Using Utensils

Horse Pills

So it’s official, my cold is actually a sinus infection.

I caught it almost a month ago on my flight to New York, but sticking to my no pills unless you absolutely need them policy I avoided going to doctor until this week.

Truthfully the main reason I went was to stop the motherly looks of concern I was getting at work. My cube neighbors would say, “Who cares if you have multiple meetings today? Go home, rest and then call the doctor.”

While I still think I could have beaten this cold with a couple more weeks, I am grateful for everyone’s concern. 

The Remedy

Apparently the remedy includes taking multiple ‘horse pill’-esque prescriptions and a nasal spray taken twice a day for two weeks! These pills are massive and they don’t have an enteric coating so they start dissolving the instant they hit your tongue and taste like metallic crap.

In any case I’ll stop complaining, who knows, modern medicine may be on to something… I am feeling slightly better.

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Space Town Hall

The seats were a little past three-quarters full last night at the Planetary Society’s Town Hall meeting in Palo Alto. The mix of people was amazing; everyone from scientists to students to enthusiasts were in the audience. My friend Jeff usually tips me off to these events and this time my friend Emily joined us as well.

The meeting started off with some brief intros and the jumped right into Q&A with Bill Nye as the host/audience handler and Chris McKay, Sandra Bodley, and Kevin Stube as the expert panelists.

There were a couple heated questions, but Bill Nye did a great job fielding and provoking the audience to explore the ideas brought up (I was definitely impressed by both his and Chris McKay’s range of knowledge).

While I’ve been to a few of the society’s presentations in the past, this was the first time that it was so audience centric and it was great to see the mix of ideas and opinions being tossed around the room.

View as slideshow

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New Concoctions

Between the music and drinks, confusion ensued last weekend when my friends and I were in a club. While ordering a Tanqueray and Tonic and Red Bull and Vodka the Tanqueray Bull was born.

On weekends and holidays I’ve been know to play the part of an alcohol alchemist and have made a few decent concoctions along the way.

Here are a couple of them:

St. Gin

• 1 oz St. Germain (my new favorite)
• 2 oz Tanqueray or Bombay Sapphire Gin
• 5 oz Tonic Water
• 1 Lime Wedge

Pour the Gin, St. Germain, and the Tonic Water into a highball glass almost filled with ice cubes.

Tanqueray Bull

• 2 oz Tanqueray Gin
• 1 can Red Bull

Pour the Tanqueray and Red Bull into a highball glass almost filled with ice cubes.

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Weekend Blog Quotes

Ran across a couple good quotes while going threw my RSS reader today that I found interesting.

One is from a friend and another from a guy whom I often don’t agree with but find his points interesting nonetheless:

“Language. It’s seems that ‘take initiative’ is an oxymoron. Right from the linguistic get go, English has set us up to fail and freeload in the doing department.

Conclusion, there are a few options:

1. we become conscious of our weaknesses and start doing
2. we move to change the verb-noun usage of the phrase
   or
3. wait for someone to do either of the above.”

— Zoe without Dots

“Today is the youngest you will ever be. Act like it.”

— Mark Cuban

Posted in Random Thoughts, The Interweb | No Comments »

Nirvana Annotated Video

This took creativity… this guy annotated a video on how to play Nirvana’s “Come as you are”. Besides tips, he included sheet music!

Nirvana Guitar How-To

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Air Force Campaign

Air | Space | Cyberspace

To see and hear advertisements for military services that includes Space and Cyberspace as sub-branches of the service is completely surreal. It feels like a mock sci-fi ad out of some cheesy TV show, but that’s exactly what the US Air Force is doing with their latest ad campaign.

Over the last couple of years the Air Force has been tailoring it’s branding to look and feel more and more like futuristic sci-fi movies/shows.

First it was the revamp of their logo to look like something from Battlestar Galactica and now it’s their tag-line, “Air Force, Above All; Air | Space | Cyberspace“.

Above All

The thought of a military presence that’s “Above All” scares the crap out of me:

• their site has sample videos of pilotless drones for monitor people,
• recent articles talking about the Rods from God project, and
• who knows what they want to do in “cyberspace”

These all take the idea of Big Brother to a whole new level.

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The Big Apple

I know, I know, everyone loves New York

Nearly every time I’ve gone to NYC I was usually stuck in Midtown the entire time, but last week I had a chance to work from the Google office in NYC and I have to admit it’s the first time that I actually enjoyed being in the Big Apple.

Chelsea, Soho, et al. are worlds away from Midtown both in terms of stuff to-do and people’s attitudes.

Thanks to help from a few friends, I was directed to some great restaurants, hang out places, and theatres and that made all the difference (map).

My view of NYC has definitely changed and I can’t want until my next trip.

Google Office

Hopefully I’ll have more time on my next visit to take some shots of the city and night life.

View as slideshow

Posted in Photography, Random Thoughts, Travel | 1 Comment »

Annotate This…

Whoo hoo… Annotations are live on YouTube!

This has been one of the projects I’ve been working on for months now with teams all over the world and it has been awesome to see everyone’s reaction to the product.

What are Video Annotations… I think the about page can explain it better than I can

Video Annotations are a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos! Use them to:

• Add background information about the video.
• Create stories with multiple possibilities (viewers click to choose the next scene)
• Link to related YouTube videos, channels, or search results from within a video
• All of the above!

You control what the annotations say, where they appear on the video, and when they appear and disappear.

Posted in Design, Flash | 1 Comment »

It’s Alive!!

Watch out interweb… here comes the new YouTube player

I don’t normally talk about work on here, but I am unbelievably excited about the new YouTube player. After months of planning, rewriting, and testing we finally launched the our new player a few days ago!

The internal plumbing is top-notch and it’s absolutely gorgeous thanks to our amazing Flash Engineer, Richard, and our Visual Design guru, Omar.

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Gladiators

This weekend I discovered American Gladiators on Hulu and I’m embarrassed to say that I watched all of the episodes.

Truthfully, I’m not completely sure why, I can’t stand reality TV shows and hate “professional” wrestling, but once I watched the first episode I was hooked.

Few possibilities:

• perhaps it’s a flashback to when I was a kid and would watch the original
• the contraptions make no sense, but still draw you in (eg. “jousting” with huge q-tips while standing on small pads over a pool of water)
• parts of it remind me of my old wrestling days
• maybe it’s just Jet

In any case it made good background noise while I caught up on emails.

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