Forget Rebecca Black, check THIS out

If you haven't heard about Rebecca Black's song: Friday, it only has 57.9 million views and was uploaded on February 10th - a mere 17 days ago.  (if you were wondering thats 3.4 million views a day)

The reason it's been so popular?  It's so damned annoying!  (I watched it only a few times for research)

Anywho, the entire reason I'm writing this post is to give a little love to Maddi Jane, a teenybopper who actually has a ridiculous amount of talent.  Give her a watch/listen, you'll love the little lass.

3.79 million square miles and 308 million people

Story 1

When my father-in-law retired from Western Electric in the mid 80's, he went to work in a local nursery.  While employed there, he befriended a gentlemen and his wife and they have since stayed in touch.

Well, this summer while he and my mother-in-law were on vacation in Florida - they decided to visit the couple.  They chatted about many things and somehow the conversation came up about how the woman works at a local Publix and on many days in the summer a nice young girl comes to the store with her husband and they buy lunch.  As people do, they get into conversations about where they are from and she mentions she is originally from Illinois but lives in Hawaii and visits Florida every summer for a time.

She mentions this to my mother-in-law because she grew up in Illinois.  It turns out that the couple from Hawaii that comes to Florida every year is my mother-in-law's cousin!

Story 2

I happen to mention to a client that I am from Easton, PA.  He says inquisitively "Oh, where in Easton." "Forks Township, just up from Lafayette College." I respond.  "Really, where in Forks Twp.?!" I can hear his voice getting excited.  I explain the neighborhood and he gets even more excited. It turns out that the house next to us is his childhood home!

On top of that, I know the current owners of the house (not because we are neighbors either), I worked with his father as a sales rep - he is a CPA in Pen Argyl.

Story 3

My wife's niece was studying abroad in London and took a weekend trip to Italy.  While sitting on a train, she peered out to people watch and thought she recognized someone.  She did - it was her great Aunt and Uncle from Illinois!  Neither one of them know the other was there!

Do you have a small world story?  I'd love to hear about it!

Ever wonder how an LCD display works? THIS is cool.

Bill takes apart an LCD monitor and shows how it works. He explains how it uses liquid crystals, thin film transistors and polarizers to display information.


Found here http://geekbeat.tv/how-an-lcd-monitor-works/

Sunday Street Hockey

See the full gallery on Posterous

I just can't imagine: Video from the Sendai Airport in Japan as the Tsunami arrives

Watch outside under the closest terminal/walkway as the water rushes in.

Click to call phone numbers

Click to call phone numbers:

With the ability to call phones built right into Gmail, you no longer have to get out your phone and retype a number anytime someone sends you one in an email or chat message. Starting today, you’ll see that phone numbers appear as links, like this:





Just click the number, and Gmail’s dialpad will pop up, already populated with the number you’re trying to call.





Click “Call” and voilà! Of course, if you don’t already have the voice and video plugin installed, you’ll be prompted to do that first.



You’ll also see a little green phone icon next to numbers in your contacts which you can use to do the same thing.

Posted by Robin Schriebman, Software Engineer

Raw Video: Kilauea Volcano Erupts in Hawaii

Should you buy a Xoom or an iPad 2?

Motorola's Xoom tablet runs on Andriod Honeycomb.  This totally sucked me in because it was being designed for tablets and I drooled when I saw it in action.  I had money in my hands and was ready to buy. But then something happened:

Tech journalists couldn't use the OS at CES.

Then the Xoom won't ship with flash support.

Then it will have to be sent back to have a 4G/LTE retrofitting.

They clearly rushed this to market and frankly, all of this scared the shit out of me.

Today, I'm staying with the iPad and hope that the competition forces amazing advances in iOS (and Honeycomb for that matter)

By the way, if you would like a peek into the design differences and marketing approaches of Motorola and Apple, take a look at these screen caps of the product pages.  It really says it all, doesn't it?