Gen Y research. Thoughts from 25-30 year olds.

Highlighted some favs.

- More often than not, when someone is telling me a story all I can think about is that I can't wait for them to finish so that I can tell my own story that's not only better, but also more directly involves me.

- Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realise you're wrong.

- I don't understand the purpose of the line, "I don't need to drink to have fun." Great, no one does. But why start a fire with flint and sticks when they've invented the lighter?

- Have you ever been walking down the street and realised that you're going in the complete opposite direction of where you are supposed to be going? But instead of just turning a 180 and walking back in the direction from which you came, you have to first do something like check your watch or phone or make a grand arm gesture and mutter to yourself to ensure that no one in the surrounding area thinks you're crazy by randomly switching directions on the sidewalk.

- I totally take back all those times I didn't want to nap when I was younger.

- Is it just me, or are 80% of the people in the "people you may know" feature on Facebook people that I do know, but I deliberately choose not to be friends with?

- Do you remember when you were a kid, playing Nintendo and it wouldn't work? You take the cartridge out, blow in it and that would magically fix the problem. Every kid did that, but how did we all know how to fix the problem? There was no internet or message boards or FAQ's. We just figured it out. Today's kids are soft.

- There is a great need for sarcasm font.

- Sometimes, I'll watch a movie that I watched when I was younger and suddenly realise I had no idea what the f*** was going on when I first saw it.

- I think everyone has a movie that they love so much, it actually becomes stressful to watch it with other people. I'll end up wasting 90 minutes shiftily glancing around to confirm that everyone's laughing at the right parts, then making sure I laugh just a little bit harder (and a millisecond earlier) to prove that I'm still the only one who really, really gets it.

- How the hell are you supposed to fold a fitted sheet?

- I would rather try to carry 10 plastic grocery bags in each hand than take 2 trips to bring my groceries in.

- I think part of a best friend's job should be to immediately clear your computer history if you die.

- LOL has gone from meaning, "laugh out loud" to "I have nothing else to say".

- I have a hard time deciphering the fine line between boredom and hunger.

- Whenever someone says "I'm not book smart, but I'm street smart", all I hear is "I'm not real smart, but I'm imaginary smart".

- How many times is it appropriate to say "What?" before you just nod and smile because you still didn't hear what they said?

- I love the sense of camaraderie when an entire line of cars teams up to prevent a dick from cutting in at the front. Stay strong, brothers!

- Every time I have to spell a word over the phone using 'as in' examples, I will undoubtedly draw a blank and sound like a complete idiot. Today I had to spell my boss's last name to an attorney and said "Yes that's G as in...(10 second lapse)..ummm...Goonies".

- What would happen if I hired two private investigators to follow each other?

- While driving yesterday I saw a banana peel in the road and instinctively swerved to avoid it...thanks Mario Kart.

- Obituaries would be a lot more interesting if they told you how the person died.

- I find it hard to believe there are actually people who get in the shower first and THEN turn on the water.

- Shirts get dirty. Underwear gets dirty. Pants? Pants never get dirty, and you can wear them forever.

- I can't remember the last time I wasn't at least kind of tired.

- Bad decisions make good stories.

- Whenever I'm Facebook stalking someone and I find out that their profile is public, I feel like a kid on Christmas morning that just got the Red Ryder BB gun that I always wanted. 546 pictures? Don't mind if I do!

- Is it just me or do high school girls get sluttier & sluttier every year?

- If Carmen San Diego and Waldo ever got together, their offspring would probably just be completely invisible.

- Why is it that during an ice-breaker, when the whole room has to go around and say their name and where they are from, I get so incredibly nervous? Like I know my name, I know where I'm from, this shouldn't be a problem …

- You never know when it will strike, but there comes a moment at work when you've made up your mind that you just aren't doing anything productive for the rest of the day.

- Can we all just agree to ignore whatever comes after DVDs? I don't want to have to restart my collection.

- There's no worse feeling than that millisecond you're sure you are going to die after leaning your chair back a little too far.

- I'm always slightly terrified when I exit out of Word and it asks me if I want to save any changes to my ten page research paper that I swear I did not make any changes to.

- "Do not machine wash or tumble dry" means I will never wash this ever.

- I hate being the one with the remote in a room full of people watching TV. There's so much pressure. 'I love this show, but will they judge me if I keep it on? I bet everyone is wishing we weren't watching this. It's only a matter of time before they all get up and leave the room. Will we still be friends after this?'

- I hate when I just miss a call by the last ring (Hello? Hello? Dammit!), but when I immediately call back, it rings nine times and goes to voicemail. What'd you do after I didn't answer? Drop the phone and run away?

- I hate leaving my house confident and looking good and then not seeing anyone of importance the entire day. What a waste.

- When I meet a new girl, I'm terrified of mentioning something she hasn't already told me but that I have learned from some light internet stalking.

- I like all of the music in my iTunes, except when it's on shuffle, then I like about one in every fifteen songs in my iTunes.

- Why is a school zone 25 km/h? That seems like the optimal cruising speed for paedophiles...

- As a driver I hate pedestrians and as a pedestrian I hate drivers, but no matter what the mode of transportation, I always hate cyclists.

- Sometimes I'll look down at my watch 3 consecutive times and still not know what time it is.

- I keep some people's phone numbers in my phone just so I know not to answer when they call.

- My 4-year old son asked me in the car the other day "Dad what would happen if you ran over a ninja?" How the hell do I respond to that?

- I wonder if cops ever get pissed off at the fact that everyone they drive behind obeys the speed limit.

- I think the freezer deserves a light as well.

- Even under ideal conditions people have trouble locating their car keys in a pocket, hitting the G-spot, and Pinning the Tail on the Donkey - but I'd bet my ass everyone can find and push the Snooze button from 3 feet away, in about 1.7 seconds, eyes closed, first time every time...

500 Colored Pencils

We all know that you can use colored pencils to create art, but can a collection of colored pencils themselves be art?

Apparently so! Here’s a beautiful yet stunningly simple arrangement of 500 colored pencils by Felissimo for Social Designer, a website that aims to crowdsource designs for charity causes.

Designboom has the story:

designed by felissimo for social designer this complete set of 500 colored pencils consists of 20 units, each pencil telling its own story with a unique name.

you cannot buy the complete set of pencils all at once, but you can receive them over the course of 20 months.

four different display methods let you keep your pencils at hand, while being displayed either as an artwork, or kept aside as a special collection.

the cases have been designed especially for the 500 colored pencils and are available in a limited edition.

Link

How to Cook Salmon in Your Dishwasher

MacGyver Chef is a new series at the gadget blog Gizmodo about attempts to cook meals without conventional cooking implements. Author Dan Nosowitz has previously poached chicken and couscous in a coffee maker. In his most recent post, he experimented with steaming salmon and cilanto sauce in a dishwasher. You can view read a step-by-step guide and view photos of the process at the link.

Link

MacGyver Chef archive

Air Travel’s Glory Years - I love Stewardesses!!!

Flying these days is about as pleasant as a root canal, with security hassles, delays, poor service, expensive or nonexistent food, and cramped seats.

But was it always this way? The answer, of course, is no. And so, we decided to take a look back to the glory days of flight - when the stewardesses resembled beauty pageant contestants, when pilots seemed likes heroes, and when flying still seemed to be an adventure - to remind us, of just how things once were.

Enjoy 50 photos of stewardesses from the good old days of air travel. Link -via Gorilla Mask

Cockney ATM

Photo: Times of London

Bank Machine, an ATM operator in Britain, now has five cash machines in London that offer users the opportunity to conduct their business in the cockney dialect. It’s a promotional gimmick designed to amuse customers:

“Readin’ your bladder of lard”, read the message on the screen. It asked for his “Huckleberry Finn”. Then more bewildering questions: did he wanted to see his balance on the Charlie Sheen? Did he wish to change his Huckleberry Finn or did he simply require sausage and mash, with or without a receipt?

Link 

"How often do you really meet your co worker's children?"

The Office Kid — Your Source for Excuses from Work



Need a good excuse for why you’re late to/absent from work? The Office Kid kit lets you pretend to have a child, which you can then use as an excuse for your questionable work ethic. Each kit comes with a framed picture of a child (ethnicity of your choice), a work of children’s art, and a list of suggested excuses. For additional fees, you can have the child photoshopped into a sports team picture or a doctor’s note on official-looking stationery.

http://www.theofficekid.com/

Mad Men BMW Ad

I’m a real fan of Mad Men, a TV series by AMC about the men and women of Madison Avenue advertising in the 1960’s. The acting, art direction and camera work are outstanding.
The advertising agency GSD&M Idea City, a real one, came up with the idea to do a collaboration between Mad Men, BMW and Vanity Fair. They produced on the set of Mad Men and with the show’s stylists and art director, a 5 page pictorial fold-out which will be published in the September issue of Vanity Fair. The idea behind is that America’s perceptions of diesel is still stuck in the 1960’s and wanted to juxtapose this with reality.
What about that? Mad Men really advertise something.

Personas

Personas is an application that searches your name on the web and returns a profile of what it finds. Mine is pictured.

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

the most interesting part was seeing all those things people said about me while it was processing.  

Try your own name and puzzle over the results. Link - you need adobe flash!

Cheeky Squirrel Photo Crasher

Melissa Brandts and her husband were hiking in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada and decided to take a portrait of themselves with spectacular Lake Minnewanka in the background. Melissa set up the camera and went back to pose, and her husband held the remote shutter  release.

Meanwhile, attracted by the sounds of the autofocus, an inquisitive Columbian ground squirrel,common in the park, popped up to investigate. Click!  "Self-Portrait With Ground Squirrel" was born.

Knowing she had struck photo gold, Melissa sent the pic to National Geographic magazine'sYour Shot, and photo editor Susan Welchman chose it for her Daily Dozen gallery last week. You can find it in all its furry glory by clicking here.

In the past few days, this photo has appeared on the popular blogs Nothing to Do With Arbroath,Neatorama, and that bastion of adorableness, Cute Overload. Today the photo surfaced on theDaily Mail.  

Some commenters claim the photo was manipulated in some way, but one Daily Mail reader pointed out:
 "You can tell this photo is legitimate because the squirrel's ears are pinned back like it was trying to figure out the camera sounds."

A Neatorama reader added: "The camera is autofocusing on the critter and not the couple. The perspective and lighting are absolutely consistent, and those whiskers are just too perfect to have been dropped in. Most of all, you can easily imagine the little guy being curious about the camera's delayed shutter countdown beep."

Some of the comments over on Cute Overload are pretty hilarious. 

All of the Daily Dozen photos get made into online jigsaw puzzles, and if you'd like to do the squirrel puzzle, it's on page three of the Jigsaw Puzzle Generator today (tomorrow it will probably move to page four).

If you want to see this photo published in a future issue of National Geographic magazine, go to the Voting Machine and choose "August Week 1"  and you can vote for it there (it's image #9 in the gallery). 

and now there's the SQUIRRELIZER.

add your own pic with squirrel - link here

worth checking out what other people have added... te he

Patent says: PS3 just wants to see you laugh

Like any self-learning sentient world-destroying super-computer, PS3 just wants to understand human emotion. One of the crazier patents discovered by Siliconera reveals Sony's plans to put areal emotion engine into the PS3. The example above highlights the system's ability to detect laughter, but that wouldn't be all the PS3 would be able to feel. The patent notes other emotions: sadness, excitement, anger, joy, interest, and boredom.

We're not entirely sure the gaming applications of a system like this (and clearly, neither doesNintendo). We can hypothesize a few scenarios. Perhaps if a game detects boredom, it can increase the number of enemies on screen. If it detects anger, the difficulty can go down. And finally, if it detects sadness, it'll tell you to just please stop playing Lair.

Patent says: PS3 just wants to see you laugh

Like any self-learning sentient world-destroying super-computer, PS3 just wants to understand human emotion. One of the crazier patents discovered by Siliconera reveals Sony's plans to put areal emotion engine into the PS3. The example above highlights the system's ability to detect laughter, but that wouldn't be all the PS3 would be able to feel. The patent notes other emotions: sadness, excitement, anger, joy, interest, and boredom.

We're not entirely sure the gaming applications of a system like this (and clearly, neither doesNintendo). We can hypothesize a few scenarios. Perhaps if a game detects boredom, it can increase the number of enemies on screen. If it detects anger, the difficulty can go down. And finally, if it detects sadness, it'll tell you to just please stop playing Lair.

Patent says: PS3 just wants to see you laugh

Like any self-learning sentient world-destroying super-computer, PS3 just wants to understand human emotion. One of the crazier patents discovered by Siliconera reveals Sony's plans to put areal emotion engine into the PS3. The example above highlights the system's ability to detect laughter, but that wouldn't be all the PS3 would be able to feel. The patent notes other emotions: sadness, excitement, anger, joy, interest, and boredom.

We're not entirely sure the gaming applications of a system like this (and clearly, neither doesNintendo). We can hypothesize a few scenarios. Perhaps if a game detects boredom, it can increase the number of enemies on screen. If it detects anger, the difficulty can go down. And finally, if it detects sadness, it'll tell you to just please stop playing Lair.

LOVE FB

Google street view... not just for the streets anymore.

Street View of a Racetrack

The Google Street View photographs of Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey, California were taken during a race! Unfortunately, the photographs don’t go all the way to the finish line. Link -via reddit

Video: Rescue robot can pull victims into its body

Tokyo fire department rescue robot . The newest model [JP] can be used for those cases in which the rescuers can’t reach people in an emergency, i.e. if the area is too dangerous for the rescuers themselves.

The so-called Robocue can be remote-controlled and is able to pull victims inside its body via a conveyor belt. After that, the person in question can be driven to a safe area.

The Robocue is equipped with a number of sensors and cameras and can be used as far as 100m away from the operator. It’s sized at 3.98×1.74×1.89m and weighs 3,860kg.

Watch it in action in the video below.

Digital goodness

It's Red Bull Soapbox Racer Time!

Ever fancied taking part in a soapbox derby but been 

just a little bit too scared to do it? ThenLess Rain 

has created the perfect site for you...the 

Red Bull Soapbox

 Racer.

Just as in the real life Red Bull Soapbox Race events, which happen all over the world, Less Rain's site allows users to create their own uniquely designed vehicles online in a 3D garage, and then paint and decorate them with go-faster stripes and bumper stickers. Along with looking good, the design and construction of the machines will also effect how they handle on the race track.

 

Players can then pick which course they'd like to race (panoramic views of the Alps, the Bosphorus, the Wild West and the icy climbs of Canada are all available) and then set off. New courses can also be designed, with the steepness modified and obstacles added. As in the real Red Bull Soapbox event, only one car is allowed on the track at a time, but the website does allow players to challenge their friends, with your opponent's car appearing as a semi-transparent ghost on the track while you race. Virtual prizes are then rewarded to the winners.

 

The Red Box Soapbox Racer follows Less Rain's equally charming Red Bull Flugtag Flight Labsite, which allows users to design and fly their own planes. As on that site, the vehicles designed on the Soapbox Racer can all be saved on the site to be viewed by others and returned to for later races. Let's go racing!

Hammer - pumps in a bump. Enjoy your Monday evening gangster hit.

check out vid here

Jackson's latest

http://www.lovelybones.com/

The Ready Meals Quiz - can you guess which box the food came from?

Microwave dinners usually don’t look like the picture on the front of the package. In this quiz, you’ll be given a picture of what the food actually looks like. Can you tell which box the pictured food came out of? In the second part of the quiz, you select which meal is homemade and which is a microwave meal, which just proves that real food doesn’t photograph all that well, either. I scored only seven out of 15. Be warned, this is British food. 

Link to Quiz

http://dontjudgemyhair.com/

Don’t Judge My Hair

From the people who brought you There, I Fixed It, Don’t Judge My Hair is a photoblog of disasterous hairstyles, cuts, and colors.

Link 

13 Bad Ass Prosthetics

Never mind that four of these are fictional, two are concepts, and two are in testing. The other five artificial body parts are quite amazing in the real world, like Cody McCasland’s sled that allows the 7-year-old to play hockey even though he has no legs. Link