Will you still love me, when I'm 82?

You Will Die at Age 82

Congratulations! You take good care of yourself. You're poised to live a long, healthy life.

What Age Will You Die?

Via Inferis' Mind Dump.

A moving, baby-shaped tag cloud

What are you wondering: amazing use of fonts, tags, and video.
Campaign website for March of Dimes - Pregnancy, Babies, Prematurity: "is the nonprofit health organization that is leading the way in the fight to defeat premature birth. (...) President Franklin D. Roosevelt founded the March of Dimes in 1938 to save America’s youth from polio."

Famous for 15 minutes

Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why Everyone's a Little Brad Pitt: "When they go to a party, they make sure they're dressed for their close-up — because there will be photos, and those photos will end up online. In managing their Web presence, they understand the impact of logos, images, and fonts. And they're increasingly careful to use pseudonyms or private accounts when they want to wall off the more intimate details of their lives."

Live long and prosper!

These are my new year's resolutions:

1. Drink one or 2 glasses of good red wine a day. Because life's too short to drink bad wine.
2. Eat lots of dark chocolate. It's one of the things that make my day.
3. Smile. I smile a lot more often lately. See also below.
4. Have more sex. See above.
5. Relax. This year I learnt how to salute the sun (thank you, Woody) and it's a great start of the day.
6. Make exercise play. (I don't like exercising... One has to set priorities in life.)
7. Sleep. Oh man I love sleeping.
8. Spend time with loved ones - friends and family.
9. Solve puzzles and play brain games. Games are great. I'm going to test the borrowed iMac + Nintendo wii set-up a lot more in the coming days.
10. Be positive.

Found in Top 10 Fun Ways to Live Longer @ Wired.com.

If Hello Kitty had a mouth

Hello Kitty Turns Attention to Young Men @ Guardian Unlimited: "The usual bubble-headed shape of Hello Kitty was slightly changed for a more rugged, cool look to appeal to men in their teens and early 20s." I think I just found the perfect New Year's gift for my long-haired Significant Other (jk). But if Sanrio gets away with Hello Kitty assault rifle or Hello Kitty vibrators, I think making black-and-white t-shirts and watches for men isn't all that spectacular. Just don't hope it catches on... we had our wave of Mickey Mouse ties and Daffy Duck socks back in the eighties.
Here in Belgium we know Kitty because, just like silly Dutch rabbit Nijntje, it looks an awful lot like cartoon character Musti. There are currently 22,000 Hello Kitty products. They account for half of Sanrio's $1 billion yearly revenue.

WWF fishmen out in the wild

Usually it's Greenpeace or Gaia who come out and grab our attention by using stunts. This time it's World Wide Fund For Nature (formerly known as World Wildlife Fund) and to my knowledge that's a first. WWF Belgium has just launched their new awareness campaign, based around a tool called Climate Impact Reducer. It teaches people how they can stop climate change (aka global weirdness) by doing small things every day. The counter on the right hand side of this post shows how the meme is catching on.
To kick off the campaign, fishmen like the one you can see in the pic showed up this morning at Brussels Midi train station. Anyone got pictures of the fishmen in action? Their Flickr campaign set doesn't have them yet, and neither does their official campaign website or the WWF YouTube channel. What I want to know is: how did commuters react? Did they confuse it with the recent Music For Life campaign by Studio Brussel, which was also based around the theme "water" (but with a completely different angle)?

Love that book? Then set it free

"Leave it on a park bench, at a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym -- anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel next. Track the book's journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person." The most travelled book in this community is Der seltsame Bücherfreund / Hoffnung's Constant Readers (30 pages with pictures only).
I think I just found the solution to my hidden collection of "books I was stupid enough to buy twice".

Stop global weirding: take navy showers

global weirding: "An increase in severe or unusual environmental activity often attributed to global warming. This includes freakish weather and new animal migration patterns."
navy shower: "A very short shower in which you turn off the water while lathering up. This old term is also known as a G.I. bath, but it’s new to many in the drought-stricken Southeast. Its antonym is the Hollywood shower, a long, wasteful one." See also this Green Thing: Take A shower: "Alistair McGowan finds two reasons to take a shower rather than a bath on World Environment Day."
Found at All We Are Saying - New York Times.

Angry ponies

22 year old Julia Pott graduated from Kingston University with a first class honours in Illustration and Animation. Her final film My First Crush [YT] (also on Myspace) was recently reviewed in Source Magazine. It's a simple but adorable mix of real-life stories about first loves, animated by hand and spoken by ponies and other animals.

Social Media classes at Berkeley

UC Berkeley: Social Media - instructor Howard Rheingold has its syllabus to the course online. It gets more and more interesting towards the end, e.g. "In what ways do our online social activities change our lives, relationships, communities? As we enter the second decade of the totally mobile social network, shall we pause to think about what changes in our lives might be more beneficial than others -- and consider what control we have over our communication practices, design of technologies, values?"

Santattoo

I don't know about you, but I enjoyed a simply perfect Festivus celebration yesterday. And looking forward to Christmas day tomorrow.
I've teamed up with Santa to bring you a unique gift that will leave a lasting impression: Bnox Xmas tattoo. Includes free striptease! Watch those hard nipples... must be from the cold.

Anti-social networks

Snubster - beta includes the Dead to me List feature. And, ironically, a Facebook app.
Enemybook Facebook app lets you manage your enemies as well as your friends. Add enemies, specify why they're your enemies, notify your enemies, and even become friends with your enemy's enemies."
Hatebook is an anti-social utility that disconnects you from the things you hate".
See also Parody sites start anti-social networking trend @ Reuters. Will carry all these apps to Graveyard of the utterly boring Facebook apps group: "dedicated to all those apps that Facebook friends stalk you with. A place where you can drop all those apps that you once added, but now gladly bury in the dark holes of our collective memory."

Brussels Girl Geek Dinner #3 on 13 Feb in Ghent: wiki is up!

Speaker is Melanie Chamaah of the Belgian (!) company that produces the hackable Linux robot Tux Droid: Kysoh. She will start with an overview on all sorts of smart companions and then of course do a live demo of the adorable Tux bot. The idea is to bring together as many girl geeks and their robots under one roof. Attendance (if you're a girl geek) is free, but you need to add your name to the attendee list on the wiki.
We're also still looking for a location, a projector screen and of course, sponsors who help us keep Girl Geek Dinners free. If you want to help, contact us or post a comment on the blog or the wiki.

Internet marketing domination seminar

PPC Villain Domination Seminar #1 - Ad Copy [YT]: "The PPC Villain is dedicated to world domination and Pay-Per-Click marketing. In this, the first in a series of video seminars, the villain shares tips and tricks for writing devastatingly effective ad copy."
Keep PPC Exciting: "Use language that sounds dirty but isn’t: (...) Year End Surplus // Blow Your Budget in 3 Clicks // Don’t Lose Out on 2008!"

Festivus for the rest of us

Next week, some of you will celebrate Christmas as a tradition. What about celebrating Festivus on December 23rd?
Festivus [WP] "includes novel practices such as the "Airing of Grievances", in which each person tells everyone else all the ways they have disappointed him/her over the past year. Also, after the Festivus meal, the "Feats of Strength" are performed, involving wrestling the head of the household to the floor, the holiday only ending if the head of the household is actually pinned."
Festivus [YT]
(Tnx, Fabian)

Been there, blogged that, got the t-shirt

Q: What do Damien VA, Kevin DM, Michel V, Dieter VDV, Maarten S, Bart DW, Bruno P, Bart VB and Michael U have in common?
A: They are Belgian twiterati and they all got a Twitter t-shirt by snail mail. No sender, no accompanying letter, a really weird and spaced out Twitter account and a nearly empty (and obviously fake) Twittershirt Blog. And beginning of this week I discovered I got a t-shirt too, sent to my work address.
My bets are on a t-shirt company that is just playing with us, bloggers from the Belgian egosphere. The t-shirt label has been cut off and to be honest, the material is a lot more soft and supple then with run-of-the-mill promo t-shirts. We are amused (and curious)!
Picture inspired by The Smoking Gun: Arresting Images, taken by Gil P.

Milow at the Ha! van Humo

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BTW, popular Belgian singer-songwriter Milow has a really nice blog Off the record.

Eye candy and earworm at the same time

kokiriko bushi [YT]: "kokiriko bushi / omodaka (far east recording) - animation dir.:teppei maki"
Are those nintendo sounds? I predict a lot more of those 8-bit Nintendo sound samples in pop songs next year. Love them in 50 Cent AYO Technology feat Justin Timberlake music video.
(Hat tip: Nina Nordbo)

Snowkiting

Snowkite worldtour 2008-2009: "Inspired by travelling the polar frontiers and creativity, for 2009 we are planning a new incredible challenge. Our goal is to cross for the first time ever the Last Degree with snowboard and kites heading to the Geographic South Pole and this by pulling sledges."
Snowkiting is "an outdoor winter boardsport, combining the airfoil and techniques used in kitesurfing, with the footgear and gliding surface used in snowboarding."
Earlier this year they travelled from Brussels to the North Pole. These snowkite dudes must be crazy.

Does my website look fat in this Ajax?

1. Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous... @ Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox: "AJAX, rich Internet UIs, mashups, communities, and user-generated content often add more complexity than they're worth. They also divert design resources and prove (once again) that what's hyped is rarely what's most profitable." Discuss.
2. Who is Jakob Nielsen and what is his importance in the current web landscape?

(Sometimes I miss being a teacher.)

All wii want for Christmas

The Nintendo Wii. Popular, in demand - and out of stock: "the elusive object of desire was also last Christmas's most desired object - the Nintendo Wii, the most innovative games console since the (Nintendo) GameBoy in 1989."
I've hooked up a borrowed wii to my iMac and am testing (also borrowed) games on it and I've totally fallen for this console. Also, no stock problems in Belgium: they were stacked up at the local BartSmit. So what's holding me back? It's the YAGC sydrom: Yet Another Game Console. Just give me some time. We'll manage with the Nintendo DS'es for now. Since my daughter doesn't read my blog it's safe to say: she's getting Tiny op de boerderij for Christmas. If you know the character and think it's full of sex stereotypes: I wrote about gender issues in Tiny over at Loslopend Wild (a group blog on what to buy for Christmas - in Dutch).

Jeroom cartoonblogging on the Wild Site

Disclaimer: I work for Sanoma, publisher of all things Humo. I'm also a big fan of Belgian cartoonist Jeroom, so if you want me to disclaim that too, I will :-)
Earlier this year Jeroom published his view on Pentecost. This month we've asked him to cartoonblog about Christmas. First one up: a puking Santa. So sick.

Current mood: happy and intense

I've been a happy user of The Filter for about six months now, but today Cool Hunter brought up another great way to creat streamlined, consistent playlist for my 25,000+ tracks on my iMac's iTunes collection. Moody for iTunes (.mov quicktour) is "a more accurate way to predict what you want to hear across all types of music and creates a streamlined, consistent shuffle."
Moody - Mac OS X / Windows app to mood tag your music in iTunes: "If one mood isn't enough, take two or three. Mix and match colors as you like. And as your day goes by, let the music's mood follow your own."

Fark the What?

Fark 'NSFW' Trademark Bid All in Good Snark?: "Drew Curtis, founder of the off-kilter social news site, filed an application several days ago with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to claim ownership of the acronym, which is standard netspeak for "not safe for work." The filing drew a heaping helping of disbelief, some legal skepticism and a few howls of derision as word filtered out online."
Or as Maarten Schenk's t-shirt today would say: WTF?
If you don't know Fark yet: "Fark is what fills space when mass media runs out of news." More in the first chapter of Curtis' book It's Not News It's Fark: How Mass Media Tries to Pass Off Crap as News. "Fark's traffic growth has been gradual since it began and there wasn't any one huge hit that made us big." Well I think he has just found one :-)

Flogging a dead consumer

During his talk at LeWeb3 conference in Paris, éminence grise of the interwebs Doc Searls quoted Jerry Michalski: "A consumer is a gullet who lives only to gulp products and crap cash." We need to gag every time we say “consumer” when we’re talking about a customer. Or a listener. Or a viewer.
Kris Hoet already wrote about this earlier, but I think Mr Searls is right: bloggers and their commenter posses are writing texts to trigger the ads the advertisers pay for. That's a very cynical point of view, especially there's not a lot of money in blogging. Buzzkits and some drinking money yes, but not a lot of cash.

w00t!

"w00t" crowned word of year by U.S. dictionary: "Massachusetts-based Merriam-Webster Inc. said "w00t" -- typically spelled with two zeros -- reflects a new direction in the American language led by a generation raised on video games and cell phone text-messaging."
Urban Dictionary: definition of w00t: "w00t was originally an acronym for "we owned other team" but used 1337$p34|< for some of the letters(w00t instead of woot). It is now commonly used as an interjection of joy."
Meanwhile, in the Dutch speaking part of the world, Woord van het jaar 2007 election has just started. My favourite? I think they're are really ugly words, but us Belgians would definitely choose (pardon my French) formatiemoeheid: "verschijnsel dat partijen en/of burgers een kabinets- of collegeformatie beu raken als die naar hun idee te lang duurt."

I found another Green Thing

Just a quick follow-up on the Do it in the dark post: the little Dark Room game by Do the Green Thing is an excellent and funny timekiller. The friendly host Susan Abongalooloo sounds a lot like the hairy one on Little Britain.
By the way, December's action is Buy an old thing not a new thing: "Old things save us CO2 and come with less megapixels, for sure, but come character, romance, mystery and history all included as standard." I don't agree: old things have worse battery life; and fridges for example are a lot less energy efficient than new ones. The old thing slideshow is quite inspiring, though. What is your favourite old thing?

I still think Camarasauri are cute

Although Engadget has its doubts about the performance of Ugobe's Pleo, I still want it for a pet. I mean, look at the way it reacts to a hand caresssing it (YT): awwwww.... For more cuteness overload: watch the Behind the scenes - making of Pleo videos.
Pleo ships for $349 which is quite hefty, but then again, the dollar rate is so low... One thing holds me back though: "PLEO’s NiMH battery recharges in four hours, which provides approx. one hour of operation."
(Thx, Gil)

What is your Spock Power?

My Spock Power is 1,307 but I'm not sure what it means, except that I'm in the Top 1% of Spock users. Spock Power is "a measure of how much influence you have on Spock each time you vote or contribute content. The higher your Spock Power, the greater your ability to influence search results on Spock."
Spock is a bit weird, but I must admit it's a handy people search engine. It asks you what colour of hair you have and before you know it, Spock tags you as, in my case, "black hair works for Sanoma Magazines Belguim Bnox bvba Chat bvba Green eyes graduate of Sint-Vincentiusinstituut, Dendermonde enjoys pasta wilt Men at Work" and the list goes on. That's not too far from the truth, really. And mostly related to my LinkedIn profile.
Also according to Spock, people related to me are Peter Forret, Alexander Freitas, Denis Balencourt and Bert van Wassenhove. I won't deny that, but there are definitely a whole bunch of people missing :-)
The only thing that slightly worries me is that Spock seems to have a bit of the Quechup disease: I uploaded my LinkedIn contact list and only added those who were already in. I skipped the "invite your contacts" feature. Cross my heart! And still I get grumpy e-mails from people who are wondering why I'm trying to drag them into Yet Another Social Network. What's your take on this?
UPDATE: I just had a look at the Spock Power Leaderboard and boy are they ugly!

Woman Warrior Queen. I like her already :-)

When you read the biography of Elizabeth I of England, the last of the Tudor dynasty, it's hard to believe that all this hardship happened to one person. But she seems to have been an particularly tough lady. This is my favourite quote - it's her response to Parliament in October 1566: "Though I be a woman yet I have as good a courage answerable to my place as ever my father had. I am your anointed Queen. I will never be by violence constrained to do anything. I thank God I am endued with such qualities that if I were turned out of the Realm in my petticoat I were able to live in any place in Christendom."
This was only a few years after her skin had been damaged by small pox, which left her half bald and dependent on wigs and cosmetics." Faut le faire!
From 12 December on, you can go see Shekhar Kapur's Elisabeth: The Golden Age. It gets a user rating of 7.0/10 on imdb.com and you know what that means: go watch that movie :-)

Influence is golden

If you got 9'50" to spare, listen in to this Buzzlogic product demo Conversation Targeting: Getting To The Heart Of Blogs And Social Media at PodTech.
Buzzlogic's Information Center: "The explosion of blogs and social media has resulted in millions of conversations happening online everyday. As a marketer or a communications professional, it’s difficult to get an effective handle on this new media channel, let alone transform incessant online chatter into a strategic marketing advantage..."
Hat tip: Ralph VC