Eye-Eye Matey!

I just have to direct your eyes to a wonderful photoblog called ENFOCAR that a coworker of mine just launched. He has a wonderful eye for creating tension in a photo. My favorite pic is A Billboard With Eyes.

The Brain Butler

I really enjoy wine, partially thanks to a man I dated a few years back. He was quite passionate about the topic, avidly reading Wine Spectator, and he could spend 45 minutes picking out a wine for dinner that night. Other than the painfully long waits in the wine store, this was perfect for me. I benefited from his superior taste and knowledge without having to spend a second learning anything.

But riding his intellectual coattails didn't work over the long term. We broke up and I was left with, well, a bratty tongue that wanted all the best wines still and a dull brain that hadn't manage to learn much more than which names meant red and which white.

I don't think my plight is rare either. I once read an article proposing that couples often store information in each other's heads. One person is good at finances. The other makes exceptional pasta primavera. Voila! A symbiotic partnership is born.

But I've started to notice that this is seeping beyond the confines of a serious relationship. It's showing up among friends and, more surprising, co-workers with similar jobs. At my workplace, a design agency, people within one capability are micro-specializing. We each have reputations for being interested in different aspects of our job. This means each of us are keepers of different bundles of knowledge.

I, for instance, enjoy being a first adopter of newer technologies that are in the early stages of user-friendliness (i.e. I don't have to do any of my own coding or head to Radio Shack for a new cord, but few other people have heard of the software/site/product yet). So co-workers send me links to things they don't have time to explore but think I might like. When I have time, I wander to the sites and try something new.

Whether this trend is new or not, I couldn't pretend to say. But I would propose that based on how much information there is in the world, it's bound to increase. As information overwhelms, we start piecing together support systems to comb through it. Those support systems include bloggers whom we've come to trust the taste of despite having never met, ex-boyfriends who hold all the knowledge we need about wine, and co-workers who research things and then report back any exciting new technologies / trends / content.

My favorite word for this is bit literacy, coined, I believe, by Mark Hurst, who is particularly concerned that we all have ever-improving experiences with technology despite the potential to be overwhelmed by its content.

Perhaps we can consciously acknowledge the need to rely on others for those bits. Call them brain butlers — friends, co-workers or bloggers who are willing to research topics we have no time for and parse it down to the information we need to know. Kinda makes you want to choose your friends (and your place of employment) a little more wisely.

Find the Perfect Gift for You

Use the Imagini Gift Finder to uncover the perfect gift for you or others (sold in the UK). Besides the regional limitation there is one other downside: the process takes longer than expected with 15 steps. But naval gazing never gets old. ; )

The results are quite fun and — I thought — rather accurate.

House Envy

A co-worker of mine just closed on a new home in Jersey. I SO want it. I want to hold it and cuddle it and make it mine and 'I wanna pet the rabbits, George'! Too obscure?

Bottom line: I don't have enough space in my little NY apartment to buy all the neat, cute things I find all over the web. Now you all can join me in my pain. The Hygge site is only available to customers in the UK.

But feel free to browse anyway.

Their Fairytale inspired giclee print and cut maple coasters will make you realize just how tough my life must be the rest of the time when I see lovely things and can't even dream about surrounding myself with them.

UPDATE: Dammit. Turns out they ship anywhere. Now I'm alone again. So alone.

Women Rule! Yes!

Women — the smart, well-balanced, successful kind — rule for two reasons today:

• Contrary to myths, they have better marriages and better sex
• They now get paid the same as men when they win Wimbledon

Um... uh... maybe... uh... can you decide?

What kind of problem solver are you? Take this one-page test (requires you to create a login) to find out. I was quadrant 2!

Fake iPhone Story

I love stories about idiocy. That's why I still pay passing attention to politics, but I digress. Here's a great iPhone story where the local news didn't ... quite ... get it right.

I Heart Social Experiments

Why do social experiments make me laugh so hard? Like Candid Camera, where you watch people think they've entered the twilight zone. Or the guy who stuck bubble stickers on posters around NYC and then returned to see who wrote messages in them.

The Voyer Box is the newest discovery to make me smile. Watch the startled looks as people get their picture taken while they walk by. I thought at first the machine cat-called pedestrians, but this is slightly kinder... maybe.

Of course, intrusive technology is BAD BAD BAD, as anyone concerned about ubiquitous computing will tell you. But SO funny.

Dream a Little Dream

Dreams: I wanna be an astronaut. I wanna sing in a rock band. I wanna ... um, write dirty romance novels. Sometimes they actually come true. You land on the moon, you open for Jewel, you ... um, write a dirty romance novel.

Well, today a little dream of mine came true. This is one of those dreams that you almost forget you have, like not having singleton socks in the laundry or rediscovering some forgotten perfect outfit. And then it happens one day — the dream comes true — and, partially because you've forgotten to yearn for it, you're insanely excited.

That's me right now. Insanely exited. Over something really small, but something I've quietly wanted since I was planning out my dream mansion in fifth grade. Today I discovered... [building suspense] ... a speaker system that can play the Same Song Throughout Your Home. Now I can walk from room to room and never lose the melody. Woohoo! But get this: It can also play a Different Song in Each Room in the House. Woohoo again!

The main reason I'm excited is that it was gushingly reviewed on this blog I read that endorses clever technical products. And although the system costs more than $1000, I'm excited for another reason: I don't need it yet. I barely have three rooms to my name — no house. By the time I need it, I expect the technology will be smaller, cheaper and more accessible.

Today's accomplishments? One lifelong dream fulfilled. Whew! I'm exhausted.

find a photo with geography

Using location tags found on Flickr images, Yahoo! has created a map that shows you pictures connected with the locations where they were taken. There are still several rough spots since it's dependent on accurate tagging and the areas of the country presented on the map seem to be pre-selected.

I've heard rumors of a GPS-based camera that can map your own pictures to an interface like this one. You'll never forget again exactly where you took something. Now that is cool, especially as you could compare someone else's picture taken in the exact same spot. Oooh!

Changing the way we look at history

Technophiles and history buffs alike will appreciate this one: a tag cloud showing the words most commonly used in presidential state of the union addresses since John Adams. The bigger the word, the more times it was repeated.

Can you forgive someone 7 times 7?

I'm going to try (emphasis on try) to renew my blogging efforts, insofar as I'll post interesting websites I've come across. More to come!

Chia Pet ... Reborn!

It's cute. It's grassy. It's completely unnecessary in your life. Cha-cha-cha-chia? No, it's Nyokki. Raise a toast to progress.

White Chocolate Maggots

Take a break. Relax. And visit Strange New Products, a site that hunts down the insane and inane. It features everything from white chocolate maggots to corporate sponsored Porta Potties. Yum! Have some fun checking back often.

How close do you live to cement?

Read today on Design Observer:

If your front door opens onto a sidewalk, you're probably a Democrat.

If your front door is more than 25' from your street, you're probably a Republican.

Gasp! She Returns!

Well, it took turning a corporate monologue into dialog to get me to return to blogging. I can't resist sharing this with the few of you still diligent enough to read this (thanks Miss B!). If you've ever walked through the pedestrian tunnel north of Grand Central, you've experienced a distracting advertisement haranging you as you walk. Garble! Grawk! Yell, yell, yell!

Well, designer Ji Lee is fighting back — at least against print advertisements. He launched The Bubble Project whereupon he placed bubble stickers (the kind used in comic books) on ads throughout NYC. Passersby wrote comments in the space provided. The results, both hilarious and unpredictable, were captured in Lee's recent book Talk Back: The Bubble Project.

Now if only there were a mute button in that pedestrian tunnel.

Anybody seen Wag the Dog?

This story about the bumbling Abu Musab al-Zarqawi almost seems too ridiculous to believe. Hmmm... anyboy ever seen Wag the Dog?

Running With Diapers

Read this little tidbit today: 5-year-old runs marathons. I find this more sad than exciting. He's like Little Hercules, who ended up with an abusive dad and claims of steroid drug use before he hit his teens. The article says they're already preparing him for the 2012 Olympics. Shouldn't there be a child labor law against this?

We all scream for ice cream (ball)!

Chalk this one up as awesome but useless: today I learned about this cool ice cream ball from L.L. Bean. You put the ingredients in one end (cream, sugar), the chemistry in the other (ice, rock salt) and move the ball around for 20 minutes. Voila! You have ice cream. Totally cool, right?

Problem is, when I tried to think of someone who could use this cool gadget, I couldn't think of a single person. Sure, it'd make an entertainment group event for one party, but would the excitement last for 20 min? And what about subsequent parties? Wouldn't your friends get tired of you forcing them to work out just to get dessert? Sigh. Excitement dissipates...

Hanging Head in Shame (But Bopping to Good Tunes)

OK, I was just about ready to give this up. Things got busy at work, and I just wasn't focused on my Cool Stuff blog anymore. But then I come across something like Pandora and can't keep it to myself. Credit Dora for the link. This is the coolest music service: name one song or one artist and, using the research from the Music Genome Project, the site predicts other music you'd like and plays it for you as streaming radio.

I typed in one of my favs, Metric, and have subsequently listened to "Unsatisfied" by Nine Black Alps, "Rock & Roll Queen" by Subways, and Slip & Slide by Tiny Amps, none of which I've ever heard before.

Now all they need is a desktop widget so I can always check there to see what song I'm listening to (instead I have to figure out which web browser window it's sitting in). Nonetheless, this is brilliance of technology in its simplest form.