccer player doing some sick tricks, a skateboarder flipping his board, a bartender setting things on fire and throwing them around, and pretty much, I wish I could be cool like them. I would love to know how to snap a whip or lasso a cow, or breakdance, or juggle chain saws. Of all those cool random things though, I think I spent hours in college (I am an engineer) trying to figure out how all these people could spin their pens on their hands. I would be happy if I had come out of college having learned that. Well, now you too can master all of these randomly awesome skills and really impress your friends. I came across this website and if I had a cashflow I would buy it. Check this out!
Twitter – The Good and the Bad
May 31, 2008
As I’ve mentioned in the past (I think), I’m becoming quite a big fan of Twitter. For those unlucky few who don’t know what Twitter is, it’s basically a social networking site developed to allow its users to update with 140-character-or-less statuses as to what they’re doing or thinking about or something like that. It’s not exactly the most productive site on the Internet, but it is a lot of fun and is good for both networking and just general communication. Lots of people are getting interest in it, and it’s getting a lot of publicity lately. That’s the good. It’s a genius idea and a wonderful service, and I love to use it to communicate with people.
Unfortunately, though, this great service comes with a downside. It’s growing way too fast. Most of the press Twitter has gotten lately has been bad press. I’d link to some of the posts on Twitter’s blog about the downtime, but that’s unnecessary. A simple Google search will pop up tons and tons of results. In fact, they’ve even created a new blog simply for the purpose of getting the word out about their progress in fighting the problems of scalability and overloaded servers.
One other problem I’ve been having lately is with spammers. I’m not sure if there’s a name for a Twitter spammer, but there sure are lots of them. The generally-accepted method of spamming through Twitter is to obnoxiously follow tens of thousands of users (following being the method of seeing what other people post), hoping in return for many of them to return the gesture. Instant popularity. The problem is, it sorta works really well. I’ve even come across a bot titled “AutoFriendAdder” in the last few days. Of course, I quickly blocked the bot, but it proves that this is no secret.
Despite all of this, though, I’m still largely a fan of Twitter and its services. Oh, and if you haven’t signed up, you really should. Once you do that, go to my Twitter page and follow me. I’ll probably go and send a tweet saying that I wrote this post, now, actually…
Gladiator Rejects…
May 29, 2008
I randomly came across this video on none other than YouTube. I remember the good ol’ days of American Gladiator – I would be interested in seeing these guys go at it though. Enjoy!
10 Rules for Dating my Daughter
May 27, 2008
This past summer, I became interested in a girl from Kentucky…(ended up falling in love), but she sent me these “rules” for dating her from her father:
1) If you pull into my driveway and honk you’d better be delivering a package, because you’re sure not picking anything up.
2) You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her, so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes or hands off of my daughter’s body, I will remove them.
3) I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear their trousers so loosely that they appear to be falling off their hips. Please don’t take this as an insult, but you and all of your friends are complete idiots. Still, I want to be fair and open minded about this issue, so I propose his compromise: You may come to the door with your underwear showing and your pants ten sizes too big, and I will not object. However, in order to ensure that your clothes do not, in fact, come off during the course of your date with my daughter, I will take my electric nail gun and fasten your trousers securely in place to your waist.