I don’t watch wrestling as much as I used to but Wrestlemania Sunday is always a special day. I rarely shell out the sixty bucks for the PPV but have watched when I’m with a group of people or at a bar or something. But this year, through the magic of the Internet, I may or may not be watching a grey market Russian livestream of the event. Man, the Internet is awesome!
Anyhow, thought this was a fitting graphic for Wrestlemania Sunday…
…I asked her to hold my wine and she agreed. 😉
(Can you see that look of longing in her eyes as she glances at my wine? Actually pretty cruel of us to tempt her this way during a birthday supper for my dad earlier this week!)
Pace’s portmanteau word “ness” is one of the most upvoted comments on this Reddit question although all of the answers are great (with that said, I’m glad it wasn’t my kid who liked to say “cockporn” instead of “popcorn”!)
When I was a kid, the cartoon “Battle of the Planets” was a huge deal for me and my friends. One of the many cool things about the show was that “the G-Force members stay in contact through a wrist-band communicator device.”
In grade one, I still remember how I convinced a bunch of my classmates to create “wrist communicators” out of paper, tape and crayons that would be modeled on the G-Force example.
For some reason, our teacher didn’t agree that having a bunch of her students whispering into their wrists throughout her class was a great idea and made us throw them out. But the idea of how cool a wrist communicator would be took root early in my formative brain.
Later on, maybe around grade six or seven, I came into possession of one of these bad boys…
Now, in hindsight, I realise that watch was probably a big part of why I never had a girlfriend in those years. 😉
A watch like that is a very visible, ever-present indicator of your geekiness in a way that watching cartoons and playing on computers and reading comic books wasn’t.
I eventually gave up the calculator watch, probably as much due to peer pressure as anything, but the idea of a powerful wrist communicator device never left me.
That’s why I became extremely excited when I saw that the Pebble (in essence a 21st Century calculator watch) was being released on the crowd-funding site, Kickstarter. Apparently a lot of other geeks felt the same way as the Pebble quickly became the most successful offering in Kickstarter’s history – with their initial goal of raising $100 000 being absolutely demolished by 69 000 backers who gave a total of $10 000 000 towards the project!
I was one of those 69 000 backers and after many delays, my watch arrived yesterday! So far, it’s pretty basic – you can download a few different watchfaces, control the music on your smartphone via bluetooth, receive texts and other notifications on your wrist (meaning you don’t have to pull out your phone every time it buzzes). There’s not even a calculator app – yet.   (I’m being a bit harsh – some reviews are raves!)
But my grade one dreams of having a wrist communicator are one step closer to reality and as I’ve said many many times over the past five years since I got my first iPhone 3S, it feels like I’m living in the future.
I’m also happy to report that I not only got a girlfriend but found a wife. Luckily she knew what she was getting into as her first text to my new watch shows…
It’s no secret that I am fascinated by the different approaches that so many tech companies take towards organizational culture compared to more traditional companies.
Here’s another example – a presentation outlining tech marketing company, HubSpot’s cultural code. (I especially love their three-word policy that guides pretty much everything they do: “Use Good Judgement”. Also like that any book an employee requests is automatically added to their Kindle account – that’s a perk that libraries sorta kinda offer to their employees already!)
Does your workplace have a similar document that summarizes its shared beliefs, values and practices? If so, what does it say? If not, why not?
Lots of April Fool’s jokes across the Internet today as usual.
One of the funniest is that /r/radiohead has temporarily changed their sub-reddit to be like /r/coldplay, playing up the “rivalry” between fans of these two well-known UK bands with Radiohead seen as groundbreaking and original while Coldplay is seen by many as mainstream, unoriginal (copying much from Radiohead) and pandering.
Some of the (sarcastic) posts from the Radiohead sub-Reddit today…
Plus this hilarious mash-up of a Coldplay encore with a heavy metal song…
Perhaps my favourite thing about the major Christian holidays is it spurs atheists and other non-believers to great heights of humour…
Shea’s mom shows Pace and his cousin the video I linked to earlier this week which shows how babies grow in a mommy’s tummy.
They’re quite enthralled…
A good article about why Google has been so successful including:
