This is a video of a 400 pound lioness trying to eat a small child at the zoo. Even though there are several inches of glass between the lion and child, there’s still something very disconcerting about watching a lion “attack” a helpless child.
After watching that video, it’s not hard to imagine what would happen if you wandered into the enclosure, right? You’d have to be nuts to wander into the den of a caged lion or tiger or…
Apparently, the people Buenos Aires disagree. Just give the Lujan Zoo $50 and sign their waiver acknowledging the animal might eat you and you can spend some time with adult lions, tigers and bears.
If you’re lucky, you might even get a giant tiger to roll over on its back like my chocolate lab. If you’re unlucky, well, you probably had it coming.
For the right price in Las Vegas, you can live out any number of boyhood fantasies (easy buddy, we’re gonna keep this clean). You can drive Ferraris, Indy Cars and Dune Buggies, pilot Fighter Jetsor play basketball with Michael Jordan. A new company called Dig This has created my favorite adolescent adventure yet: construction equipment playground.
Under the watchful eye of our experienced instructors you will be successfully operating one of these yellow giants in less than 10 minutes through a course that will take you through a series of at least 3 activities where you will move mountains, stack monster rocks, dig huge holes, and so much more.
Who’s up for a Vegas weekend? I can’t wait to get back to my glory days in the sandbox. I mean, how much different can a 3 ton Caterpillar excavator be from the 3 pound Tonka version?
Dave Pell (the self-titled “Internet Superhero”) recently launched Delivereads, a service that sends a handful of curated articles straight to your Kindle each week. It’s a wonderful idea with excellent execution. Here’s the sign-up process:
Let Amazon know Delivereads is going to send content to your Kindle
Give Delivereads your Kindle’s email address
Read
I’ve been subscribed for a couple of weeks and the article selections have been great. It’s fun digging in after a new delivery has downloaded to my Kindle — having a random collection of content chosen for me reminds me of those paper things that I used to get sent to my house. What were they called again?
For around 300 bucks, Lockitron lets you turn regular doors into awesome doors from the future that can be opened via smartphone or text message. Never again will your keys poke you in the leg when you’re jammed into a full subway car.
I was tempted to ignore the obvious security issues and order this bad boy until I read this:
The Lockitron is currently a “beta” product and as such certain aspects of its operation might, at times, not perform as expected. Some things that we would like to note include wireless range issues, problems working with non-standard or damaged doors and latencies that might occur while unlocking your door.
When Bill Watterson ended Calvin and Hobbes, he could have handed the reigns of the beloved strip over to any number of cartoonists and raked in a pile of cash. Of course, Watterson was staunchly opposed to any licensing or merchandising of his work — and milking it for a few extra dollars would have been unspeakable. The last strip ran in papers over 15 years ago and yet it’s still every bit as funny and thoughtful now as it was then.
Even though Watterson left at the top of his game, it’s easy to wonder what would have become of Calvin and his fluffy companion. Thanks to the blog Pants Are Overrated, we can imagine their present with a little more clarity. They present Hobbes and Bacon (and Hobbes and Bacon Part 2) as a nod to one of their “most prominent influences.”
Oh, and the rest of their site has been fun to navigate around as well. Go on and give it a look while you’re there.
Joel Spolsky (of Fog Creek and Stack Exchange) advocates for team lunch at work:
The importance of eating together with your co-workers is not negotiable, to me. It’s too important to be left to chance. That’s why we eat together at long tables, not a bunch of little round tables. That’s why when new people start work at the company, they’re not allowed to sit off by themselves in a corner. When we have visitors, they eat together with everyone else.
I completely agree with Joel’s post. One of my favorite things about working for Harvest is that we eat lunch together nearly every day. Our unwritten rule that lunchtime conversation should avoid “work” talk gives us all a mental holiday from any office stress and allows us time to learn something about each other beyond what we do for the company. By the time lunch breaks, I am usually recharged and ready to crush the second half of my day.
The Atlantic’s excellent In Focus blog ran a collection of photos for Memorial Day and the picture above really struck me. There are many people who deserve our thanks today and not all of them have served directly for a branch of the armed forces. The families of our servicemen and women bear a tremendous burden — and they are just as deserving of our gratitude on this holiday weekend.
To Bob, Gabe, Zach, John, Kevin, Jay, Joe and Art — and their families: Thank you.
You’ve probably already seen President Obama’s speech at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, but it’s simply too good not to share. Grab some popcorn and watch the whole thing.
Harvest just released an alpha version of a project I helped build, called Gardener:
In February, a few members of our team were asked to dedicate a week to R&D by building a new time-tracking app. While discussing scope, we agreed that we get more done on days that we take a a few minutes to set an agenda, and we sought to design an app around this thesis:
I believe planning/allocating time will make me more focused and productive.
The experimental nature of the project gave our team a chance to play with Backbone.js, a framework designed to bring MVC structure to the browser. I was completely impressed with how easy Backbone makes keeping track of loads of data. A lot of the complexity of building a javascript app gets reduced to almost-nothing right off the bat. Awesome!
Anywho, check out Gardener and let us know what you think.
Earth hour asks people to turn off the lights for one hour to serve as a small symbol of commitment to further action against global warming. I don’t know how effective this gesture is, but it sure does make for some nice imagery.
Both Alan Taylor’s In Focus and Boston Globe’s Big Picture have posted sets of pictures from earth hour. Most of the photos are of famous landmarks which can be “dimmed” by clicking. Seeing Las Vegas go dark was a personal favorite for me.
When the bright lights of the strip get shut off, Las Vegas is just another boring, American city.
Opening day is approaching and Summer Anne Burton is doing her part to make sure we’re ready. Though she’s only about 10% of the way through drawing every baseball hall of famer, I smell an impending book deal. Go ahead and sign me up for a pre-order, Summer.
Earlier this morning, my Grandpa Jay passed away. Though the news was not unexpected, that hasn’t stopped me from reminiscing my Saturday away.
Many of my favorite moments with him were spent over a game of cards after school (usually gin rummy or cribbage). Our games gave us a chance to talk about my classes or sports or whatever was going on in the world. Mostly, though, we talked about music.
Grandpa played the saxophone well into his later years and was quite fond of big band music. As a kid, it wasn’t my favorite style of music (it sounded too “old”), but that didn’t stop him from playing it for me.
During my freshman year of college, I played for my school’s jazz ensemble. Our director, Bill Russo, was a fantastic composer and arranger who worked with artists like Duke Ellington, Leonard Bernstein, Stan Kenton and Dizzie Gillespie. Needless to say, Grandpa loved this and would ask me about it every time we saw each other. It was really nice to have a new perspective on the music he loved — and I grew quite fond for many of the songs we played.
With Grandpa in mind, I put together a small Rdio playlist of big band tunes. Give it a listen if you’re so inclined — it’s a great soundtrack for a trip down memory lane.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably already know that Jeopardy! super-champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter were defeated by IBM’s new supercomputer, Watson. It’s been 14 years since IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov and Watson represents a tremendous leap forward in natural language understanding.
Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy! player: It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman. But unlike us, Watson cannot be intimidated. It never gets cocky or discouraged. It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it’s confident about an answer.
