Monday Morning “Impediment to Productivity” – 20080114

Hi,

Time to strike fear into the hearts of businesses everywhere with two simple words. “We’re Back” Yes. Monday Morning “Impediment to Productivity” is back for 2008, a week later than planned but even I can have my productivity impeded. So did we all have a good silly season?

So with a soundtrack of ice clinking in a glass of single malt its time to “Alez Sillies” once more.

The Common Craft Show is a series of short explanatory videos produced by Lee and Sachi LeFever. The main draw is what they call Paperwork Videos. The videos are very cleverly executed and I really like the way they convey a ton of information in a really entertaining manner.

For example, Jools and I were at a party on Friday and chatting with our friend Doreen about her latest works. Needless to say we wanted to see the piccies but Doreen hadn’t sent them out yet. This year she will be using Flickr to share the photo’s. To explain what online photo sharing is, why you would want to consider it, what are the benefits of using it and which online photo sharing tools you can use to get your hands dirty right now: head over to
http://www.commoncraft.com/photosharing or
http://www.commoncraft.com/show for some other topics.

Phil & Seona were in Melbourne over Christmas and we chatted about John Scalzi (amongst other things) which reminded me that I had a link to one of his free eBooks. You can find a copy of it in just about every reader fomat under the sun at http://manybooks.net/titles/scalzijother06agent_to_the_stars.html and you can find out what the hell it’s about at http://www.scalzi.com/books/2005/11/agent_to_the_stars.html
It’s a hoot.

Blame time, this from Karen
“Check out this painting dude. You have to watch to the very end to realise the true brilliance of this guy.
Shades of the early days of Rolf Harris.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIJtKxdRQzY ”

What do a cup of tea, chaos theory and total silliness have in common? Besides Douglas Addams and the Infinite Improbability Drive. Well today’s answer is the Theremug. That’s right using a cup of tea as the controller for a musical instrument. Kyle McDonald has written up the Instructions for turning a mug of tea into a Theremin:
1 Prepare some tea
2 Expose the L/R leads on an 1/8″ cable
3 Immerse leads in tea
4 Plug cable into audio input
Etc etc Head over to http://www.vimeo.com/432353 and check out the video. Absolutely priceless, I’m sure Douglas Adams would have approved.

Worth 1000 have been reading the Terry Pratchett I suspect .. here is the guff on a recent competition.

“Death. The Grim Reaper. We all know this non-denominational character by his sickle and his dark robe. Ingmar Bergman showed us that we can postpone the inevitable by engaging Death in a chess match, and the 1934 movie “Death Takes A Holiday” showed us that even the Grim Reaper needs a vacation once in a while.

The rules of this game are thus: Show us the Grim Reaper on vacation. How would other vacationers react? What would he do? Water ski? Camp? Go to a theme park? Or maybe he’d just lounge on the beach.”
http://www.worth1000.com/contest.asp?contest_id=18130&display=photoshop
My favourite is http://www.worth1000.com/emailthis.asp?entry=428077

Jools sent across this item about Domino Day 2006 when a new world record was set. 4,079,381 stones were toppled out of the 4,400,000 that were set up. Four builders’ challenges were set in which pairs of builders were chosen to complete vital parts of the set-up while the dominoes were already toppling. The first three builders’ challenges failed so the success of the last challenge was crucial to setting the world record. The design of the course took about a year and a team of 90 builders took around two months to build it. As the video shows it took less than 4 minutes to fall over.
Part I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tep0qX6AeCE
Part II http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGaFjgrjZjI
Parts I and II will blow about 18 minutes here is a 4 minute highlights http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTaGdlrMWhU

By the way Jools has done a great job of tarting up duggup http://duggup.notdeadyet.com.au, it looks fabulous. It only came back on line today as well but stroll over and give it a once over and let us know what you think.

You thought I wasn’t going to do a game today. the thought did cross my mind but then I would have to deal with all the email. So today we are offering two choices.
Choice The First: TowerBlox is a game of precision, timing, and stacking (I’m screwed). It allows you to take a precious skill learned as an infant (stacking blocks), and put it to use in a quick and mad little flash game. So here is the deal, you are building an apartment tower out of tons of blocks. Each block swings from a crane above, and your job is to pick the find the perfect moment to click and release the block so that it lands on top of the previous block a squarely as possible. The more square your block lands, the more people fly in from the sides using umbrellas as wings and take up residence in the block you just dropped. Stacking them exactly on top of one another will generate bonus points. As the tower grows, it starts to sway, meaning you have a swinging block that you have to time to land on a moving target.
http://www.scenta.co.uk/minisites/flash/roboclaw/index.html
Heaps of annoyance.

Choice The Second. Even more annoying is Roboclaw. The object of the game is to move a double-axis claw to pick up a ball and place it in a goal. The up and down arrow keys control the main axis, and the left and right arrow keys control the secondary axis. The levels get increasingly difficult ( it would be silly to make it easier) by adding obstacles (the claw and arm can pass over obstacles, but the ball cannot) and making you race the timer, fear not there is a code for each level so you can pick up where you left off if you lose all of you lives.
http://www.gamershood.com/flashgames/4707
Impedimentia indeed.

Have a good one

thatch

{Currently listening to Feist and Rodrigo y Gabriela }
{Currently reading: Ruby On Rails Manuals }
{Quick Status Check: Going To Hell}
{Crop Circle Status: It’s not long to May now and the games will begin again. http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/2007/2007.html }

Published
Categorized as Mondays

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