blog-j: Symbolizing, Coding, Objectifying, Processing

Energy drinks are all the rage these days. I should know: for the first 6 months or so after Phillip was born, the only way I got through the day (awake) was by drinking Red Rain. Until then, I’d never really felt the need to go the energy drink route (unless you count the occasional Jolt for late night crazy 3-4 hour hockey games back in high school). Since then, like most of us, I’ve had my share of “pick me ups” when necessary. On a usual day, though, a coffee from Starbucks is usually enough to get me through.

Apparently, caffiene in such high quantities is not so good for you. So says energyfiend.com. And to prove it, they have a handy little calculator that will tell you how much of a given drink you need to consume to die.

Disclaimer: This tool is for entertainment purposes only. Nothing on here should be construed as medical advice or information. Don’t try this at home. If you actually try this and end up dying after only 140 drinks instead of 143, it’s not our fault.

My immediate question was whether to go with RedBull or Starbucks:

At $3 (CDN) for a RedBull and $2 (CDN) for a Starbucks Grande Coffee, it’d cost me $614.25 to commit suicide by drinking RedBull, compared to only $88.06 if I used Starbucks coffee. So there you have it. It’d be cheaper to kill me by buying me Starbucks.

Wow. Who ever thought Starbucks would be a more cost effective solution to anything?

Get your own scores @ energyfiend.com/death-by-caffiene/

Hat tip - Mike/Citynews Toronto.

Note: the images are minorly edited to fit on this page. And don’t you love how they give you a link to purchase your poison of choice online?
And buzz off - I’m not telling you how much I weigh. Haven’t I given you enough bloody embarassing information?
Hosers.

Tangible and touch user interfaces are getting more and more press. The reactable shows a different take on using the concept to create music, which is really cool. Not that there’s anything wrong with sliding images around and resizing maps, but…this is a whole lot cooler.

The reactable, is a state-of-the-art multi-user electro-acoustic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical artefacts on the table surface and constructing different audio topologies in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language.

More info and examples @ www.mtg.upf.edu/reactable/.
To top it off, there are example clients in a variety of platforms/languages, including C# (apparently Mono compilable) and Flash, which just tickles me pink. See the files section @ www.mtg.upf.edu/reactable/?software.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a bit, I think I noticed it a couple weeks ago. Rob has updated Aardvark to work with Firefox 2.x. Which is an absolutely beautiful thing.

Not resting on his laurels, he’s also built Aardvark into a bookmarklet, so you can now use this most wonderful tool from within IE and Safari. To quote Rob:

Cool new stuff in version 2.0
Aardvark is now designed to also run as a “bookmarklet”, which means IE and Safari get some Aardvark love. It is also now designed to be highly extensible….anyone who can write javascript can make it do just about anything they want. Web developers will be able to have it call functions in their own web applications on the selected elements, which can be extremely useful for debugging.

Download / bookmarklet it now @ karmatics.com/aardvark/

For those regular readers of my blog (Hi Mom, Dad!), you’re probably wondering why, over the past month or so, you’ve not been graced with the usual pearls of wisdom that I so wittily impart. Hardcore followers may have indeed noticed my lack of a “new years” post (really, if you’ve not been following me since my days on GeoCities, you’ve really missed a lot), coupled with the lack of a “Hi, it’s my birthday” post, and may have gotten the impression that I’ve fallen off the face of ye good Earth. (In 24 parlance, that would be “gone dark“. Hence the title.)

Well, I haven’t.

(For those of you uninterested in why none of the above has happened, you may want to leave now. Then again, if you are uninterested but are simply looking for something to complain about, by all means - read on, spread the wealth, and have your own private bitch-fest on my account.)

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