Entries from September 2006 ↓

Ugly Dress.com – Bridesmaid Dresses From Hell is an “archive of the world’s worst Bridesmaids dresses. Contained within are photographic proof of some of the dresses that our friends, the brides, have made us wear so that they could look good.”

Worth visiting for the great dress titles including “Married in a Whorehouse” and “Pole Dancer Pink”.

One guy (Noah) took a pic of himself everyday for 6 years but this is my favourite, it’s called “Living My Life Faster – 8 years of JK’s Daily Photo Project” and involves some very cool hair effects.
Living My Life Faster – 8 years of JK’s Daily Photo Project on Vimeo

This could be really cool: Ning – Create your own Social Websites!
Ning gives you the platform and tools to create your own video, photo or group site which you can make public or private. You also get access to the source code which apparently is 100% customisable. It makes its money through ads and premium services (like $20/month to run your own ads which I think is a LITTLE steep). A pro for some and a con for others is that the web applications are hosted on their servers. I think it would be cooler if they did a Movable Type and sold licences to use it on your own server.

Andrew has a new favourite past time, checking out the signatures of American Presidents on Wikipedia. It’s great! I think his favourite is Lyndon Johnston’s which “looks like Armenian”.

This is way cooler than Guitar Hero…

UrbanGuitar.com :: Main Stage :: Guitarmed and Dangerous

New Yorkers David Hindman and Evan Drummond have created a new form of gaming, and the guitar- a real one- is the controller. Conceived and developed while Hindman was a student at New York University, “Modal Kombat” is an extension of the classic game Mortal Kombat. Instead of battling with buttons, however, characters fight by responding to notes, chords, and melodies played live by participants on guitar. The resulting performance is “a modern-day ‘dueling banjos,’” says Hindman.

There’s some video of it on the modalkombat.com site.

Maybe it was Kafka who wrote a story about a man who was so disturbed about the passing of time that he took to waiting in queues so that time, and thus his life, would be spent more slowly. Anyway, they’ve done a study of attitudes to people jumping lines. Apparently:

When a person intruded into a line, this resulted in an objection 54% of the time. However, when 2 people intruded at once, there were objections 91.3%. The figure shows that 73.3% of objections came from people behind the intruder, and the person directly behind the point of intrusion objected most frequently.

I’m presuming that these were only vocal objections as I thought there would be more if it included unvoiced ones, but you’d have to read the actual study…

BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Girls’ school women ‘earn more’

Women in their 40s who went to single-sex schools subsequently had higher incomes than those in mixed classes, a long-term study shows. Researchers at London University’s Institute of Education are tracking almost 13,000 people born in 1958. They said boys and girls in single-sex schools were less likely to have studied “gender stereotyped” subjects.

Phew, lucky I changed schools in the second year of high school to an all girls’ school. But isn’t it nice to know that the reason they earn more is because they were less likely to take up “female” occupations, which are paid less than technical or “male” jobs…

Yale to Make Select Courses Available on the Internet

Yale University is producing digital videos of selected undergraduate courses that it will make available for free on the Internet through a grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation… The project will create multidimensional packages—including full transcripts in several languages, syllabi, and other course materials—for seven courses and design a web interface for these materials, to be launched in the fall of 2007. If the venture proves successful, Yale hopes to significantly expand its online offerings over the next few years. The new venture joins a growing number of university-based initiatives that use the Internet to make educational materials widely available.

The three courses being taped this winter are Introduction to the Old Testament, Fundamentals of Physics and Introduction to Political Philosophy. Detailed information on the Yale project and others supported by Hewlett’s Open Educational Resources Initiative is on the Foundation’s web site including an initiative to provide free educational resources from the UK’s Open University.

AtomFilms – Me

The idea is simple, the result is stunning. On November 1, 2001, artist Ahree Lee began taking daily digital snapshots of her own face; and she has continued this project every day since. In 2004, Lee compiled all of her daily images into a montage with a wistful musical score. In the fast-paced parade of images you’re about to see, each second of screen time represents about one week’s worth of pictures.

It’s kind of freaky, the way her face keeps the same expression the whole way through.

Here is my odio.us Custom Web 2.0 Business Plan

Disruptive social-networking-aware remixable blog desktop app that leverages the long tail.

To get your own, download the app, or click on the up/down arrows until you find one that you like!