Minions!

I saw Despicable Me not too long ago and I really enjoyed it.  The minions were pretty funny.  I found this today and I thought I would share.  Its a minion I made with the Minion Maker:

Songsmith and Remakes of Classic Songs

I can't help but laugh at these videos:

So, a while ago Microsoft decided to put out some software that you sing into and it generates a "song" for you, but the result sounds like something you would hear as a demo track for a cheap keyboard.  The commercial for this thing is painfully corny. (I haven't watched all the way through.)  So when you get enough of that, see the results of this program on some remakes of some classic songs below:

Okay, this has to be the worst commercial ever:


Metallica's Enter Sandman as a Disco Song:


Queen's We Will Rock You Salsa:

Wow. Graduated, married, two receptions, went on a cruise to Mexico, went to Australia, and moved to Phoenix all in three weeks! We are insane.

21st Century Distractions

Image from http://images.nymag.com/news/features/add090525_2_560.jpg

The other day, I read this article which discussed distraction. It is a little lengthy but it is a good read.  At the beginning of the article, the author asks the reader to get rid of all his or her distractions: Twitter, texts, email in-boxes, checking sports scores, etc.   I did my best to do so, but I didn't successfully read through the whole thing without looking up a few things he mentioned in the article.
The author discusses how the problem of attention has been brought to the center of our culture's attention, and how attention and distraction has been the focus of many studies.  It seems that most of the studies say that the detractions that we have are a negative thing: they hurt productivity and waste time.  The author wonders if wasted time is actually wasted or not.  Isn't jumping from site to site just following your attention?  While I was reading the article, the author mentioned some things that distracted him from writing the article.  A few of those things caught my attention and I looked them up, then I returned to reading the article.  It didn't distract me enough to stop reading the article completely, but now I know more about the things he mentioned.
There are a lot of people who think that the lack of attention of younger generations will lead to them lacking skills like concentrating on complex tasks from beginning to end, but the author makes an interesting point:  they can already do things that their elders can't—like conducting numerous conversations simultaneously across different mediums, or being able to pay attention when switching between attentional targets in a way that has been thought impossible.  Is this a bad thing? Time will tell if this leads to a state of ineptness or to a new way of thinking and doing things.

Nerd is the New Cool?

Oops! PS3 Y2K10

Image from http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/gamelife/2010/03/apocalyps31.jpg

Yesterday, many PS3 owners could not use their systems because of a cryptic error message: "An error occurred during the start operation. (8001050F)." Some people were complaining about lost data and trophies and games that would not start. Sony told PS3 owners to not even turn on their systems until the problem was fixed.  This embarrassing bug influenced people to call it the ApocalyPS3. It turns out that it was a bug in the clock that thought 2010 was a leap year. (I wonder why the systems thought that 2010 was a leap year.) This problem is reminiscent of some of the problems that people were worrying about when Y2K was approaching. I am quite surprised about this because of the reputation and high standards of quality that give Sony a good name (unlike the XBox 360 red ring of death issues). Don't worry, though. If this ever happens again there is no need to fear: Wired wrote a list of 10 things to do while your PS3 is broken.

Privacy Invasion!

Image from http://static.arstechnica.com/2010/02/18/thumb_kids_laptops_ars.jpg

According to some recent articles, parents are suing their child's school because they claim that the school used a school-issued computer to spy on their child at home.  The laptops that the school district issued out have webcams that can be covertly accessed by school administrators, but they didn't tell anyone that they could or would do that.  This is ridiculous and kind of creepy.  Although the details of the situation are not clear as to if the school can access the webcam at any time or if they can only look at things saved on to the computers by the students, I think that it was wrong that the school didn't say that they had this ability. Also, I find it ironic that if the school was so worried about what the students would do with these computers and worried about the students' online safety, their solution was to spy on them.