Wii Prayer

A family shouldn't have to wait until Sunday to worship the Lord...especially if they have a Nintendo Wii, complete with special Cross controllers and a Kneeler (all the fun of kneeling and genuflecting...in your own home!).

Yes, seriously, someone's making a game of this. Well, I think so anyway - if it's a spoof/hoax then it's being pretty thoroughly carried out.



If the minigames are good enough, I'll almost certainly be buying a copy of this. After all, WarioWare barely has any storyline at all and that's still one of the most popular Wii games..

Piano Stairs

This innovative little trick, courtesy of Volkswagen, is a great little excercise in social psychology. I wonder how it would scale though..

Music in the street

I headed out to Spitalfields Markets for Spitalfields Stew recently, a free, al-fresco jazz festival and generally fantastic idea. The sun was shining, the market was packed with people and there was a great crowd sprawled all around the stage. Also I had a picnic, I love picnics.


_{I never got a turnout this good for my jazz gigs...}

The Billy Jenkins Blues Collective were up first and I highly recommend the show if you can see them anywhere - suburban blues with a load of energy, and featuring (slightly unusually) a violinist, fantastic.

Ordesa played second - I've seen these chaps before but they were fantastic. Kenny Wheeler (nearly 80 years old, but you can't tell) on trumpet, playing with just a guitarist and saxophonist. Beautiful, simple music played perfectly.

Finally there was a 5 piece improvisation (two bass, two drums and Jan Kopinski leading on saxophone), which whilst slightly too wild and abstract for half the folks who came out for a day in the sun with some pretty music, was still a bit disappointing for me. I guess I listen to too much Ornette Coleman...


_{I'm behind his left ass-cheek}

After all this, we wandered over to Brick Lane (where all the oh-so-so-so-so trendy kids hang out) and saw Ben Walker singing his fantastic Twitter Song (and a beautiful ditty composed for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall). Check him out sometime when you can.


_{Seriously, two hats. I'll never be that trendy.}

Good times in London abound! :)
Xx

Disco Robot Teleporter

The coursework specification for my Computer Animation module reads:

"Model and animate something you believe will exist in 2050"

Could you ask for anything better?

I combined three of my favourite words, a lot of spotlights and various other fun effects into the following:

Disco Robot Teleporter


There was a proper disco dancefloor underneath all that at one point, you can see an awful quality initial preview of it here - I'm not sure where that went in the final rendering, but as it took a day to render what I have, I'm not going to bother re-doing it.

Also, here's what the teleporter originally looked like - I couldn't get the fancy particles into the final rendering either:



Enjoy.
Xx

PS: I made it all in Blender, and it's a Blender Render. Grab me if you want more techie details.

Disney's Copy & Paste

You'll never watch some of your favourite Disney films the same way again :)




This video's been floating around the Internet for a few weeks now, I'm sure it could be improved upon - there's definitely some Bedknobs & Broomsticks and Little Mermaid scenes that seem a bit dodgy to me too.

Happy Mothers' Day

Mums are awesome, especially mine. Also, putting the apostrophe in the right place in Mothers' Day is awesome too. Ever feel like burning down card shops that are stuffed with poor grammar? I do...but enough about arson.

Mr T. - Treat Your Mother Right


Possibly the worst song on YouTube. Utterly addictive though and video is to die for. Skip to the last minute if the middle's getting boring.

Now, I'm off to call my mum :)

Xx

Extreme Sheepherding

This one starts a bit slow, and then goes on to such epic degrees of win I nearly cried. Seriously, you've not lived until you've seen people playing Pong with flocks of sheep:



Enjoy :)
Xx

Musical Stock Exchange

Ever wanted to take the spikes on a serious financial graph and make them the basis of a whimsical tune? Me neither. Enjoy:



Thanks to Will for the tip-off here.

Tic-Tac Makes it up to Football Fans

Many people on the Internet (and presumably in the so-called 'real world') seemed rather annoyed when ITV decided to broadcast a Tic-Tac advert rather than the thrilling last 20 seconds of the Liverpool vs Everton FA Cup game. There were calls for ITV to be banned from showing football, angry Facebook groups and even the odd 'flashmob' against ITV.

I wasn't, however, aware that anyone was blaming Tic-Tac. But, just in case (and also because marketing folks need salaries to keep the economy going), they made a video by way of apology:



Brilliant ;)

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it)

This has been flying all over the Internet since it was released a couple of days ago:



Not to be watched whilst drinking*, operating heavy machinery or becoming heavily pregnant.

*Exception: shots, as part of a formalised drinking game.

I love mass production

Take a look at this video from the BBC:

Inside a frozen pizza factory

When I first saw the link I was expecting some Panorama style hidden camera tour of immigrants working in amazingly unhygienic conditions - as with the ready meals for supermarkets a while ago. Instead, we're at the other end of the spectrum of journalistic integrity, with a straight-up presentation from a product development manager for the factory.

I prefer fresh food, though I'll happily eat frozen stuff like this. What I really love though, is seeing these mass-production factories in operation. There's something incredible about the precision and efficiency and ingenuity that's gone into every tiny part of the system...I almost wish I'd taken up engineering rather than compsci.

When I worked there, I was always really impressed by the level of detail that went into the efficiency of processes in a McDonald's restaurant. I still am, to some degree, but it's all too often ruined by the human element - which leads me to wonder why on earth such establishments are not more automated. The quality would be better, the waiting times lower and the food safer.

Plus, it'd kill off a bunch of low paying jobs and ensure that graduates weren't just ending up on the dole. Seems to be win-win for the economy. Get to work folks.

Videos of Tie-Dye Quartet at The Yardbird

As promised, courtesy of YouTube, here's some videos from parts of our second set:

Chameleon


Spanish Guitar Jam


Fever


Ina's Jam


Wade In The Water


Silver Rain


The tracks are also up for free download on Last.fm. Or, at least, they will be shortly. Try back tomorrow if you can't find them now.

Little moments

A large percentage of F1 viewers, so unscientific surveys carried out without a proper representational sample size, proper interviewing technique, prop...

A large percentage of F1 viewers only watch F1 for the crashes, that was meant to read.

But, I hate people who don't carry out surveys properly. I just saw an ad saying "80% of women (sample size: 22) would recommend this to their friends". Hint: 22x0.8 = 17.6 - at least pick sample sizes that give your percentage an integer result. I was reading an academic textbook yesterday which claimed:

"In a University in Australia [another reason not to have Universities in Australia] 336 Computer Science students were sent an email ... asking for their password. 138 replied with a valid password ... 200 changed their passwords without prompting."

Now, hard enough though it is to believe that every student in a department actually read an email and took this kind action based on it, does anyone else see a problem with that statistic?

Anyway, I had a point when I started this post...people watching events just in case something bad happens. Here's a little something to keep the faith going:

South African MP's chair breaks on a BBC Interview

and..


_{George Bush tries to leave a press conference}

Here comes another bubble

A little old, but I've only just stumbled across this video:



Love it :)

Thanks to sooz_g for the find.

Microsoft Student Technology Day

I've resumed my duties as a Microsoft Student Partner for this year, and the second treat* was an expenses-paid trip down to London for me and some friends for a series of technology talks from a few folks from Microsoft, including the CEO himself, Steve Ballmer.

The whole shindig was in Festival Hall, and started off with the CEO of Huddle.net giving some advice on how to start and run your own little start-up company, drawing on his experiences from starting Huddle. There were some really useful tips about how to deal with venture capitalists, how to get funding in general and how to get help and support from various groups, one of which I can personally vouch for - Minibar London.

Next up was 'The Science Behind Live Search'. Unfortunately, we didn't actually get to see much science, but saw lots of cool usage trend graphs - bit scary to see how much you're monitored as you search away. Also interesting to note that 40% of searches end in failure, 50% of searches are just repeats of something that person has looked for before and that enough people actually use Live Search to be able to gather reliable statistics like these ;)



The third talk was the reason I turned up - Artificial Intelligence by Microsoft Research. Given that my final year project's going to have a bunch of that stuff in it, it was great to see it explained, and the various formulae put into context. Cool presentation too - mostly based around computer games.



Next was Steve Ballmer...and if you've never seen him present then:

a) Find a YouTube video
b) Find a YouTube video

Seriously, the guy is hilarious. 'Exuberant' doesn't come close to describing his style. He also had some very interesting stuff to say about the future of technology, and really knew his stuff well.

We rounded off the day with a presentation from my old colleague Paolo, who got to show off the trendy Surface, which even has a programmable API and emulator that'll be released to the public soon. Sweet.

Edit: Found a video of a bit of Paolo's talk:



Get in touch if you want any more detail on the above, or some contacts to talk about this stuff with :)

--

*_{The first treat was a nice shoulder bag filled with goodies and software...and four RJ11-RJ11 adapters. Note that that reads 'adapter' not 'extension'. If anyone can think of a use for a RJ11-RJ11 adapter, let me know.}

Toys for cats

After an exciting trip to Maplin today, we popped into Pets At Home to laugh at the animals who were so unloved by their owners that they're up for adoption. They had some great stuff there...

1. A new friend
Whilst looking at the hamsters, it occurred that I hadn't yet gotten our house's cat - Roscoe - a present for his birthday yet. Now, he's not much of a hunter outdoors, and has yet to bring me back anything dead as a present yet. Quite a disappointment I'm sure you can imagine. So...how about a hamster?


_Rawr

I was thinking we could make a YouTube video, called 'really super cute hamster'. We could film the hamster washing himself, eating little bits of cucumber and playing with bits of string. And, just when the teenage girls have called their mother, little sister and favourite doll over to watch the video, we let Roscoe into the room.

He can chase the hamster around for a bit, catch it, toy with it for a while and then, having ripped its heart out, present it to the camera - smearing the blood all over the lens.

Alternatively I could just get him a little toy mouse stuffed with catnip.

2. Litter Kwitter
"Toilet train your cat" read the box. "Guaranteed results within 6-8 weeks". What?



This little box contains three separate rings which are placed in the human toilet (and hopefully remembered and removed when people are sitting there), and taken away one-by-one until the cat is taking up the bathroom for 15 minutes at a time and filling out all the answers in the crossword in the Sunday papers.

Seriously.



You might think it's a bit wrong to watch this video for more than about 22 seconds. Don't turn it off...you'll see.

Musical Road

I love Honda, they come up with such awesome stuff, such as this - a musical road. They've cut ridged grooves into a road in California, which interact with your tyres to create a little melody as you drive along. I can't think of anything more awesome:



Next challenge: make a spoof video of what it would be like if the British public sector tried doing this on the M25.

Boogie Wonderland

I quite like dancing, and I quite like the 70's. Specifically, John Travolta, The Trammps, Earth Wind & Fire, The Bee-Gees and (some of) the dress sense. Clearly, therefore, a night out at Flares is a good idea.

The music was mostly good, and the dancefloor packed at all times. Well, except when one of my favourite songs came on, of course:



No, I'm not available for marriage proposals. However big the dowry.

BBC News

Via Graham Lineham:



Simply wonderful :)

Dr Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog

I don't click every link people send me online - if I did then I'd never have time to send other people links and pretend that I found them myself.

However, when three very separate, and generally quite switched-on folks sent me a link to the following, I had to go view it, and I'm glad I did.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog

Made up of three short videos (the third's not out yet), and apparently only online for a limited time, this is some kind of upbeat mix of a Monty Python Sketch, the Rocky Horror Picture Show and an episode of one of those uncomfortable British Comedies - Peep Show perhaps.

Amazing. If you click one link today, make it this one.