UtterlyBoring.com

Random Links For The Day

Some random reading material for the day…

Prop Hunt for Team Fortress 2, probably the best video game mod ever.
Detecting the Social Sites your Web Site Visitors Use, thanks to a CSS information leak.
craigslist “Missed Connections” area in artistic form.
A New Sith, or Revenge of the Hope: Reconsidering Star Wars IV in the light of I-III.
Forget Skype: Tiny Chat is far simpler.
An engineers guide to bandwidth.
What’s the funniest thing you’ve ever said during sex? (warning, some NSFW language).
How to track Google Keyword rankings in Google Analytics.
Al Franken draws a map of the USA.

October 12, 2009

Intel’s Real “Rock Stars”

You’ve probably seen the Intel Rock Star ad featuring the Inventor of the USB. If you haven’t, go watch it. It’s a good commercial. I’ll wait.

What you may or may not know (and it wasn’t a huge secret) is the “Rock Star” on the ad is an actor, and not the real Ajay Bhatt. Conan O’Brien found this out, and decided to show some more geek cred and interview the real Rock Star at Intel.

Video after the jump…

(more…)

October 11, 2009

Time Killer For The Day

Miami Shark is a crazy violent, chaotic, insane game that isn’t the greatest game of all time (like some say), but is still a load of fun. It’s like Jaws on speed.

October 11, 2009

Local TV Rants

A couple local readers send in these rants about local TV and local TV companies. Discuss/comment below.

Charlie send this in about Bend Broadband’s newest service:

Today, being 10/7 I talked to a sales assistant at bendbraodband requesting that my silver package be bumped from 12 Mbps to the new offered 14 Mbps, seeing that it is “a free upgrade.” Thats completely false. In order to upgrade they require you to buy a DOCSIS 3.0 even though a 2.0 can more than handle it. They’re old Gold tier was 16Mbps. It makes no sense. The new modem is 79.00 outright. More BBB BS.

And Rod has a beef with how NFL Games are broadcast.

So the local Fox Station that is “Serving” Central has selected Seattle and Dallas as our local teams to show. As a 49er fan, I would love to watch a few games on TV. Yes, Bend broadband sucks, but dish sucks worse, as I’m sure you would agree.
To see how absurd this is, look at the broadcast map for NFL week 5: http://the506.com/nflmaps/ .
WTF? Can something be done?

I don’t watch much NFL as I’m generally at the office on Sundays, but that URL is indeed interesting. Thanks for that, Rod.

Discuss.

October 8, 2009

Dead Deer in Clown Suit Left on Iowa Porch

You can’t make up headlines like this.

October 8, 2009

Amazing Photography Requires Some Risk — Or Really Good Software

I’m always amazed by photography that requires the photographer to take risks and make careful plans that allow the photo to be taken.

Exhibit A: A National Geographic photographer and his team wanted to make a seamless image of an entire redwood tree from top to bottom. The results (and the planning involved) are amazing.
Exhibit B: The planning and setup were involved and equipment was destroyed, but the results were totally worth it.

In the same veign, recent research is making it really easy to fake a composite photo with pretty convincing results. While it’s still obvious that they are fakes because the perspective is off, it’s a pretty impressive concept.

October 7, 2009