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I figured the last post of the year should be something educational so here is a very cool article:
100 Things We Didn't Know Las Year.
Some of my favorites are:
The lion costume in the film Wizard of Oz was made from real lions.
One cow gives off enough harmful methane gas in a single day to fill around 400 liter bottles.
Nelson Mandela used to steal pigs as a child.
In the 1960s, the CIA used to watch Mission Impossible to get ideas about spying.
I have been spending some of my time off listing to the audio book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Its a great book that tries to prove that a group of "normal people" are smarter on average than a group of experts.
Here is a wikipedia article about the book.
Here is the authors presentation at SXSW Conference 2006 (MP3)
I hope everyone is having a great Christmas day like we are! We just got done opening are presents from each other and now we are going to eat breakfast and then head out to Missy's family Christmas.
Watching A Christmas Story on Christmas Eve has become one of my favorite holiday traditions. If you have never seen A Christmas Story it starts tonight at 6 and plays for 24 straight hours.
If you don't have TBS try watching this:
A Christmas Story in 30 Seconds (and Re-enacted by Bunnies).
Actually I don't want a hippopotamus for Christmas but someone did send me this very old, very funny, Christmas song that I have never heard that I thought I would pass along.
I want a hippopotamus for Christmas mp3.
Well, I have to go do some last minute Christmas shopping so pray for me!
I just spent the last five hours shopping for Christmas presents and now I am really in the holiday mood and cant wait until Monday. Now if we could only get some snow and magical reindeer it would be awesome.
According to the news today is the First Day of Winter and the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. Along with that I think today is my last day of work until the 2nd of January.
To celebrate these three magical events here is a game where you get to Kick Santa to see how far he will go (Update: my high score is 958).
I found this off Digg.com this morning and thought it was really cool:
How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? This map gives a brief history of the world's most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious wars are also highlighted. Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds? Ready, Set, Go!
OK, I didn't make this dreidel game the Jewish Outreach Institute did but I have enjoyed playing it.
Most people don't know that Dreidel is actually a gambling game played during Hanukkah. I really would like to find a real dreidel to play the game though.
Last night Kenny flew in for the holidays and a break from his internship at AMD. So we picked him up at the Airport and headed to Dave and Busters to celebrate Geek Christmas.
We all exchanged gifts and I got a few things to make my co-workers jealous:
USB Missile Launcher
USB Beverage Chiller
USB Bluetooth Adapter
The coolest gift of all though had to be the Air Soft Gun that Nick got Eric for Christmas. Erics cows better watch out!
Microsoft has a new interesting product offering. The basic product offering starts with FREE domain name, web site, email, web site stats, etc all built on SharePoint services 3. I saw a demo of the product and they have made it so easy to setup the site, it's almost like working with word documents, no PROGRAMMING or SCRIPTING skills are needed.
So this is your chance to get your own .com (for free)!
Here is one of my favorite seasonal flash games: Winterbells. Click to jump, then bounce off the bells. My high score is 51,170. Add your score to the comments. I love simple games.
PS. Hit The Birds!
Who doesn't love brownies? Nobody, that's who!
So last night Missy and I worked on one of our Christmas projects and put together 24 brownies-in-a–jar Christmas gifts. It looks cool, it's easy and inexpensive to make, and it turns into brownies!
Basically, you layer all the dry ingredients in a quart jar, and then add a tag explaining what wet ingredients (like 4 eggs and melted butter) to add and how to finish the recipe. The one we used comes from Allrecipes.com and includes pecans, which don’t belong in a brownie so we replaced them with chocolate chips.
As normal we have some brownie project pictures here.
Tower Defense Flash Game.
This game is based on the popular Warcraft 3 “Element Tower Defense” and the Starcraft “Turret Defense” game play. The object of the game is to prevent the hordes (waves) of monsters from getting to the castle by building element towers near the path. You can choose from a number of different elements to build towers from. When you click on a tower that has been built, the build menu becomes an upgrade menu, allowing you to make your tower stronger. The monsters will spawn (appear) every 20 seconds. Their health will be multiplied by 1.25 with every wave. If your towers fail to kill the monsters, and they do get the castle, a civilian of your castle will die. When all your civilians die, the game will be over.
If you see Nick you might want to ask him if he is ok since he has a bad case of the Milk Cow Blues!
If you haven't had enough fun shoveling your driveway here is a neat little shockwave game you can play to shovel parking lots.
Missy and I have spent the last 8 hours shoveling off the drive way. I did take one break to go with Nick to get a new Mailbox and look at the cars in the ditches.
Here are a few more pictures that we took.
So I woke up this morning with nearly 18 inches of snow in our yard and the radio saying every major road in Mid Missouri is closed to all but emergency vehicles, so Missy and I are staying home today and I am going to try to shovel the driveway without giving myself a heart attack.
I have my pictures of the blizzard here.
Has anyone seen Nicks Mailbox?
On a totally unrelated note, no one in Key West is looking for a Network Security Specialist are they?
