Wingsuits and the Crazy BASE Jumpers That Love Them

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wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

There aren’t many videos online that give me goosebumps in a good way. This is one of them. I can watch this over and over and over and still my jaw drops. The clip above is from Matchstick Production’s ski film, “Seven Sunny Days” (trailer). There are a ton of videos out there of people who are BASE jumping with wingsuits. It’s nothing new, but still awe-inspiring. They may not be as fast as a guy with a jet strapped to him, but I’m sure they’re having a ton of fun out there.

Buzzing tourists:
Wingsuit jumping in Switzerland:
And we’ll leave you with the trailer for ‘Learning To Fly’, a film about Chris McNamara’s first year learning to BASE jump:
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An unoccupied derelict’s attempt to communicate

Filed Under Pranks, Scam | Comments

Heather received the perplexing email at the end of this post in her inbox a few days ago. I’m not sure what it all means, and I could only find this post on Yahoo! Answers with other people questioning it as well. The email posted there was slightly different in some sentences.

Intelliant (the username in the email address) is a company that provides OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. Alternatively “IntelliAnt” is another company that provides “end-to-end corporate services focused upon addressing both Business and IT needs of the corporate world”. I doubt either is behind this email though, unless they’re testing OCR software on someone’s scribbled rantings.

Another clue is that all the emails in the To: field were *.edu. The other copy of the email posted on Yahoo! Answers was from “i.love.school@gmail.com” but was addressed to *.edu email addresses as well.

Is it some strange spambot looking for valid emails? Or maybe a spammer trying to craft emails that get past filters? Is it viral marketing? Is it just somebody bored? Anyone have any ideas?

UPDATE: Looks like some people are already on the case and have uncovered a plethora of information related to this interesting email. Head over to tomecatti’s livejournal for more info and enough links to keep you busy until 2010! I haven’t read it all, but there’s a good summary posted in an lj community:

So, about two and a half weeks ago, I got this weird email at my university email account. My first reaction? Post it in my LJ and laugh. Over the next two weeks, that LJ post was flooded with other people who got the email, with interpretations, theories, and sudden paranoia about terrorism. We’ve come to a few conclusions: It’s not Jim Strope, author of the hilarious manifesto Weeping for Narcissus, but it also could be, because Jim is practically giving the culprit head in his denial. It also seems to only be going to people with some association with Colleges; students and faculty members have shown up. We’re also pretty sure that it’s this guy who registers his sites as “Tom Jones”, but is more likely named “Michael” or “The Man Smarter Than Everyone For Seriously You Guys” and wants to make the Borg real.

(warning: All links here may give you a combination headache and lulz, and be packed full of stupid “puzzles”)

Original email that H recieved:

—–Original Message—–
From: intelliant@gmail.com [mailto:intelliant@gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2008 12:16 PM
To: [REDACTED]
Subject: An unoccupied derelict’s attempt to communicate

Is it accurate to say that you’re trying to find another human who thinks as you do? If not, there is no need to read further as it means that those who think just like you are already around you.

You must wish to force all people to adopt your views. Or does it appeal to you more to promote imbecility?

I was planning to get married this year since it would have increased the tax refund. They told me a marital union should be about love. They had no interest in acting as allies.

They think the most wonderful thing is to find what you enjoy doing. This is self-deception. Perhaps one twentieth of today’s GDP would suffice to live luxuriously by historical standards.

People ask how I make ends meet as I rarely work. I question why they compensate skillful liars by donating to the movie industry. Why do they crave after cars and private property? Is it not apparent that they admire traveling only as long as it’s highly regarded by the general populace?

They’re confident that society can’t change. But as children, they dreamt about omniscience, perfect relationships, and utopias. We are still that impressionable. We’ll build a society based on rational thinking.

Don’t reply to this message as we will not read it. Use the best internet search engine to search these words.

arrogant teenage expectation intelligence students
light philosophy strategy ideology logic
distilled pure general design insecure
terrestrial personality intolerant delectable defiance
conspiracy social spiritual art traits
indoctrination innovative Borg monomania clandestine

Search for three words at a time for best results. Hence, there are a very large number of possible searches, so only the fanatical will succeed.

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New Year’s Eve at the Blogger Bungalow

Filed Under Personal, SF Bay Area | Comments


photo by Violet Blue(?)

When it came time to decide where we were going to spend the evening welcoming 2009, it was a tough choice. There were things happening all over the Bay Area, but not wanting to do the “party circuit” we decided we had to pick one. Enticed by interesting hosts/guests, technology, and gift bags compliments of Good Vibrations, we got dressed, touched up the red in the hair, and headed over to Violet Blue’s Blogger Bungalow for her New Year Party.

The party wasn’t just for invited guests though, as she had all sorts of live-blogging technology setup in order to share our celebration with everyone online. There was an Eye-Fi enabled camera circulating around the guests where photos were instantly uploaded to the Blogger Bungalow Flickr account. There was a Macbook on the table next to the absinthe and chips logged into a Wordpress blog and 12seconds.tv. Guests were encouraged to post on either of the sites, and some of us took 12 seconds in between conversations to record silly videos. We stayed up until the wee hours of the morning talking tech, sex, art, and culture. There was even time for some late night Twitter-nanigans.

In addition to the Eye-Fi camera, Scott Beale of Laughing Squid also took some photos, and I grabbed a few with my iPhone. I’m sure there are tons of other photos, tweets, and blog posts if I can just try to remember the names of all the wonderful people I met….

Hope everyone out there had a safe and enjoyable celebration and is looking forward to this new year as much as I am! Have a great 2009!

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Year-End Travel Meme Time

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List the towns or cities (I’m including National Parks too) where you spent at least a night away from home during 2008. Mark with a star if you had multiple non-consecutive stays.

Monterey, CA *
Lewisville, NC
Santa Barbara, CA *
Olema, CA
Seattle, WA
Black Rock City, NV
Cedar City, UT
Bryce Canyon National Park, UT
Loa, UT
Goblin Valley National Park, UT
Moab, UT
Las Vegas, NV *
Hollywood, CA
Miami, FL
New York, NY
Chicago, IL
Yosemite National Park, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Joshua Tree National Park, CA

Want the full details? Here’s my Dopplr profile

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How To Pronounce Labret and More Fun Facts

Filed Under Body Modification, Education | Comments

A common misconception about the popular below-the-lip piercing is how it’s pronounced. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard people say “It’s French, the ‘t’ is silent!”. Consider this your Body Mod Public Service Announcement for the day. The ‘t’ is pronounced. It’s not French, it actually comes from Latin: labrum meaning “lip”, and -et meaning “something worn on”.

If you’re interested in more information on the labret piercing, ModBlog (aka BMEZine, one of my favorite sites) has an article and even a wiki page. Did you know that the labret is part of cultures in Alaska, South America, Africa, and even ancient Babylonia?

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Visual Illusion Jewelry

Filed Under Art | Comments

These necklaces and earrings from Tania Hennessy on Etsy are amazing. Not only are they eye-catching, they’re also made from recycled vinyl records! Click over to her store, Aroha Silhouettes, to check out all the different pieces.

via mindhacks

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Fire on the White Holly In the Sausalito Yacht Parade

Filed Under Art, Burning Man, Fire Art, SF Bay Area | Comments

For 19 years, the Sausalito Yacht Club has held the annual “Lighted Boat Parade”. Everyone brings their boats out lit up with Christmas lights and cruises around the Bay. This year for the 20th time, they held the same parade, only there was a new entry, the White Holly, which took things a step further by being loaded up with fire art from around the Bay Area.

The White Holly is a “High Endurance, Expedition Vessel” primarily used primarily for research missions. It’s a pretty hardy ship, but one has to wonder if anyone had in mind what it was used for on Saturday. Unfortunately I wasn’t there, but I saw multiple comments on my Twitter stream of friends mentioning going on a boat, needing ear protection, etc. The best being “It’s like we took Crude Awakening and stuck it on a ship. There’s nowhere to run or hide. God help us.” I wasn’t fully aware of what was planned until the next day.

So what was on the White Holly? Well up front there was Epiphany, a 25′ steel sculpture by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito that many remember from the Crude Awakening installment at Burning Man 2007 or maybe Maker Faire 2008. It had a “beating” heart of fire. There was El Diablo, a jet engine repurposed for shooting fire (and being noisy) by Jack Schroll. There were also flame effects built by the Flaming Lotus Girls and Bob Hofman installed on the boat amidst the Christmas lights. Don’t forget the Tesla coil hanging off the side of the boat upside down sending arcs into the water. And to top it all off, the loudest air raid siren ever produced, the Victory Siren, announced to the entire area that the White Holly had arrived.

Videos and photos are still trickling online, but here’s what I’ve found so far:
Wally also posted about it over on Planet Wally
There’s also a good video over here.
Friends Leslie and NetDiva were lucky enough to be on board and have posted their Flickr sets from the White Holly.

The Victory Siren

Tesla Coil Test

Megavolt2’s Video

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A Night of Scrabble in Time Lapse

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Vimeo is being weird so you may have to hit play, pause, and then replay or else it zooms through the video way too fast

We’ve been playing a lot of Scrabble lately. Surprisingly it’s the old school board game style and not some online Facebook app. I saw on Laughing Squid that this year is the 60th (or 70th depending on who you ask) anniversary of Scrabble. They’ve even released a Scrabble Diamond Anniversary Edition of the game. (Call me old fashioned, but I believe there’s only one true Scrabble board… and it’s this one) In honor of so many decades I figured we’d sit down this evening and make a time lapse of our games. I also tossed in a bit of stop motion fun. Watch my tiles on the right at around the 1 minute mark. The first game was a win for Heather (playing on the left), but I came back and reclaimed my crown in the second game!

There were a few words that we let each other slide with. One of these days we’ll go out and pick up a Scrabble Dictionary, but in the meantime it’s house rules which allows for more interesting words.

The video was made using my Pentax K100D DSLR + TI-85 calculator intervalometer setup and compiled using Quicktime.

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Using Cloud Hosting with Mosso

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Mosso.png

I’m quite familiar with the topic of webhosting, having hosted websites for well over a decade now. Most of my friends and colleagues come to me to ask my opinion on what they should use to host their website. My general answer is Dreamhost for most people since it’s quick, cheap, and easy to run small sites on. If you need something more powerful than that I usually start asking questions to help pick out a good virtual server or dedicated server. But it wasn’t until recently that I had any experience with cloud hosting.

Cloud hosting is the latest and greatest thing in the world of webhosting for large sites, and it seems to be quite popular. For years I used shared servers, but finally had to graduate to a couple of my own dedicated servers when some sites really took off in traffic. Now, as I’m working on a project that (*fingers crossed*) is really going to take off, I started looking at something that would scale better than constantly upgrading servers. It was time for me to graduate to cloudhosting.

What is cloudhosting (aka cloud computing) you ask? In simple terms, it uses the power of multiple servers to serve your content. Your site starts getting busy? More servers are thrown behind it to keep up with the demand. You’re not stuck on one machine that becomes unreachable as things slow to a crawl when your site gets overloaded. Basically it’s meant for people who have a web application or site that they need to scale.

I ended up signing up for Mosso, because it was relatively inexpensive ($100/month to start), had no setup fees, and was backed by Rackspace who has an awesome customer service record. So far I’ve been happy with Mosso, although the site hasn’t launched yet. It’s been relatively easy to learn how to do things via their custom control panel, and my only complaint is the lack of SSH access and SVN access, but they’re well aware of that and are looking at things. I’m really happy that I have a webhost that will scale with my site. I don’t have to shell out thousands of dollars when the site isn’t even going to be ready to launch for another couple weeks/months. And when it does launch, I feel more comfortable knowing we’ll be able to handle any amount of traffic (as long as my code is good!).

If you’re looking for cloud hosting, check out Mosso. If you use my referral code (REF-FREEFORALL) you’ll get your second month free!

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Posting to Wordpress from the Desktop

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I’ve caved and finally started seriously looking at a desktop level application to manage all my blog posting. When you have as many sites as I do, it’s much easier (and faster) to keep them all in one interface. Having a web interface is nice for flexibility, but it is definitely slower.

Right now I’m playing with MarsEdit, which seems to do just about everything I want. There are a few things I’d change if I were the developer (I don’t like having to go to the menu to set the post date on a post I want to go live in the future), but overall I’m happy so far. Hopefully this will help me write even more each day across the different sites. I’ve already pumped out 3-4 blog posts for Geeky Tattoos in no time. So far the only major issues I’ve found are:

Resized Images
I like to upload full sized images to wordpress and then used the automatically generated thumbnail in my post. MarsEdit uploads the full image and then includes the full version in your post. It’d be nice to have this full functionality from the desktop, rather than having to login and tweak the post later.

Twitter Tools
It doesn’t seem to play well with the Twitter Tools plugin for Wordpress. Posts are not getting saved with the checkbox that says “Notify Twitter about this post?” I’m guessing I’ll have to either edit the Twitter Tools plugin and figure out how to fix that, or just modify the database so that the default for this option in new posts is set to true. Luckily it fails in the right direction (i.e. not tweeting as opposed to constant tweeting).

Anyone else have any other tools they recommend for blog publishing? I’m primarily using Wordpress blogs, so that’s a requirement. OS X is also kind of a requirement since I’m still using the Macbook Pro, but Windows based suggestions might be useful to others.

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