So far my promise for more frequent updates has been about as successful as a promise to make US politics more transparent.
Regardless, my inspiration for any sort of well thought out, opinion based post, has been buried beneath a layer of anxiety, excitement, and mostly insanity.
This Sunday I will be attempting to run my first ever marathon. Read more →
So instead of my typical 2am routine of Netflix, Hulu, and Google Reader, I decided to update the WordPress Software on this site. This is much easier said than done. Needless to say, zrdavis.com all but imploded upon itself and I’ve been picking up the pieces ever since. I’ve been able to get all of the old posts and pages up and running, but all of the user comments were lost in the fire. Sorry.
The good news, however, is that this will birth a new era for The Good Badger. Step one, new page design. Check. Step two, more frequent posts. TBD. Step three, move to Silicon Valley and bump elbows with Steve Jobs. I’m all about baby steps.
With that said, zrdavis.com is an eerie place when it’s void of comments. I encourage everyone to add your 2 cents whenever possible. It’s not necessary to believe in your opinion, or even have thought it out all that well. All that matters is that you have one and that you share it with the universe.
And today’s tasty nugget goes as follows:
“I’d rather have a thousand Monica’s….” wouldn’t we all
I guess because I first saw this ad in conjunction with watching The Office on Hulu, it might not technically be a viral ad. But since people have sought it out on YouTube nearly 300,000 times in less than a month, I will count it anyways.
I won’t subject you to an advertisement (that I’m not getting paid for) on my homepage. If you’re interested in a really good new viral ad, check out my recommendables page.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with TED Talks (Technology Entertainment and Design) you will probably be dieing to give me an e-hug after this one. TED Talks, in short, are described as “ideas worth spreading”, but I like to think of it being much more important than that. If I were in charge, their motto would read, “ideas too crucial to keep contained.” That’s also why I’ll never be a professional motto writer.
TED Talks is an annual conference where intellectual leaders in a variety of fields deliver brief (approximately 20 minute) lectures to an audience of 1,000 people. As of the last few years, these talks are now available for free public viewing online at their website.
Where else can you find some of the top individuals in different walks of life presenting information that 99% of the public is either unaware of, or hasn’t thought critically enough about? Imagine a class where each week you’d watch a new TED Talks lecture and then spend some time researching the topic and engaging in a Socratic Seminar seminar by weeks end. Beats memorizing the all of the battle dates of The Civil War.
I’ll end the rant here and suggest to you a few of my favorite talks, although all of them are excellent. Enjoy… Read more →
If you haven’t heard of Twitter by now it’s likely that you get the bulk of your information via Morse Code and the computer is a foreign object to you. In March, the social media juggernaut drew 14 million people, and when Oprah delivered her first tweet a few weeks back, “Twitter” was added to the vocabulary of millions more. Still, I get the feeling that there are a lot of people that only know of Twitter, but couldn’t explain it without giving that “I’m Ron Burgandy?” sense of uncertainty. When I asked my mom if she uses Twitter, her response was, “yeah, I signed up for it”. I explained to her that owning running shoes doesn’t make you a runner [in her defense, she is extremely web savvy for her…um…demographic (that’s the PC way of saying age)]. While I’m certainly no Mark Zuckerberg myself, I do spend waste enough time on social media sites to have a decent grasp of what Twitter is all about. Read more →
When you think about it, the intricacies of what an airplane goes through during the average flight is pretty incredible. First it has to taxi around the runway for what feels like a full day, accelerate to speeds to generate lift from the ground, continue ascending to a manageable altitude, remain at a constant cruising speed for the majority of the flight, angle itself downward to approach a runway from 6 miles off the ground, and land an enormous aircraft at extremely high speeds on wheels that look to be the size of Fruit Loops on a large cereal bowl sized body (it’s amazing I’ve made it this far without using a cereal analogy – my favorite type). This is only a basic summary of what a commercial airplane goes through on a regular basis, and it’s pretty unbelievable. What’s even more unbelievable to me, is with the exception of taxiing, the remaining tasks can be fully automated. Basically a giant robot can take you from Los Angeles to New York in just under six hours. There’s a human on board to slowly move you around a crowded airplane parking lot, or in the rare instance where you need to land in a river; but in most cases, he/she is often just along for the ride.
This post is not about airplanes. I know as much about aviation as the average American knows about Cricket. It’s about being on autopilot. Human Autopilot. Read more →
There are certain obvious indicators that you naturally associate with a down economy. High unemployment rates are one. A bear stock market would be another. But broken teeth?
It’s a force so jolting you’d think that you had just been blindsided by a rhino.
Common side effects include but are not limited to: lost sense of identity, whiplash, anxiety, missed bowel movements, premature bowel movements, or really any kind of unintended action dealing with bowels.
This force that I’m referring to, of course, is the instantaneous acceleration from going entirely unemployed to working 60 hour weeks. My launch from around the clock nothingness to hyper-employment took a transition of less than 3 full weeks. Read more →
“You don’t get a second chance at a first impression.”
You’ve heard the saying before; likely more times than you can recount. Logically, it’s a statement that can’t be disputed – one can only do anything for the first time once, just like you can only do something for the 7th time once. I can only go sledding for the first time once. Likewise, I can’t try sushi for the first time twice. Obviously the weight of the statement lies in the importance of first impressions. Read more →
In case you happened to miss the rant by CNBC’s Rick Santelli….
At :38 into the clip Santelli calls out to President Obama, “Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages…”