My friend snapped this photo of John Hodgman surreptitiously at an undisclosed location that wasn't a Starbucks

I went to the Patchwork indie arts fair this weekend in Santa Ana. I was hoping to find a good painting for my dining room, but didn't find anything suitable. I was pretty psyched to find Patchwork, though. There were a lot of creative things going on, music, food, lots of cool handmade t-shirts and clothes and other arts and crafts. It was a pretty small fair all things considered but dense with goodness.

One of the artists that was there was Steph Calvert. She runs an enterprise called "Hearts and Laserbeams" and under that name creates a lot of whimsical trendy art pieces. Many of which involve robots and cupcakes. It reminded me that although Southern California is, at times, very mass produced, it also has pockets of fun stuff going on that are the origins of the "next big thing".

How can you not get excited about eating a formal dinner hanging from a crane with ~20 of your closest friends?

Dinner in the Sky

Thanks Nate (and Andrea, and Betsy)!

This is the coolest thing I've heard of in a while. Apparently Orange County uses the big networks of run-off canyons to route rain into the ground-water-table. It's like a massive version of the canonical Seattle rain barrel that catches and saves water from your gutter implemented at a municipal scale. Further coolness is that fact that the 2 billion gallons that Orange County has captured in the last few days has an estimated value of $1.5 million.

Sciencedude - OCRegister.com
"OCWD uses small dams in the Santa Ana River, near Honda Center, to corral water, which is then guided to percolation fields. "

"The Queen of Narnia and Empress of the Lone Islands desires a safe conduct to come and speak with you," said the dwarf, " on a matter which is as much to your advantage as to hers."
"Queen of Narnia, indeed!" said Mr. Beaver. "Of all the cheek ---"
"Peace, Beaver," said Aslan. "All names will soon be restored to their proper owners. In the meantime we will not dispute about them."

...

"Oh," said Mr. Beaver. "So that's how you came to imagine yourself a queen -- because you were the Emperor's hangman. I see."
"Peace, Beaver," said Aslan, with a very low growl.
"And so," continued the Witch, "that human creature is mine. His life if forfeit to me. His blood is my property."

From C.S. Lewis's, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe

I love that saying... "Peace Beaver." I love the Chronicles of Narnia as a book. As a movie I'm ambivalent.

My high school got rated #1 by U.S. News and World Report. Boy, I feel sorry for the rest of the nation. :)

Gold Medal Schools - US News and World Report

Thanks for the pointer Nate!

This was so outrageous that it deserved a blog entry:

"An email mailbox represented as a 3D, virtual LAX airport. in this "world's coolest email program", based on the origin or destination of the email, each message is depicted by any of over 80 world airlines (e.g. for UK, it comes by Virgin or British Airways). emails with attachments are carried by the couriers: FedEx, UPS, DHL, and CargoLux. in addition to the pilot chatter & roaring engine noises, the 3D world depicts has both day & night scenes"

Click on the trailer on the left.

I found out about it from information aesthetics

Yet another reason why USAA rocks: USAA is a financial services company. I do most of my banking with them. They have no branches as far as I am aware. From my perspective they are a completely online bank.

Typical criticisms of this are that you can't get cash and that you have to deposit checks by mail, which is slow. Well USAA addresses both problems. They will reimburse you up to $10.00 a month in ATM fees charged by other banks. And now the COOLEST of all things. If you want to deposit a check you simply scan it and upload it. It goes immediately into your bank account.

I'm totally excited about this because it is fast and even easier than putting it in a deposit envelope and mailing it. I don't know how they deal with countering fraud, but as far as I'm concerned it's awesome. It took me about 5 minutes to scan and deposit two checks and the money was in my account immediately.

(However, it took me 5 friggin' hours to get the software for the scanner set up!)

The President held a reception at the White House for the NCAA Championship teams. Since UCI won the men's volleyball championship, they got to go. While making his remarks the president actually says "Go Anteaters". Click on the image on the left to see the clip.

The clip comes from the White House's web page here:President Bush Meets with NCAA Championship Teams

After hearing Jimmy Carter speak I respect and admire him more than ever. As Chancellor Drake said he is an outstanding example of a man who acts from his values.

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Education -- Jimmy Carter urges balanced U.S. position toward Israel during California campus stop
12:44 a.m. May 4, 2007
IRVINE – Former President Jimmy Carter urged students at a Southern California university with a history of strained relations between Jewish and Islamic groups to set differences aside and work together to find solutions. More

Dude, me and Jimmy.

The Center for the study of Democracy and Model United Nations
Present Former U.S. President
Jimmy Carter

This is too cool. A hamster powered shredder. Hamster runs. Paper shreds. Hamster uses shredder paper. Link

The Washington Post has produced a March Madness style beer competition between 32 notable brews. The winner is Brooklyn Lager. Who would've guessed? Saranac Pale Ale made a close second. Click on the image on the left to see the full match-up.

This company has a totally cool vision, trying to power ocean going vessels with enormous kites: KiteShip - Innovation in Tethered Flight

It seems totally cool. It would be environmentally friendly to a huge degree. Enormous sails could be made, the size of which sails could never match, but there do seem to be some drawbacks:

• Sailboats don't use wind the same way kites do. While they are some times pushed along by the wind, they also use wind the way an airplane wing does - especially when trying to make headway into the wind. So the kite could only take a ship in a direction that the current wind supported.
• What happens during a storm? Old-school sailors have perfected lots of methods for dealing with that sort of scenario
• Would a new hull design be required that maximizes efficiency when being pulled rather than pushed?

This cool YouTube video shows a handful of visualizations of flight data in a time lapse mode. The creator did some creative things with color and trails which makes for some neat images - if you are kind of geek and into this sort of thing.

Thanks Charles!

Following up on a previous post here about ice cube trays that make ice cubes in the shape of legos, here is an ice cube tray that makes ice cubes in the shape of enormous diamonds.

Awesome alternative jack-o-lantern from Bits & Pieces: Big Mac pumpkin

These are totally cool. Ice cube trays that make ice legos. Finally an easy way to build an evil ice palace.

This is incredible. A guy solving a rubik's cube blindfolded.

Cool table is a mashup of other tables. Neat metaphor for a conference table - lots of people, creating a new thing which is a merger of everyone's ideas.

Tjep. - Accident for Strawberryfrog

This is insane. It's a waterski-style inner tube with the added advantage that when you get air, you *really* get air. It converts to a kite-like parasail device. Talk about extreme-sports. I predict this thing will exist for about six months before the company gets sued out of existance.

Nonetheless, I sure want to try riding it. Buy it here. See it in action here.

I just spent an hour chatting with Chris DiBona who is the Open Source Program Manager at Google. It is great to hear someone who actually is working in the guts of the field talk about net nuetrality, dark fiber, data centers, open source licenses, and Air Wolf. It has such a different flavor than people who are professional commentators.

Here is the summary of the opinions:
Net nuetrality: bad will get worse before it gets better.
Dark Fiber: innocuous it hosts Google's internal network and makes caching work better.
Data Centers: mmm...they exist and Google needs food badly...
Open Source license: If you want to make money off your software don't use them. If you do use them, don't try and make money off your software later. Apache is his flavor of the day.
Air Wolf: Scared of Jan-Michael Vincent, show sucked. (He is completely wrong on this point. A helicopter landing in a psuedo-volcano rocks.

Turn Your Head is a company that will create a wacky gift from the profile of your face. Submit a picture and they will use a lathe to carve it out of a hunk of wood. The result is an art piece which sculpts space into your visage. From any perspective two negative views of you look at each other.

"At Turn Your Head, we fill the space between two opposing profiles of your face. By spinning that space into a three dimensional visage that follows the outlined silhouettes of your two profiles, we create the "Pirolette".

Place the Pirolette to your face and it will match your profile. Locate it near a wall and the shadow of the Pirolette will be your silhouette.

Your profile captured forever in an object of art. An optical illusion of shadow and light, each one unique because it's you!

Sketch Swap is a clever web app that lets you make a drawing and then when you are done will show you someone else's drawing.

It reminds of the Twilight Zone episode in which a person was given a box with a button and told that if they pressed the button they would get a million dollars and someone that they don't know would die.

Eventually of course the person succumbed to the tempation and pressed the button, and got the million dollars. Then the box was taken away from them and given to someone that they didn't know.

So beware- you may get a sketch like whatever you just drew.

retrievr is a sketch based image query tool. The user draws an image using coarse colors and brushes, like my picture on the left, and then retrievr searchs through flickr's photo database to find images that match. The image on the right was among the ones returned.

It's pretty cool. It kind of works.

From Herbert Simon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Really strong magnets from a company with a sweet name: United Nuclear

The LA Times has this excellent lengthy article about the world of "cool-hunting." (Fads are so yesterday - Los Angeles Times archive) Cool-hunters are the people who tap into emerging youth culture and sell their predictions to companies who then productize the trend and then wait for the cash to come rolling in.

The article makes lots of insightful comments about our consumer culture and how there is no lifestyle we can discover which doesn't have a line of products helping you to live it. At the same time many people just try and demonstrate that they know the breadth of lifestyles available by purchasing key knock-offs of cornerstone elements of a particular lifestyle (a copied hand-bag, a particular style of retro T-shirt, etc.)

Culture mining, cool-hunting, trend-spotting are all fascinating to me because they are intertwined with the world of technology, which is where I make my living.

Choice quote:

At the same time, Popcorn's mind is constantly tuned into the tantalizing "what ifs" of tomorrow. Her 2001 book, "Dictionary of the Future," predicts the proliferation of a "cosmetic underclass" who can't afford to erase their age, a parent education movement that issues permits and product discounts to well-trained parents, and "personal archivists" who organize the e-mails, digital images and other data that help document our existence.
When asked about today's obsession with cool, even Popcorn sounds peeved. She moans: "It's like everybody's hip now. It's exhausting. There's no discovery. It's not original."

Zip around the airport in these oh-so-british driverless pods. The future is now.

What an awesome commentary on faith, consumerism and pop culture. This lanyard replacement for the iPod shuffle turns your player into a cross. In the process it forces you to ask yourself where your worship is directed. Buy one here.

Here is a wacky video that looks like a demo for some special effects artist. Someone took a bunch of close-up plant video and added wacky eyes and beaks and probers and stuff. Disturbingly realistic, but obviously fantasy.

Did you ever wonder what it would be like to see a water balloon pop in space?

Some videos of people on the vomit comet popping water balloons in zero-G.

Seatac airport here in Seattle, just instituted this totally cool parking lot. It is called the "Cell-Phone Waiting Lot" The idea is that you go and park in this parking lot while you wait for the person who you are picking up to call you on their cell-phone. Then you zip over to "Arrivals" and pick them up.

This is great because it gets rid of people endlessly circling around the airport loop while they wait for the late plane to show up. It also reduces the burden on the cops who are always yelling at you to move your car. It also increases security by lowering traffic volumes. It gives me a place to park that isn't too far away while I wait for the phone call (In the past I hung out suspiciously in the Denny's parking lot). Anyway, it's not often that things like this get better. Here is an example of a transit thing that did get better.