Remember the A380 that I visited at LAX a few months ago? Well, luckily for Airbus, they’ve received some orders despite being 2 years late on their promise, and one of those orders is a very special one from an unknown billionaire who is having his tricked out to the tune of $150 million. Oh yeah, that’s in addition to the price tag of the plane itself ($325M).
I first noticed this piece in the hardcopy of Wired Magazine in the form of a double-paged full color article with descriptions of the various custom areas of the plane, but I wanted to give out some link love, and found a very cool Flash based version of the article on Wired’s site. Thank you Wired!
Just to give you an idea of some of the customizations, there are: lounges with sofas, an office, a shower, master bedroom, formal and casual dining rooms with a 70″ flat screen, and crew quarters. The staff seating area holds 25. 25 people!
I know that the ‘dedicated’ web surfers among you are already scoffing at how late I’ve found these latest viral videos, but the reason I decided to post them was because I was thinking of a comment that a comedian made about how the Internet is important: “there are people dying to see videos of Mentos mints turning Coke bottles into volcanoes.”
So these guys (EepyBird.com) took the whole Mentos in Diet Coke thing and ran with it. Very far. To the point of entertainment, 3 minutes at a time. They actually have quite a few videos of them conducting ‘experiments’ with Coke and Mentos mints. And while their source materials are free, courtesy of their manufacturers, the exposure they (both) gain is tremendous (wonder what kind of $ they make…).
So onto the important stuff, the videos! They’ve got more than this, but I liked the ones where they did a whole Bellagio water fountain thing and then a cascading dominoes show.
April 9, 2007 at 9:15 PM · Filed under Cool, Internet
I love Rhapsody. I don’t know why I didn’t sign up for this the second it was available. If you don’t know anything about online music services, let me give you the nutshell version of why I now can not live without Rhapsody. BTW, Rhapsody is Real Networks entry into the online music biz, following iTunes, and Napster. Full history if you’re interested.
For $10/month, I can listen to almost all of the music they’ve got, and it’s pretty extensive (over 3 million tracks) due to their contracts with all of the major record labels. I can organize these tracks however I want (playlists, etc.), and seconds after selecting a track, it starts playing and the quality is surprisingly good. Their built-in “Music Guide” lets me read up on the artists, find similar artists, play albums in their entirety, or select tracks or add them to my library. They’ve got an interesting feature that plays a ‘radio station’ of an artist’s genre of music. It’s not perfect, but it helps you to find stuff that’s similar in nature.
Of course, I could buy these tracks as well, but I haven’t dug deeply enough into their DRM rules to figure out if I would be hosed if I lost or moved my data. For an additional $5/mo, I can get the “to go” plan which lets me put the music onto my portable MP3 player. I haven’t decided to try that out yet. Word of warning on that though - it doesn’t work with iPods due to DRM issues.
All in all, if you like music only just a little bit and have a high speed Internet connection, get Rhapsody!
Windowing and Graphical User Interfaces are taking some more big steps. You may think that I may be talking about Windows Vista with Aero, but while it has some neat features, I’m not. Instead, let me first tell you about the coolest thing in X Windowswindow managers: Beryl. I’m totally going to date myself in this article by reminiscing about when I used twm, mwm, and fvwm. The X-Windows/*nix marriage was definitely something that I love - you have the power of a *nix kernel, a totally customizable command-line based shell, slap X-Windows on top of it and run any window manager you want. Your computing environment, your way.
Where was I? Oh yes, Beryl. Having been stuck in a predominantly MS Windows environment for years now, I’ve lost touch with the latest in the windowing advances. Luckily, I know folks who do keep in touch, and I was recently shown an extremely cool demo video of Beryl (and there are probably dozens of videos now). If you’ve seen demos of Aero and been wowed, prepared to be floored. Features in Beryl include warping windows, zooming in and out, using a cube as an abstration for a virtual desktop environment, transparency, wrapping windows around edges, and so much more. Just watch the video here:
If you don’t want to spend hours hooked to your computer screen, don’t click the link below. On the other hand, if you want to be challenged, take a look at this puzzle. What’s interesting is that are no instructions. But click around a bit and soon enough you’ll figure out what the goal is.
PS> When you’ve thrown your monitor out the window out of frustration, head over to Gizmos for Geeks, click through to your favorite online vendor(s) and get a new one (and buy lots of other stuff too!). Tell everyone you know.
It’s called the World, because the islands are grouped together so that the whole things looks like a map of the world. The World will consist of between 250 to 300 smaller private artifical islands divided into four categories - private homes, estate homes, dream resorts, and community islands. Each island will range from 250,000 to 900,000 square feet in size, with 50 to 100 metres of water between each island.
I know that the ‘dedicated’ web surfers among you are already scoffing at how late I’ve found these latest viral videos, but the reason I decided to post them was because I was thinking of a comment that a comedian made about how the Internet is important: “there are people dying to see videos of Mentos mints turning Coke bottles into volcanoes.”
