I am a wee bit emotional this week as I prepare to head home and try to get a job there (which means at least six months apart from my BF). So I will blame that for my reaction to the following.

1. Kristian Anderson wanted to thank his wife for supporting him through chemotherapy so he got some celebs help to wish her happy birthday.

2. Ok nothing about the Bed Intruder Song made me teary, however I was heart warmed to discover Antione Dodson is saving up the profits from this meme so he can move his family out of the projects.

3. This Pulitzer Prize winning article by Gene Weingarten is actually over a year old. However I read it for the first time this week after Karalee said it made her cry. I will start you off with one paragraph, but you must go read the whole article.

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer — beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone — he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

And if that article made you cry (which it will) you can watch this video for some cheering up:

I recently watched a documentary called We Live in Public, about an internet entrepreneur called Josh Harris who physically predicted future online trends. In the 90s he was often compared to Andy Warhol, but Josh knew people didn’t want 15 minutes of fame, they wanted to be famous all the time. In the days of dial-up he invented social media by creating an underground “hotel” where residents interacted through 24/7 surveillance. When he got sick of that project he and his girlfriend moved into an apartment with cameras everywhere and crowd sourced their lives.

Yes that’s right he did that way before rubix cube guy had the idea.

The amazing thing is no one has heard of Josh Harris. Even the CEO of MySpace had no clue who he was, and yet he pioneered web 2.0. Go watch the movie.

I feel Wave has fallen to a similar fate, too advanced and bold for it’s time. Sure it probably would have taken off it had integration with Gmail, but that’s not really the point. People are saying they predicted it would fail because of various faults with the interface, but the interface did no justice to it’s working capabilities. The back end of Wave was far beyond anything else currently available and I sure hope in 10 years the whole internet functions the way it does.

Will be interesting to see what the talented team behind it end up doing. Josh Harris has been long forgotten and is currently living in Ethiopia, it would be sad to see the Google Wave team fall into the same obscurity. (Hopefully Greg leaves Google to become the next Willy Wonka.)

To all you haters, I hope in a few years you have the hindsight to see Wave pioneered Web 3.0.

Or rather, I used to wonder how I could work in the Google offices without knowing software engineering… and doodling was the answer. Although creative labs would probably be a better fit.

Watching these inspiring ads it’s funny to think that AT&T (and Apple) are now so slow at adopt technologies which have been around for years like “face time”.

It’s also funny to think back when these ads were made I was playing Heaven and Earth on my Dad’s Mac and none of the other kids at my kindergarten even had computers at home.

…and even offers to give you a new pair if you add your lone sock to their lost sock database. Very engaging and product relevant, I love it.

Claim you free socks at www.lostmysock.co.nz >

via @codacreative >

Okay, it’s not Rhys Darby that does it, it’s Dr Dre… Mr. Darby just makes us Kiwis look a little bit slow as he usually does.

BUT WATCH THESE ADS ANYWAY BECAUSE THE ARE QUITE FUNNY

By the way I went to the New Zealand consulate (in Sydney) today to get a new passport. It was nothing like the one in Flight of the Concords which was disappointing. On the lift up I was honestly imagining 70s wallpaper and a platter of Mainland cheese to greet me.

This should be useful for the new job!

Well it leaves the conspiracies up to your imagination.

via Mumbrella >

My mum tried to add me on facebook and failed.

If you haven’t read yet I am famous on the Google blog >

Also I have added a menu to the site with some popular links. Enjoy it while it lasts as I don’t particularly like it and it may vanish soon.

Speaking of site features, I have a comments section after every post. After receiving several emails and facebook messages about a post the other day I thought maybe no one had noticed it. Well it is there and am happy for you to use it as a soapbox.

If you haven’t seen it yet, this video is about 4 years old.

As reported earlier this week I said I would like to see the ability to send messages into the future. This would be most useful with emails or waves, but I have just discovered a way to update your Twitter or Facebook for a future time.

Laterbro lets you log in using your social network of choice and write a status update and update the time you would like this to be posted. Could be useful for sending birthday messages when you think you will forget or be away from a computer or for us down under to send messages into another timezone. >

Watch it here > and the thing that really gets you is even you want to bully this kid about how lame the poem is.

1.This should be on gmail as well, the option to have a message delivered to the recipient at a set time in the future. This would be useful for sending reminders to other people, digital time capsules and at least a million other things. Such a technology existed in the late 90s when e-cards were popular, the options were “send now” or “send at future date”.
Why is this not standard these days?

2. As seen in this video, it would make cooking so much easier and creative. Pamela Fox suggested it be a gadget not a bot (as I originally concepted). Currently rethinking it and more on that to come…

As far as I know there are tons of interior design applications and all of them are rubbish.
My idea is you upload photos of areas of your house to a Wave gadget and change the colours of the walls/ carpets etc straight onto the photos. You would be able to add furniture into the picture straight from an Ikea (for example) catalouge and if you gave dimensions of the walls, this could be used to position things as well as feng shui. Being on wave means you could work with family and housemates to find colours and furniture everyone likes.

4. Whenever you leave a job you get a big card signed by everyone in the office, which you lose at work drinks before getting a chance to read it. Wouldn’t it be better to have that card online so you could access it later?
My proposal is a wave gadget with ecard templates which coworkers can decide on and then decorate using photos or drawings of the person leaving. When everyone signs the card with their personal message there is an option to leave a link to your facebook or linkedin account so you can stay in touch. When everyone has signed it a designated person would publish the card and add the leaving person to the wavelet.

5. Imagine if Protools or a similar company made a Wave Gadget which allowed multiple musicians to upload and mix together their tracks in one place.
No more emailing different parts to each other just one place to mix the music, discuss the lyrics and potentially even publish straight to Myspace/ Purevolume/ Lastfm when finished.  Instead of paying for expensive mixing software each song could just have a 5 second soundbite at the end promoting the brand who made the gadget. Would be perfect for start up bands and school music projects.

This is my idea to use Wave to make my life easier. A Wave bot which detects food names from your conversation and adds them to a gadget which suggests recipes. If a supermarket chain built this they could deliver the missing ingredients to your house!

Read more about it on the Google Developers Blog >

“It’s unlikely that ad blockers will get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising needs to get less annoying.

“There will always be some group of people who want to block ads for personal reasons. But if we do a good job on the advertising side, people won’t want to block ads. People will find them actually useful.

“I think there will be a nice equilibrium. If people get too aggressive with ads, then ad blockers will become more popular and companies will get less aggressive with ads. The market will sort itself.”

- Linus Upson via >

instead of making that stupid movie. This is way cooler.

This reminds me of when we first moved into our 48th floor apartment in the middle of Sydney and the net wasn’t connected yet. There were plenty of wifi networks, but the only one which wasn’t secure was called “FUCK YOU PEOPLE STEALING MY INTERNET”. Lol.

Could this even be a Christmas present idea for Boyfriend’s twin siblings? (one is a male with big build and the other a super skinny female) perhaps more funny if they look nothing alike?

[edit] he thinks it’s a terrible idea and pointed out that one of them won’t understand it at all.

Here’s the original from Macworld 1986: