e-wot?

Via DataViz

Learnlets » What does the 20th year of the web mean?. A thought piece from Learnlets, Clark Quinn. And an infographic via Dataviz:

SPOILERS>>>>>>>>>>

1 18.25 ounce package chocolate cake mix.
1 can prepared coconut pecan frosting.
3/4 cup vegetable oil.
4 large eggs.
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips.
3/4 cups butter or margarine.
1&2/3 cups granulated sugar.
2 cups all purpose flour.
Don't forget garnishes such as:
Fish shaped crackers.
Fish shaped candies.
Fish shaped solid waste,
Fish shaped dirt.
Fish shaped ethyl benzene.
Pull and peel licorice..
Fish shaped volatile organic compounds
and sediment shaped sediment.
Candy coated peanut butter pieces, Shaped like fish.
1 cup lemon juice.
Alpha resins.
Unsaturated polyester resin.
Fiberglass surface resins.
And volatile malted milk impoundments.
9 large egg yolks.
12 medium geosynthetic membranes.
1 cup granulated sugar.
An entry called 'how to kill someone with your bare hands'.
2 cups rhubarb, sliced.
2/3 cups granulated rhubarb.
1 tablespoon all-purpose rhubarb.
1 teaspoon grated orange rhubarb.
3 tablespoons rhubarb, on fire.
1 large rhubarb.
1 cross borehole electro-magnetic imaging rhubarb.
2 tablespoons rhubarb juice.
Adjustable aluminum head positioner.
Slaughter electric needle injector.
Cordless electric needle injector.
Injector needle driver.
Injector needle gun.
Cranial caps.
And it contains proven preservatives, deep penetration agents, and gas and odor
control chemicals. That will deodorize and preserve putrid tissue.

source

Here’s the full recipe video:

and another:

Here’s one that you could eat (not tried it myself, but it looks good and doesn’t contain the cranial caps and cross borehole electo-magnetic imaging rhubarb) click for edible Portal Cake recipe.

‘The Cake is a lie’ meme explained

Portal is still my favourite game. I <3 GLaDos

Internet Meme Database | Know Your Meme. A site that lists all the known internet memes and explains what they’re about.

[edit: oh, the fun... hours of it. Well worth a few minutes/hours]

Peter Backus Uses Math to Explain Girlfriend Woes. Silly, but funny in a geeky way.

This guy in the UK used Drake’s Equation to work out the likelyhood of getting a girlfriend in the UK. Drake’s Equation is to calculate the likelyhood of finding life on another planet.

He found that there were 26 suitable girlfriends in the UK.

1. it turns out he already has a girlfriend. So not a bad way of saying ‘I love you’ with maths. =)

2. I guess this might prove the existence of life on another planet. lol

I heard this on BuzzOutLoud.

A great post from Jakob Nielsen. I can particularly relate to this bit:

0.1 second is the response time limit if you want users to feel like their actions are directly causing something to happen on the screen. For example, if you click on an expandable menu and see the expanded version in less than 0.1 seconds, then it feels as if you made the menu open up. If it takes longer than 0.1 seconds for the revised state to appear, then the response doesn’t feel “instantaneous” — instead, it feels as if the computer is doing something to make the menu open.

I know how that feels: I’ve played online games with a latency of half a second, which is painful.

Powers of 10: Time Scales in User Experience (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox).

Just found a great free desktop graphics site (I was bored). It’s great. DesktopNexus

You can even filter by screen resolution to find the best quality pics for your monitor size.

I also found what I reckon is the best visualiser for iTunes. It’s not free, but the demo is. The demo has ugly ‘reminders to buy’. But it’s so good that I bought it. Click for G-Force

I also quite like another visualiser from the same people. Click for Whitecap

I love World of Warcraft. I’ve been playing since Oct 2005. But I can’t play it anymore. It’s grown too big for me. It’s grown beyond my ability, and, more importantly, my desire to explore. It’s become too complicated for me. So here’s my, equally complicated, sonnet to WoW.

I loved the music, places, gameplay, friends
I’ve made. I even got the wife to play.
I also built it into my MA.
But hey. All good things must but come to ends.
And even though my Shockadin defends
The flag, the node, the healer – pvp;
My Shadow Priest, her racial stole away;
My mage’s macros Blizzard thought offends
The balance of this bloody game. Enough.
Before this game I had a better cause.
This quiet rest now gives me time to spare.
Design, compose, and make creative stuff,
Is what I should be doing without pause.
I now have time. If only I could dare.

Damn. I used to be able to knock up a half-decent sonnet in 30 minutes. This rubbish Petrarchan sonnet took over two hours. Damned iambic pentametre and fiddly rhymes. Perhaps I should have stuck to the English sonnet structure. Perhaps I should have stuck to playing WoW.

Shawn Callahan just gave a great talk at an IKMS evening talk tonight at British Council Singapore. It was great.

The reason I liked his talk so much is because, apart from his stories (of course), Shawn is able to say things concisely and simply: crystallising in a very few simple words thoughts I’ve not been able to form yet about things I’ve been doing, and half-thinking. I was half-aware of these points, they’re totally relevant to my context, but I hadn’t formed them into thoughts, let alone statements. Shawn does this very well. He put into simple words things I ‘know’, but can’t say myself. These simple points resonate with me, so I have to write them here before I forget them. He made the tacit, explicit. Nice one Shawn.

On collaborative tools: “They’re not really collaborative tools, they’re communicative tools. Collaboration is a set of behaviours you might employ when using these communicative tools”. Totally agree.

“Opinions are a push strategy. And what happens when you push? People push back, right? Well stories are a pull strategy.” They’re also more engaging than a presentation of facts or opinion. Early in his presentation, Shawn explained this with a story about a manager who would move away from his computer and sit at another table with a colleague in order to give full attention to the colleague. He told us that when he first shared this story, it had great impact on the behaviours of the managers listening. The managers listening all copied the behaviour of the manager in the story. The same point, as a bullet point in a presentation, would have had little or no impact. But as Shawn says, “stories are plausible”.

Two questions I liked: “Can I do it?”, and “Is it worth it?” The first determines ability or capability, the second, motivation. Beautifully simple. He added that when looking for examples of good stories, find people who are ‘doing it’.

If people are struggling to tell a story, remind them of the key turning points and ask them what happened. Or ask them for the ‘Mood points’ and ask them how they felt at that time. Getting them to draw the event might help them externalise their memories and feelings.

Gossip is a good tool for communicating social information [my feelings exactly - I reckon that even gossip about soap operas has an important social function - exploring, confirming & normalising moral views, etc...]

Stories give permission. Tell a story about something that others have experienced, and they’ll say ‘yeah, that’s what I did. So it must be OK if someone else had the same experience/feeling.’

I had a question about stories, which went something like: “how do you tell a story about lessons learnt on the front lines of a project to senior management so they’ll listen?” My point being, that senior management are often only interested in results, completion and targets met. They might not care too much about the significant changes that have occurred in processes and values that have arisen while completing the project. So how to get this point across to management? Shawn suggested two approaches. First to get the staff involved in telling stories about what they did and why it was worth it (‘can I do it?’, ‘is it worth it?’). Then ask them to keep telling those stories until they become embedded in the project’s success [my imperfect words, not Shawn's]. Second, record the stories and present them to management with the question ‘which of these is most significant/ has the greatest impact’. This, is a great idea. I’ll try this.

Another point Shawn made simply is that being strategic often means knowing how to say ‘no’ to some projects. This is particularly important to me right now, because I’m having to turn down or delegate some great projects – I’m having to say ‘no’.

Shawn’s blog Anecdote has been in my rss aggregator for months, it’s great. I’ve also been following Shawn on Twitter @unorder. It was great to meet him. Thanks Shawn.

And thanks to Patrick Lambe, Green Chameleon & Straits Knowledge for arranging Shawn’s talk tonight. They were both in the middle of a busy schedule giving a masterclass at the Singapore International Storytelling Festival.