Unsought Input

So, I had a pretty good time making the quiz yesterday. I felt that I might have rushed through that one, though, so I wrote another quiz. I think this one is a little better. So, give it a try. Choose Your own Destiny

So, recently I have been faced with the question of: “what do I want to do for a living?”. This question sucks. I mean, how do you know what you want to be? Do you do what runs in your family, as in the olden days (dad’s a baker, your a baker?), are you lucky enough to inherit a family business that you may or may not want to run and ruin? Do you join the Army and have the government tell you what to do for a living? Or, are you like most of the people my age who go to college and study something that they like to study? And when you start, there are seriously a million jobs in the market and everyone wants to hire you? And then, when you graduate, there are some jobs, but they are in Antarctic and you don’t want to move to Africa to go to work every day. And even if you did, the pay sucks because it’s an entry level position.

And then, when you finally get the job you think is really the job you spent $40,000 on college for, job of your dreams that you are going to love forever and ever amen, you hate it with ever fiber in your soul.

So, how do you decide what you want to be? What do you want to do with life? And when you do decide, how do you get someone to hire you? And pay you to do something that you love to do?

So, I am going to make an aptitude test. If other sites can make stupid tests that everyone and their brother depend on for instructional guidance in life, so can I.

Click here to take my quiz: Career Aptitude Quiz

I recently found out that Mozilla is a non profit corporation. Thats right the same Mozilla that makes Firefox. Mozilla’s mission is to improve the internet experience for the public benefit. I would say that they are doing a really good job of that because Firefox is used my millions of people and totally kicks IE’s ass.

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T-shirts are the apex of human fashion design. Although man and womankind have clothed themselves in many different materials, in arrangements ranging from the functional to the impractical, from the plain to the ebullient, nothing tops the simple comfort and versatility of the T-shirt. You can even use yours as a laptop case.

Need proof? Below are five T-shirts that can actually improve you life.

1) Can a T-shirt with a simple, elegant design, help you find your soul mate? The answer is yes. Pull the cord, and suddenly it is apparent why this shirt is so brilliant.

By raising these shades, you can send a subtle but sexy message to that attractive person from across the dance floor (or bingo parlor, whatever, I’m not going to tell you how to live your life).
Made by a Japanese company with an inscrutable name, it’s a good illustration of the kind of clever, art-and-craft ideas you buy Make Magazine and shop at Ikea for. Unfortunately, it’s only available at museum shops in a few select cities.

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It has taken five years and two wars, but finally, author Dinesh D’Souza has found the real cause of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.  Saddam Hussien?  Nope.  Lax airport security?  Sorry.  Osama bin Laden and the extreme religious conservatives who plotted and carried out the attacks?  Not so much.

The real culprit is gay marriage and Fear Factor.  D’Souza explained on the Colbert Report.

Now, some might say that advocating that we become more like the terrorists in order to avoid terrorist attacks is sort of like giving in.  But that’s just silly.  Let me explain why with a simple analogy everyone can understand :
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In earlier science projects articles about sulfur hexafluoride gas and non-newtonian fluids, we at least had a little bit of theory and explanation to go with the goofy videos. Not so much in this entry. It turns out that filming a video in very high speed, then watching it in slow motion, is just fun.

What could be better than watching somebody get hit in the head with a water balloon over the course of a minute?

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Many movies have been made about the future and most of them have sucked. Usually they involve people in shiny suits and rocket cars. Or its some lame post-apocalyptic future where everybody wears football shoulder pads and drives dune buggies. However, there have been a few movies that have been so bad that they actually managed to get some things right. These movies all come from the 70’s so mind-altering drugs probably had something to do with it.

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An artist named *spacecoyote posted two “fan-fic” anime-style drawings of The Simpsons and Futurama characters to the popular art site deviantART.com. Less then a week later, she was signed on to work for Bongo Comics - owned and created by Matt Groening (creator of both series) on anime-style Simpsons comics. She also might be working with 20th Century Fox as well.

How’s that for a nice little bit of happiness from this “Web 2.0″ world? Post some junk online that you think your friends might dig and instead of a lawsuit (more common) you get a job?

Please do check out *spacecoyote’s drawings - I especially like her realization of Marge, Patty and Selma in the Simpsons drawing.

Here’s the official deviantART posting on the topic if you’d like to leave her some props.

Musicals. If you stop and think about it, it’s bizarrely amazing that musicals continue to exist. The fact that they make up a whole genre of theater and film is stranger still.

People just start singing, for no reason, or for contrived reasons. They dance around, in the middle of the day. Don’t get me wrong, musicals take a lot of skill to write, score, direct, and act in. But let’s face it - if there were no such thing as musicals, and you had never heard of The Sound of Music, or Grease, or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and someone tried to explain the concept to you, the only possible response would be, “WTF?”

Which is why I have developed a theory: the best musicals are the ones that make fun of musicals, or at the very least point out the absurdity of the whole business. Here is empirical, scientific proof. The ten best musicals that make fun of musicals:

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Every day, five or six thousand social-networking, blogosphere-trotting, long-tailing web sites are created.  All of them with a really great, new idea that combines RSS with AJAX and plans to stay in Beta forever.  Out of all of those, a few are really cool and useful - and Technorati is definitely one of them.

Technorati tracks blogs and the discussions, reactions, and responses that bounce from blog to blog via the simple mechanism of who is linking to who.  It also collects tags and allows you to search the mass of blogs for posts that might be relevant to your query.  Bloggers can “claim” their own blog and use some surprisingly fun tools to see who is talking about them.  Some people have even been abandoning the whole trackback system in favor of Technorati.

And apparently, Technorati hates me.

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Recently the hotly anticipated expansion for World of Warcraft, the Burning Crusade came out. I got the chance to play it and I was blown away by the improvements made to the game play. The following are the top three coolest new additions to the game.

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Apple gets a lot of credit for putting effort into the user experience. Many attribute the success of the original Mac, iPods, the iTunes Music Store, iBooks, and their other products to ease of use.

But building a brand based on user experience can be much harder than, say, a brand based on low prices (like Dell) or ubiquity (like Microsoft). Because it doesn’t take too much to go from “it just works” to “it doesn’t work,” which has been my experience with iTunes 7. The worst problem: it freezes up whenever I don’t have an internet connection.

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According to an upcoming National Geographic show, we are getting close to being able to do a human head transplant. And I for one couldn’t be more excited. Lately my body and I haven’t been getting along and I think it’s time we took a break and started seeing other people.

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Extras
Sundays @ 10 PM on HBO
In a nutshell: The Office + Curb Your Enthusiasm

Aren’t you Americans lucky? Ricky Gervais’s second hit BBC show (since The Office) is here on Pay Cable!

Gervais plays goofy and awkward (sound familiar?) bit-part actor Andy Millman who spends his time playing the role of an extra in crappy British TV shows and movies. His agent, Darren Lamb (Office co-creator Stephen Merchant) can’t actually get the guy a good part to save his life - his role is really that of being more pathetic than Andy than actually getting him work. Ashley Jensen (the wardrobe closet manager on Ugly Betty) plays Gervais’ co-extra and best friend Maggie, who, while not more pathetic than Andy is actually more clueless. But sweet. She plays Andy’s conscience.

Andy gets some local recognition - mostly from people on the street who hate him or directors that dispise him. Like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, he is pretty good at unintentionally pissing people off just by opening his mouth - a role not too far off from Gervais’ Office manager David Brent. (more…)