Across Weirdish Wild Space

God, I love The Onion. I”m very glad that even their ability to poke fun at those in power hasn’t been dampened by Barack’s election win. Seriously, the one good indication that democracy and freedom are still alive and well in any country are people poking fun at politicos with impunity.

And in other political parody awesomeness…

• Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress
• Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job

One of the things I actually do always admire about the US around election time, is the incredible number of people and creativity willing to work on getting people out to vote. Considering the Canadian election that sadly has Harper and the Conservatives back in a minority, had historically low turnout, I do think when I get back that I need to work on something like this.

And you have to respect moveon.org. Consistently, these guys are just amazing with their ability to leverage web actions to get fundraising and mobilize support.

This viral replaces a simple first and last name of someone you send it to in the actual text shown in various places in the flash video making it seem like McCain won by one vote because of their not voting.

Absolutely brilliant. Can’t believe this would be too hard to do either.

OK, admittedly, as much as I really loathed the “Wassup” commercials when they were on television (and think Bud is a terrible beer), this parody is absolutely fantastic :

If you are unfamiliar with them, the original is here too :

(via BoingBoing.)

Mike Cohn basically invented the idea of Agile User Stories which is what we’ve started using at Amnesty on specific projects for our Agile development. It’s definitely paid dividends though, like any new introduced technique, has had a few growing pains as we’ve learned new things.

We do have some of the issues he mentions in Prioritizing Your Product Backlog in our agile development, and I’d have to say we don’t spend enough time “grooming the product backlog.” We do spend a good week between iterations, thinking of the focus of the design goals of the next iteration and writing new user stories.

Interestingly, we have noticed as well, the difficulty in prioritizing at the story level rather than epic or theme level so I thought this was a pretty nice presentation.

Really liked the idea of Kano analysis as an additional screen on the product backlog : exciters/delighters, and mandatory/baseline. Particularly the idea of driving that via a simple survey of just a few tens of users – a functional questioning asking how people feel if it’s present and a dysfunctional question asking how people feel if it’s absent.

Bit long, but definitely worth your time if you’re using doing agile development and working with a product backlog (doubly so if your backlog is more of an attic that never gets looked at). Weird little thing, note the slides appear below the video of Mike doing the hand waving and talking which makes full screen not so useful on it. You’ll miss important stuff… so maybe move the browser down 1/8 of the screen before starting the presentation.

(via someone, but I don’t remember who… =< )

I was surprised to see this posted on the 37Signals blog today as I was combing through my feeds. I used to live on English Beach in Vancouver and this guy would be balancing rocks as you see in the video all the time. It is truly astonishing to see, and more so late at night when there is no one around and the tide has come in and there are all these isolated anthropomorphic figures separated on little rock islands by the tide. I don’t think the video does it justice, but considering this was literally right outside my door when I lived on Beach Ave, figured it needed a post.

Plus, really getting tired of England the past week and missing Vancouver and Canada and living next to the sea and friends far away (and really tired of absurd internal politics at work). Nice reminder of how beautiful the city is. Do kind of imagine I’ll be living back there someday…

OK, one final picture from my flickr just to rub it in…

(via Signal vs. Noise.)

YouTube has just started putting full length versions of vintage television shows such as MacGyver and (oh no !) the original Star Trek online for viewing with their “theatre mode.”

Apparently, though, it doesn’t look like they’re available outside of the US or Canada unless you’re doing a VPN workaround like evil little me. Yes, ssh tunneling to your own servers is the bees’ knees.

It is frightening how big an influence growing up on Star Trek TOS had on me (my Mom was a huge Trekkie). Besides, fundamental ideas about the future being better, stronger faster and ideas about technological progress, good and evil and fundamental rights, was this underlying theme below it all of the idea that one man, can indeed, summon the future. Oh, and oh yeah, that diversity itself is being attracted to green-skinned Orion dancing women… =] And let’s never forget the show was the first ever television show to actually show an interracial kiss (gasp!).

Anyhow, if giving you that link doesn’t waste most of the rest of your otherwise productive afternoon, I don’t know what will.

via Lifehacker

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

via Cool Hunting

Beat junkies Hifana as two fishermen from a animated music video with stylistic nods to traditional Japanese folklore. Very cool.

Wamono

Money As Debt is a fantastic 45 min or so animated feature on the fundamental changed nature of money, loans and the banking system that disabuses people of the notion that money and especially loans are still tired to underlying value (like, say for instance gold).

The first half on the actual idea of money is debt gives a real insight into how we’re in the middle of our current financial crisis, though the second half goes off into some interesting talk of more sustainable money systems and then sadly goes somewhat into the realm of the weird talking about conspiracy theories and pins things on the idea of a cabal rather than a systemic problem and breakdown.

Basically, though it underlines the idea that banks can create as much money as people can borrow and the entire system of money creation and legal tender is based on the promise of the borrower to pay.

If too many people are unable to pay their promises, the fundamental debt repayment that all this money was created upon and the only real value to money that banks have multiplicatively lent out is cut from under them, which is why the crisis is so scary.

When I was a kid, before i got into power gaming and being a master geek, I used to read the “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories which were the forerunners of so many computer games and text adventures that were to follow. Ah yes, the path to being a high school social outcast…

And just in time for Halloween, someone has put together The Outbreak, a little video interactive adventure that is a hell of a nod of the head and petite homage to Romero’s ‘78 classic Dawn of the Dead.

Really interesting use of flash video as well. Like the opening screen before the movie loads especially.

Much as Google’s mission to organize all the world’s information gets scarier and scarier, it is without question an interesting beast. It’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto is actually extending well beyond merely being passive to actively trying to do good.

And you have to be impressed with their latest initiative to spend $10M USD on ideas to change the world and fund them. They’ve also got a deceptively simple site for submitting ideas and then getting everyone to vote on which are the best ones. Oh, and very importantly, a nice music video :

I particularly like the criteria they’ve used to define ideas and how they are measuring their merit :

Guidelines

Our goal is to set as few rules as possible. However, we ask that you put your idea into one of the following categories and consider the evaluation criteria below.

Categories:

• Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
• Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
• Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
• Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
• Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
• Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
• Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
• Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don’t fit into any category at all.

Criteria:

* Reach: How many people would this idea affect?
* Depth: How deeply are people impacted? How urgent is the need?
* Attainability: Can this idea be implemented within a year or two?
* Efficiency: How simple and cost-effective is your idea?
* Longevity: How long will the idea’s impact last?

I always remember when I was a kid naively thinking Christmas should be this day, but September 21st, the day before the autumnal equinox would work for me as well. Any day we could get people to commit to there being a day of peace, even ceasefires, as long as it was a global gesture would be amazing.

It’s a very nice idea. Peace on earth, everyone…

Well, had a bit of a hard slog the last little while, so just reminding myself of a few important things. Great advice and a fantastic speech from The Steve.

Sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. And don’t settle.

Great little mini-documentary ? Teaser ? that needs a bigger documentary added to it even though the student who did it calls it a small graphic novel.

Reminds me of the book about the actual journey a tshirt takes from where it is manufactured to the time it gets to your back (someone please tell me the name of the book since a search on amazon for journey and tshirt brought up way too much old concert memorabilia… =< ).

(via scaryideas).

Absolutely cool, Tarentino-esque short about… Tarantino. Even in Brazilian, totally reads like one of his scripts. An excellent little homage to the master… Tarantino’s Mind.

(found via Daring Fireball.)

OK, I have no idea why more people aren’t more furious about this, though I guess it’s just evidence of what everyone suspected all along.

And, ok… sure, the people who listen to Fox are the ones most likely to believe what the White House says in any case (or that the Dems do the same thing anyway), but this seems beyond that. As the commentator in this segment points out, there is a difference between saying “The White House today sent us a briefing saying… “ and “We think that… “

It’s the difference between propaganda and journalism or acting as a party mouthpiece and agreeing with a position. And while I don’t think anyone in the waning days of the Bush administration will be surprised to see that more cracks are appearing in the wall of an administration that would support torture, arbitrary detention and lying to start a war, but the degree to which the administration seems open to brekaing rule of law whenever it suited their agenda is a little bit frightening and should be a scary morality tale for all those governments (and journalists) who followed their lead on so many things so blindly.

Anyway, I hope it does create some incentive around a return to true journalism in the US. The Fox news model of opinion as journalism has provided a chilling effect on proper news reporting in the US and a “if it bleeds it leads” epidemic which I think ultimately hurts us all and makes it seem like we live in a much more violent and fearful world than is actually true. I’ve completely stopped watching US news programs since they seem so amazingly biased compared to their non-US counterparts (though still read the feeds for the NYTimes and the Washington Post).

I haven’t really been watching the American political race very closely so I can’t really comment on the relative merits of the current Democratic and Republican leaders going into the race. I’m sure anyone who knows me can figure out which way I’d be leaning. Either candidate, whatever the case, would be a massive improvement as far as I’m concerned over the current administration.

Nevertheless, this speech, regardless of the echoes of JFK’s and whatever you think of Obama personally, is a phenomenal piece of speech craft and an incredible piece of oratory. Let’s hope that it’s promises about a vow for unity and a global pact for working to solve our shared problems for a better world gets delivered on.

Bit long, and even though he brings up some unpopular issues on the American agenda in the middle, it still is a pretty amazing speech and definitely worth the time you’ll take to watch it.

Oh yes, it really, really feels like this sometimes…

I don’t think there is anything Joss Whedon has ever done that I haven’t liked; Buffy, Angel, and the brilliant, yet sadly-yanked-before-its-time-by-Fox Firefly have given me an appreciation of this guy’s writing (hell, I even like the “Grr! Argh!” of the mutant enemy animation at the end of all his shows… ).

He works the web like few others do, regularly hangs out in fan forums and plugs into his reader and viewership like few others.

So, I’m not sure what to make of his latest, Dr. Horrible and Captain Hammer. OK,a supervillain musical sounds somewhat plausible, and there is no question that the singing Buffy episode is probably amongst most of my female friends’ favourites, but I’m still not sure what to make of it.

However, I still watched it like a rabid fan boy, and even though I’m not a fan of musicals, I have to say I enjoyed the episodic immensely (and tuned in today to watch the finale).

Now I’m kinda wondering where it goes from here. Is he moving it into the stable at Dark Horse comics ? Is it an indirect pilot for a show ? Not sure if its intentions are modest or grand but you have to give a tip of the hat to the guy.

More than anything though, I think it does demonstrate that excellent writing, and some low budgets can pull off some extremely interesting stuff on the internets.

(another interesting thing was the use of Hulu as the video serving. Have to admit it was extremely high quality and smooth).

Ah, if only it were socially acceptable for an adult of my age without children to watch Sesame Street more often. This is great. So subversive.

Contrast with the actual video !

Wow, the small team that did this did an utterly amazing job putting together this 10 minute short with Blender.

Back in the day when I first got to Uni, the plan was to be an astrophysicist. I literally saw NASA as a viable career choice. Academia wasn’t enough like Star Trek that it could hold me long, but I still get a vicarious thrill from watching space exploration and dreaming of alien worlds to explore one day.

The Phoenix Lander is just getting to Mars today and starting its descent. But the red planet has managed to take out as many probes as have made it to the surface of the planet, so the outcome is far from certain.

So, geek out a little with this footage from NASA of the projected landing.

[Update : You can actually watch the Lander run up live on NASA TV starting @ 6 PM EDT !]

Hard to watch but important to see.

Being a classically trained economist, I’ve always recognized that one of the biggest problems with the old adage with “you can manage only what you measure” is the corollary that it is “what you measure, matters.”

For decades, nations have measured their progress through the horrible proxy yardstick that is the GDP or GNP, currently the Gross Domestic Product. I’m a huge fan of alternative measurement systems that include other measurements to get a true grasp of a nation’s progress and strength. Mostly because of a famous speech by Robert Kennedy which just passed its 40th anniversary this past week.

The Glaser Progress Foundation presented the video below but the in tandem with this, Senator Dorgan in the US has also been holding congressional committees about forcing the Commerce Department to adopt “satellite accounts” in addition to GDP that were recommended by the National Academy of Sciences (that, unsurprisingly, were stopped from being adopted by the Bush administration). Anyhow, inspirational video. Check it out.

Transcripted and removing the specifically about the US stuff :

For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things.

Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that… gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall.

It counts napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our city. It counts Whitman’s rifles and Speck’s knifes and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play.

It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.

It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country.

It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worth while.

Seriously, does anyone have a defence for still measuring national progress exclusively under GDP anymore other than the typical hand-wringing and arguing over how it should be augmented or replaced ? Would it even matter to try a couple of different measurement systems simultaneously to see what could be accomplished or makes sense ?

(via WorldChanging)

Fantastic mashup of USSR era graphisme, red army choir vocals (remember that whole Col War thing ?) and everyone’s favourite video game plumber as well as a nod of the head to the first Apple Macintosh commercial, “1984”. Brilliant.

The Peoples’ Mario

Surely there is no more iconic representation of proletarian virtue than Mario…

And just for good measure, a meme/video trope you need to know anyway… the 1984 commercial from Apple

(via the always great, Play This Thing! )

Your moment of Internet Zen for Tuesday…

via TechCrunch

Just a little propaganda for my peeps…

I’m starting to get really irritated with some of the companies here in the UK doing the hard sell. Especially when you move, including calling your mobile number (which is inexcusable though it is the only number I have but none have ever been given permission to contact me or use my number after my relationship with their company has been terminated).

Today, someone showed up before noon at my door claiming to want to sell me electricity and gas from British Gas. Anyhow, after being asked to be removed from whatever lists they’ve got and not bothered again, I just happened to run across this prank call on an inbound telemarketer in the States. Priceless. Going to try it next time…

Amnesty International(disclaimer: who I work for), has just released their 2007 Annual Report which outlines the state of the world’s human rights.

Available in five languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic).

Lotta stuff going on in the world that people don’t know enough about, or even worse, are doing nothing about when they do know about it.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
- from Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Russell Peters is someone I believe could have only been created in Canada. A Torontonian comedian of Indian descent who pokes fun at the differences between us as a multicultural people while still managing to celebrate the humanity that binds us together.

It’s hard to explain him without actually seeing him, but he is really funny and somehow manages to poke fun without being offensive. I’m not quite sure how he does it, but he pulls it off wonderfully.

Someone sent me the google link to his video Outsourced. It’s not his best performance… I think those are all about his family and especially his father (who reminds me of my father sometimes).

Still, ingenious and brilliant in places, it’s pretty hilarious overall.

One of the things that made it very hard to leave my old office was just how many great and cool people worked there. Even people who weren’t working directly with you would just be amazing to work with.

Part of the TV production crew for the music label was doing a timelapse test of some of their equipment out my office window the day before I left and I asked them if they’d give it to me. Absolutely no problem. Thanks C !

Of course, this is just going to make me really miss the old place. It’s been pouring in London ever since I got here this morning. =<

I’ve spoken before about Channel Frederator which is this great aggregator of video animation content online which does a weekly podcast that I religiously watch for my cartoon fix.

Anyhow, I mentioned it to some friends at a party last night and was happy to see that you could now get a lot of the episodes via google video in their entirety. Which is fantastic. Here’s Episode 2 which has one of my more favourite clips, War Photographer (the rest of the clips in Episode 2 are kinda weak with the exception of Welcome to Be Country which is inspired). And no, I don’t know why Viking Marching Bands and Earth, Wind and Fire remixes make me so happy, but here it is :

TED, the Technlogy, Entertainment and Design conference is perhaps the most important conference in the world, IMHO. More than Davos, more than the NY leadership conference, TED brings together the thinkers, mavericks, and doers that, taking a note from the “Think Different” Apple commercials, are really pushing the human race forward.

I’ve been wrangling for an invite or a few years but even the paying the nearly $5k to get in is not enough. You have to be able to contribute. In fact, the schtick is that you must somehow be able to contribute to the wishes of the TED prize winners which are often lofty but possible, humanitarian goals which require design, technology and effort if they are to succeed.

The next best thing to being there though is video though, so I’m really happy this year that TED decided to post video of their conference speakers. (Even slicker, you can also subscribe to the video feed in iTunes. How slick is that for us lazy downloaders ?)

Here’s who I thought made the best and most impacting presentations at TED. Might save yourself going through the ones that, well… really didn’t make much of an impact. These were the ones that impressed me the most and I felt were worth watching :

• Majora Carter
  
  Is the head of Sustainable South Bronx, a MacArthur Fellow (genius grant) and was the first person to bring greenry to the South Bronx is sixty years. Frankly, I think she’s amazing and her presentation impressed the hell out of me.
  
• Larry Brilliant
  
  Is the epidemiologist who headed up the WHO program to eradicate smallpox.
  
• Cameron Sinclair
  
  Didn’t give a great presentation because he rushed it, but he is one of the founders of one of my favourite causes, Architecture for Humanity. This survey of things they’ve done is just fantastic and very imspirational.
  
• Sir Ken Robinson
  
  Besides being hilarious, gave a fantastic talk on creativity and how our entire school system needs to change to accommodate the growing need for knowledge workers rather than industrialized workers and the role that creativity plays in that transformation.
  
• Joshua Prince-Ramus
  
  Gave a talk one of my favourite modern buildings and its design, the Seattle Public Library which really gave some interesting insights into functional design.
  
• Hans Rosling
  
  Gave a super interesting talk over global data and showing how we need to liberate it if we are going to really analyze the impact of long term trends that are going on in the world.
  

Would be interested in what people think. You can see more blurbs for each of the speakers, as well as other speaker videos such as Al Gore, Nicolas Negroponte and others.

I’m sitting here a spoiled brat compared to this woman. I am smack on the doorstep of the world’s largest urban park whereas this woman fought a hard battle of urban renewal to not just bring the first piece of green space adjoining the river to the polluted, overindustrialized and woefully badly urbanly “planned” South Bronx in sixty years (try and think of living someplace with nothing green for 60 years), but has also led an entire “green the ghetto” movement which has revitalized the area proving that not only is green sustainable, it’s also commercially profitable and good for the inhabitants.

She spoke at the TED conference in Monterrey this week and they’ve put her segment online. Her speech, quite frankly, blew me away. I suggest downloading the video in its entirety or you can watch it online here (though I had lag problems).

The woman is amazing, charismatic and solving a genuine, real problem. Most of all, she is one of those rare people that makes us realize that it only takes a few people, maybe even yourself, acting in everyone’s interest to make some big changes that benefits everyone. She’s even a MacArthur Fellow (yes, the ‘genius award’ people) for her contributions.

Wow. Brilliant, scarily insightful and funny. Great 45 minute video of Newman’s comedic performance.

And this guy is a true eco-activist that walks the talk. He cycles to his local gigs, used Amtrak for his US tour, uses pedal power for his multi-media shows and even uses a solar powered ISP.

Well, it’s not like you can drink the stuff…

Where do people find the time to do these things ?

And can I just say… I don’t know what it is about that “Tap” song by Audiobody on this video, but I have to admit it’s damn infectious. Might have to buy the track…

(via the show with zefrank)

Don’t ask me how I missed this one, but following some links around the net I found out my peeps at Greenpeace UK (Hey JoeG !)apparently produced this viral when I was looking the other way in 2003. It’s pretty damn good and quite funny actually.

And it should tide you over till I can locate and digitize (through my shady contacts) a copy of the secret REM “End of the World” Greenpeace video that no one ever wants to talk about and upload it to YouTube anonymously (bwahahahahahaaaaa !).

Kinda topical since my company is in the middle of releasing virals right now too. No, um… really…

This is what Free Culture is all about.

Few people realize that the inspiration to Disney’s Aladdin was actually a long lost (and ruined) pet project film by three time Oscar winner Richard Williams (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Return of the Pink Panther).

A labour of love for Williams, who spent 20 years working on it, the film was seized by the bond completion company before finish. They released bastardized versions of the original and (as any company choosing money over art generally does) ruined it completely.

Fan Gilbert Gilchrist has painstakingly restored the classic original storyreel to try and show it the way that Williams intended in a reverse Phantom Edit style.

I haven’t seen the whole thing yet, but it’s up on YouTube as 17 shorts.

Just watching the trailer below has me psyched to watch the whole thing.

Just because I can’t believe Harper is re-opening the gay marriage issue in my own country after what I think is a great leap forward for progressive rights in Canada, I’m posting the clip. Cause it’s freaking brilliant. Jon Stewart rocks. Favourite quote from the segment :

Bennett : Look, it’s a debate about whether you think marriage is between a man and a women.

Stewart: I disagree, it’s a debate about whether you think gay people are part of the human condition or just a random fetish.

If I was gay, I’d marry Jon Stewart… =]

While personally I’m busy trying to learn all the other languages, I loved this clever German ad for learning English. Dedicated to mein grossen schister IW in Wuppertal !

We Are Sinking

(via Gadling)

When I was younger, I wanted to be an astrophysicist and even made it as far as university before I realized it was unlike Star Trek enough that it was probably a bad career choice. One of the huge things that used to trouble me (and still does) was the reason the SETI project has yet to find intelligent life in a universe vast, and bright and brilliant edged in all directions. Like Mulder, I wanted to believe.

Terry Bisson had the most logical answer in his short story, but I do love this little sci fi short adaptation of his tale :


They Are Made Out of Meat

And the absolutely brilliant original short story by Terry Bisson.

via BoingBoing