Testing Google Wave - embed a wave into a blog!

I finally have a Google Wave account. Wave is a very nifty tool, and I'm spending some time trying to understand it.

One of the cool features it has is the ability to export Waves to blogs, and have people interact with your wave from within your blog, in real time!

Take a look at the Wave I embedded at the bottom of this blog: (Note: if you don't see the wave, it maybe because you don't have a Google account, or even a Wave account.)

If you can't see the embed below, please refer to the screenshots: Click the pictures to view in higher resolution.

I want a drag and drop feature, I wasn't able to find something like that yet.

PS: I noticed that waves have to be made public so that other people can view them. This is done easily by adding the robot "easypublic@appspot.com" as a contact and adding it to the wave.

How to do the Nozomi Sasaki dance (for Fit's!)

Nozomi Sasaki starred in a Lotte Fit's commercial which became famous in Japan for this (very) cute dance. This spawned a dance contest in Japan. The steps are quite simple, but nonetheless, a Japanese magazine had to spell out the individual moves, as you can see above! Click the picture above for a high res version.

Thanks Reallycuteasians!

Did you know? (the extremely fast pace of tech changes)

This is from the Economist. This video's main purpose is to shock a person with numbers to rethink how businesses have been spending on advertising.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer selling Windows (circa 1980+)

LOL. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stars in a commercial advertising the original MS Windows product. As he said, "You get all these features plus reversi... for only 99 dollars!"

Watch the commercial here:



Discovered this via @JimAyson.

Twitter lists out as a beta feature

Twitter rolled out a beta feature for lists to a part of Twitter's user base, according to Techcrunch. This summarizes the list feature:

Setting up a list is simple. Currently, the homepage features a Lists banner that allows you to start simply by clicking on the “Create a new list” button. Once you do this, an overlay appears and you just type in the list name (which Twitter then converts into a permalink along the lines of twitter.com/USERNAME/LISTNAME), and set the list to be public or private. This is obviously an important distinction as the public one, others will be able to see, while the private one will be for your eyes only.

On the right hand column of you Twitter.com homepage, you will see a new “lists” area under you bio. Clicking on this will take you to your list overview page where you can manage your own lists, as well as see other user’s public lists that you are a part of. Also, on user profile pages you will see that the users’ lists are now listed under the “Favorites” area in the right hand toolbar.

Clicking on any of these lists will take you to a stream of just the users followed by that list. Basically, this is a filter, if used the right way. This is something Twitter proper has long needed (though plenty of third party services like Brizzly have stepped in to offer it).

Unfortunately, adding people to your list is not as easy as it should be. The reason for this is that there is no user search functionality. Instead, you have to either go to your “following” page, or to that person’s profile to manually add them.

I have created my own list - for "friends." I'm still playing with this feature. As of now, its main benefit for me is to filter my feed according to my own personal preferences.

Dear God... (more funny letters!)

After the first post, I decided to find more funny letters to God, and here are some of them!

By the end of the photos, I'd like to connect an amazing TEDtalk to these letters.

1. How hard is it to love people?

2. This reminds me of Kaitlyn Maher's answer to "Are you from New York?" and Maher's answer is... here.

3. Wow, this kid is suggesting to God what He should have done with Cain and Abel.

4. This takes the grand prize for me!

These letters written by kids remind very strongly of Rebecca Saxe's TEDtalk about how the abilities of children/people to reason out and judge scenarios of "people thinking about thinking people" develop markedly and rapidly between the ages of approximately three and seven years old.

She discusses how the RTPJ (the part of the brain that enables us to read minds and intentions) works (geek stuff here), and ultimately how we can influence other's minds (using magnetic devices).

It is a very exciting talk - one of the best I've seen via Ted.com!

Thanks to Geek Army for the letters!

Dear God...

LOL.

Google barcode logo today!

The Google doodle today is a barcode!

What is the significance of October 7 to the barcode? According to Wikipedia, on October 7, 1952, the US Patent Office granted Patent 2,612,994 for the barcode to Norman Joseph Woodland, Bernard Silver and Jordin Johanson.

The history of the doodle

There's a colorful history to the Google doodle. According to the Google Story, the first Google doodle was designed by founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998 to serve as an out-of-office announcement to their users. To people who knew, the doodle signified that Page and Brin went to the Burning Man festival, and if Google went down that day, no one will be there to fix it. See the historic doodle below.

Since then Google has been regularly changing its doodles depending on the occasion. According to Wikipedia, "Google doodles have been produced for the birthdays of several noted artists and scientists, including Andy Warhol, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Louis Braille, Percival Lowell, Edvard Munch, Nikola Tesla, Béla Bartók, René Magritte, Michael Jackson, H.G. Wells, Samuel Morse, Hans Christian Ørsted and Mahatma Gandhi among others.[2] Additionally, the featuring of Lowell's logo design coincided with the launch of another Google product, Google Maps. Google doodles are also used to depict major events at Google, such as the company's own anniversary.[6] British novelist Roald Dahl has been featured, with the logo containing characters and items from some of his books, such as Matilda. The celebration of historical events is another common topic of Google Doodles including a Lego brick design in celebration of the interlocking Lego block's 50th anniversary."

Here's one doodle that appeals to me - the MC Escher doodle!

I voted for Efren Penaflorida as CNN's Hero

Wanna have an ID photo like this?

Would you like to have a photo like that adorning your ID? But this ID is nothing compared to...

Batman bin Suparman! I've blogged about this young superhero of superheroes before.

Thanks Oddee for the first pic!

Metallica - Turn the page

This Metallica song doesn't make me sad - but after seeing its accompanying music video, I felt really sad.

It captures in detail the difficult problems of a single mother raising her child. What puzzles me and saddens me is when the mother said at the end, "if I were to live my life again, I would make the exact same choices." It's almost a statement of helplessness.