Plan your movie bathroom breaks wisely

You can use RunPee, a website that very thoughtfully flags the best times during a film when you can go to the bathroom without missing much.

How it works

1. Select a movie

2. The timeline shows how many minutes into the film the opportune bathroom break times are

3. The next box shows a non-spolier verbal / visual cue you can wait for before going.

4. If you want more of a description, the last box shows a summary of what you will miss when you go to the bathroom. The text is scrambled though, so that you don't accidentally read it unless you really mean to unscramble it.

Free music?

Have yet to look around but sounds promising:

Free Music Archive

Augmented Reality online

Augmented reality, defined by Wikipedia as a field of computer research which deals with the combination of real-world and computer-generated data (virtual reality), where computer graphics objects are blended into real footage in real time, is the the latest trend in online marketing.

Eminem's Relapse

Eminem is using it to promote his latest album Relapse. Users can print out an image from the Relapse website, then use their webcam + 3D tools on the site to spray paint it. The site will give prizes away for the best entries.

Eminem Augmented Reality Screencast from Outside Line on Vimeo.

BBH for WWF

BBH China also used augmented reality to promote the WWF via a mobile app that "literally puts the fate of wildlife in your hands". The mobile bear interacts with the space shown in the user's mobile phone. 

Wonder if this will catch on here. 

Would depend I guess how many people have webcams, and how many of the total mobile phones in the Philippines have cameras. The latest study I saw still said that many people have legacy phones. 

But given that Second Life never really took off here, would be interesting to see if this hybrid will catch on.

Terminator - Twitter Advergame

Terminator Salvation promoted the film online via Twitter advergame. Saw this a few weeks ago but didn't get to post. 

How it works - people follow the Terminator Twitter group then log in to the Terminator blog. Trivia, etc questions are posted on the Twitter group, which people can @reply to. Points are updated for correct answer through direct messages.

Will keep this in mind!

The impossible dream

We were once asked to create a site that would hit X million hits in X days. That's right. X million hits in just a few days. (Don't want to put the exact number because our client might see this and get mad. Hahaha.)

It seemed proposterous at the time but I guess it is possible!

The Site With 8.64 Trillion Hits in One Day

BY CHRIS DANNENMon May 18, 2009 at 12:59 PM

The day before India's Lok Sabha elections, the country's election commission made a new Web site live to provide election results in real-time. The commisson overbuilt the site, so it thought, readying it for almost 3,000 hits per second--that's 80.6 billion hits in a single 8-hour day. (Below, a supporter of India's victorious Congress party.)

The six-day voting process was supposed to culminate on Saturday, May 16, but the servers were crashing, and updating stopped. TV channels and newspapers that had been counting on the site's accuracy were flailing. The servers, which live at India's National Informatics Centre, couldn't be fixed until early Sunday morning. The final hit-count: 8.64 trillion hits in just eight hours, far more than top-visited sites like Google, that gets only 5,300 visits per second, or 460 million per day. You can view the results of the elections here.

[Original article here.]

Twanalysis: I'm a boffin, Ashton is a celbrity, WilliamShatner is a robot

Twanalyst.com will analyze your Twitter account and classify you as one of several kinds of Twitter-ers:

• TALKER (12%) - a general keen conversationalist
• SHARER (10%) - someone who shares lots of links etc they've found
• NEWBIE (9%) - someone with few friends or followers yet
• NETWORKER (9%) - a conversationalist who tweets a lot
• WRITER (8%) - a general keen tweeter of their own content
• POET (8%) - a writer who tweets more than usual
• CELEBRITY (8%) - someone with a large following
• SOCIALITE (8%) - someone who is mainly in conversation with people
• BOFFIN (7%) - someone whose language is generally advanced or technical
• ROBOT (7%) - someone whose tweets are mostly links
• LURKER (5%) - someone who doesn't tweet very much
• GURU (4%) - someone with many followers but doesn't follow back so much
• VOYEUR (3%) - someone who reads lots of others but has few followers
• PARROT (1%) - someone who retweets excessively
• ODDBALL (1%) - someone who overuses hashtags

The analysis for my Twitter account gave me a readability index of 16 (apparenly you want something between 6-12; "below is simplistic and above is obscure"!) and categorized me as a BOFFIN! Does that mean nerdy? I guess I am a little. 

See the whole Twanalysis.

Twanalysis also classifies Ellen and Ashton Kutcher as CELEBRITIES and William Shatner as a ROBOT.

Starbuck would so kick Uhura's ass!

Don't you think? 

A Gizmodo post posed the question of who would win in a fight, Starbuck or Uhura. Starbuck is so male she could probably even take out Kirk...

...although what the article was actually comparing was the size of the Battlestar versus the souped up Enterprise, et al:

(Click on image to view full-size on Gizmodo)

Quub: brainless status updates

Now trying Quub, a new site that lets you update one status message to several social networks at the same time (Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, Hi5, Tumblr, Plurk, MySpace). Similar to Flock and Nutshellmail, it is an aggregator site that tries to streamline social connectivity.

The site also tries to make updates even more brainless by offering options for key words that you just have to click to put together your final status ("at home", "trying to sleep",...). The site is supposed to pick up on your style of status updating and offer you relevant options.

The introductory video tries to get very buzzwordy when they start calling status updates the "ambient model". Instead of traditional communication where person A has to personally ask person B what he is doing, everybody is just broadcasting to everybody else what they are doing - ambient communication.

Introduction to quub from quub.com on Vimeo.

Interesting. Brings us back to the surveillance function of social media. 

In terms of relevance, to me at least, not sure how much I need a site like this. I only really update Twitter and Facebook and the two are already linked so don't have much use of this yet. Maybe if I actually start using my Tumblr and Plurk.

Architect Selgas Cano's Hidden Forest Office

Beautiful:

Spanish architecture firm Selgas Cano recently unveiled their new office in Madrid.  Located within a forest,  the tube-like structure is half-sunken into the ground, giving the illusion of complete isolation.  A large window runs the entire length of the structure and forms part of the roof, ensuring workers a panoramic view of the surrounding woods.   The office is entered via a partially-hidden stairwell and has retractible shutters at the end of the structure.  Selgas Cano’s design is seen here photographed by world-renowned dutch architecture photographer Iwan Baan.

(From PSFK.)

A ‘Churchill Gene’ for Creative Drinking? - NYTimes

Now here's an idea!

It’s an old notion: alcohol stirs the muse. Winston Churchill vouched for this, calling his tippling crucial to finishing his six-volume memoirs (“Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me”). Faulkner, Twain, Beethoven and Van Gogh also seem to have mixed drink beneficially with their work.

Click here to read more.

Maybe this could have helped me through yesterday's fifteen-hour workday!

Love this ad

Natural Paint

Galeng!!!

GUTEN TOUCH from Multitouch Barcelona on Vimeo.

Paperbeatsinternet.com

Can I join?

http://www.paperbeatsinternet.com/

Principal Exports of the Philippines

Love this. Found it on the flickr photostream of some guy named lunchbreath while looking through his fun informational graphics:

Original file here.

Objectified

From the makers of Helvetica, comes Objectified - a documentary about our relationships with things, design, and consequently, designers. 

See the trailer here.

It premieres today in the US. Wonder when it will arrive here... or in the torrents.

Digital Fiction from Penguin

Inventive way to renew interest in a few of the Classics.

http://wetellstories.co.uk/

spring cleaning

I have a whole shelf of notebooks. I love notebooks. I like them plain, with lines, with grids, with dots as grids. I like them with white paper, black paper, colored paper, differently colored paper in one notebook. I like them with printed covers, plain covers, cloth covers, plastic covers. I have notebooks from Muji, Singapore, London, the States, Starbucks, National, Fully Booked and several other random places.

I have big notebooks that are good for journalling, notebooks with multi-colored paper that are more fun, plain notebooks for doodling and thinking stuff out. I have thin, small notebooks that are easy to bring around, and souvenir notebooks that remind me of places I've traveled to.

The problem is that I can't use them. Some of them are so nice (like the pasalubong from my sister from the Globe Theater with an illustration of  Midsummer Night's Dream's Titania or the ringbound Muji with dotted paper and "2 elastic bands, 1 to keep a page marked and 1 to keep the book closed") that I can't imagine what I would write that would do them justice.

Recently I've told myself that I need to start using the notebooks and stop buying until I lessen stock. But the only thing I really think is "worth it" to use a nice notebook up for is as a journal. Or to write down things that are groundbreaking. But that never happens.

I actually use notebooks everyday at work to take down agreements and action points at meetings. And I've tried to get myself to use the nice notebooks for work. But I can't bring myself to write client directions like "bigger logo, bigger logo, BIGGER LOGO" or "more exciting animation daw" (actual notes) on my pretty flower-patterned, cloth-bound from Paperchase or the Quotable Quotes one that reads "Life is about creating YOURSELF" on the cover.

So I have scratch notebooks. Lots of scratch noteboks. Usually Coronas, which I also really like even if I think the paper quality has declined in the last few years. I can write easily in those because they're easy to replace and I could even buy them in bulk if I wanted. I have lined Coronas, grid Coronas, Steno Coronas, all those Coronas in white, blue, pink....

Will it never end.