phaithful

Dude this is the sic-est thing I've ever seen. The Pistol Shrimp uses its claw a sonic weapon to create an implosion of bubbles that momentarily reaching the temperature of the sun. Wikipedia Entry

I wonder how they taste ;)

This past Tuesday I played basketball with a few of the QE Earthlinkers. Although we didn't have enough to run 5 on 5, we did get a few good games of 3 on 3 and even 3 on 4 ... heh heh. It was just some good ole fun basketball... none of that BS arguing on every single play down. None of those stupid touch foul calls. Just loving the game, and playing the game.

Great Basketball Videos

As usual, the daily life inspires more videos. So here's my round up of some great basketball videos from around the web, mostly buzzer beaters and fights... ending it with the greats!

Amazing Circus Shot

Never Give Up

Toronto Raptors vs Washington Wizards.... never ever give up

2005 Espy Winner - Blake Hoffarber

That's a horse shot if I've ever seen one.

Buzzer Beater Even the Great One Can't Deny

NCAA Top 10 Buzzer Beaters

Uh... Fighting the Referee?

I've played with some really nasty guys before, but I'm glad I don't play in this league.

Top 10 NBA Fights

More Fisticuffs... too bad it's missing the Artest / Jackson Pacers highlights.

Top 10 NBA Fights - Awesome video clips hereFight Videos - Sexy Videos

Kobe's 81

Nuff said...just SiC

I Want to Be Like Mike

Of course I've got to end it with the Greatest of All Time. Top 40 Jordan Highlights.

I'm not much of a football guy, but after work last night I went out to play a little two-touch football with some of my fellow Earthlinkers at Victory Park. It was a lot of fun...

Finding the Field

It took us a bit of time to find a place to play even though Victory Park is really big. There are 4 full sized baseball fields, 3 large patches of open grass, and a full size track complete with regulation football field in the center with 2 goal posts.

I guess the patch of grass that the QE guys normally play on was being occupied by the summertime soccer players. Also, the field between the 4 baseball outfields was occupied by little league. And the nice football field inside the middle of the track is off limits since the local HS practices there. We ended up finding a nice large patch of somewhat level grass to play 5 on 5.

The Big Game

We split up into two teams of 5 (4 guys and 1 girl). I was on the same team as Farshid and man! does that playa have a crazy arm. He pretty much threw from one end zone to the other, not to mention he's got a few good juke moves.

The Rules

The rules were fairly simple. 5 downs and no first downs. Two hand touch. No blizting, no QB run, no Rushing (we had 1 extra person to start so Glen was always on offense 6 v 5).

The teams came out to pretty even. I think I was the leading receiver for our team and Tanya was the leading receiver for her team. I believe Tanya had the highest reception ratio out of anyone and had quite a few rushing yards to boot. I think I also heard a few chants of "Reggie! Reggie! Reggie!"

In the end, our team won 5 TDs to 3 but it was fairly close competition throughout. All in all it was a good outing and it was a lot of fun just to play some sports with fellow Earthlinkers.

Some Football Vidz

Since I was so inspired of our football play, I thought I'd round up a few of the best football videos I've seen on YouTube. Enjoy!

Plano East vs John Tyler - 1994

Awesome comeback from a highschool team. Down 41-17 with 3 minutes left to go... a story book ending.

Sam I Am has got some Hops

Hmm... should I juke left then go right? spin move? ... nope... let's just jump over this dude and run it in for a touchdown.

Cal vs Stanford 1982

Probably one of the most famous college football plays ever. Hahaha... I always feel so bad for that band member at the end

So I was surfing around on Xanga just checkin' up on a few friends and I came across a few new posts by my cousin Alen Lin. He's an awesome photographer. Check out some of his latest works, he recently photographed a few restaurants and also a couple of events, http://www.xanga.com/alen.

Alen Lin's Portfolio

He's also got a couple of other things on his personal web site, www.alenlin.com. Check out the portfolio section it's got an awesome gallery of photos.

I think he also does some video because he's got a YouTube vid of a pretty cute Asian chick breaking to some music.

I probably experienced the biggest waste of my life tonight. I've been messing around with Amazon's S3 service and in doing so, I stumbled across another service that Amazon has called the Mechanical Turk. The basic premise is: there are certain tasks that computers can't do but humans can do very easily. So for each repetitive task you can make a few cents. If the task is hard then you make more, if the task is easy... well you make less.

The Amazon Mechanical Turk

Amazon provides this lengthy explanation of where the term Mechanical Turk comes from an yaddie yaddie yaddie... Of course I didn't want to read all that so I skip down to the line that says
"One of the best ways to understand Amazon Mechanical Turk is to complete a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) and see what the experience is like."

My Attempts at Human Intelligence Tasks

I'm an idiot so I sign up and try out a few. I filled out some 1 question demographic questions at $0.02 a pop. That took me about 5 minutes and I answered about 15 questions... Then I took a few surveys for $0.20 a pop which took about 10 minutes each. Then I scoured the web to find "Magic Blogs" that had a Google PageRank of 3 or more which took about half an hour to find 4 @ a rate of $0.16 each. Surprisingly there aren't too many well ranking blogs solely on the topic of magic tricks.

So if you calculate it... YIKES!!!!

• Time: 5 minutes Wage: 15 Questions x $0.02 = $0.30
• Time: 30 minutes Wage: 3 Surveys x $0.20 = $0.60
• Time: 30 minutes Wage: 4 Magic Blogs + Contact info x $0.16 = $0.64
• Total Time: 65 minutes, Total Wage: $1.54.

OMG!!!! That's $1.42 / hour. Talk about a waste of life. Even wasting away my life watching YouTube is more valuable than that... at least I get some joy out of YouTube. I know, in some countries $1.42 / hour could feed a whole village, and I sympathize with those people... but even that U.S. [insert crappiest job you can think of] worker gets paid five times (5x) as much.

Well now I know, if I ever need a mundane tasks to be performed, I can find some suckers on the Mechanical Turk. I want the last hour of my life back.....

A great video that I saw on Marketing Pilgrim is the Beginner's Guide to RSS by Common Craft.

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