photo by Douglas C. Pizac

Ed McMahon, best know for being the announcer of The Tonight Show (1962-1992), has died in Los Angeles at age 86.

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guest post by Burstein!

photo by unknown

In response to all the hipster hate going around, I offer you a moment of joy with Look at This Lovely Hamster blog. Of course, there is always hipster hamster art for those of you that like their rodents to reflect youth culture.

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Infotainer Joel Bauer tells you about his business card that took him 25 years to design.

It doesn’t fit in a Roledex because it dosen’t belong in a Roledex. It’s the kind of thing that even if they don’t like you they won’t throw it out.

An interview where Joel talks about his awesome business card.

via Scott Simpson

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QualiaSoup made a great video that explores the concept of Open-mindedness.

A look at some of the flawed thinking that prompts people who believe in certain non-scientific concepts to advise others who don’t to be more open-minded.

via Richard Dawkins

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“The Dungeon Master: The Blind Date” is a video by The555 that imagines what might happen if a D&D Dungeon Master was brought in to run a blind date campaign.

via Neatorama

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While riding the “wicked awesome” escalators at Moscone West on our way out of Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2009 my old friend Schlomo Rabinowitz tells us his Hodgman-esque story of Jorge Escalario, the inventor of the escalator.

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Dark Roasted Blend has a great series of Nightmare Playgrounds and Children’s Sculptures, Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3. Mike Kupietz describes them as:

Photographs of surreal, decrepit playgrounds that were designed so strangely or fallen into such ugly/beautiful disrepair that they’d give any sensible kid nightmares. It’s as if Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean had gotten into the playground business.

Thanks to Mike Kupietz for the tip!

photo via Dark Roasted Blend, original source unknown

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Abram the Safety Ape, “Health Educator” and driver of the Art of Bleeding ambulance, recently spoke out (in the form of rhyme) about the Connecticut Chimp Tragedy.

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“Generation Loss” by David Elliott shows what a JPEG image can look like after saving it 600 times, each time slightly increasing the compression.

via Boing Boing

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On Monday afternoon at SXSW Interactive 2009, our friends at Rackspace had their big Rackspace Cloud Lounge Party at Brush Square Park out in front of the convention center. Laughing Squid Web Hosting has used Rackspace for our servers and data center for ten years (we’re one of their oldest customers) and I’ve been trying to talk them to do something at SXSW for years, so it’s great to see them in full force this year.

The event was to organized promote their Cloud Hosting services (something we have recently started using with them), including the launch of their new Cloud Servers and Cloud Files coming out of beta. In addition to all of the Rackspace people we’ve been working with, it was great to meet the founders of some of the companies that have joined Rackspace, including Mailtrust, Slicehost and Jungle Disk.

At one point in the party I had the pleasure of introducing Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels to Rackspace chairman Graham Weston. It was quite an ironic meeting considering that Rackspace is now competing directly with Amazon, of course as Werner was saying at the party, there’s plenty of the cloud pie to go around.

Speaking of Rackspace, they recently announced that they have hired Robert Scoble and Rocky Barbanica to produce video and develop a community for their new project Building 43, “a place for people fanatical about the internet”. Here’s more on the launch from Robert and TechCrunch.

Photo Gallery: Rackspace Cloud Lounge Party

Here’s a video of the Rackspce Cloud Lounge Party at SXSW 2009.

See Previously:

- Robert Scoble Tours the Future Headquarters of Rackspace

- Rackspace Cloud Hosting: Sites, Files & Servers

photos by Scott Beale

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Andre Torrez recently launched Listable, web service where you can make lists for whatever you want. A great example is “Words it is NOT ok to ever say.” list by Mike Monteiro.

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Here’s a video of the late, great Phil Hartman auditioning for Saturday Night Live back in 1985/1986. Jon Lovitz makes an appearance at the end of the video.

via The Sound of Young America

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Go Media is selling wonderful FAIL stickers that help you publicly call out real-life failures. They feature the authentic Impact font and a clear background to help produce the realistic effect of tagging something (or someone) as FAIL.

via Jake Nickell on Twitter

image via FAIL stickers

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On Wednesday, Google announced that they were no longer going to develop Notebook, which really sucks since I’ve been using that quite a while to keep track of notes, projects, etc. So of course I asked Twitter for recommendations on a good Notebook replacement and by far the service recommended the most was Evernote. In fact as it turns out, Evernote is even working on a Google Notebook importer.

I checked out Evernote a little bit when it was in beta, but yesterday I took a second look and was blown away. Evernote simply rocks! I’ve set it up to synch my notes between my computers (both Mac and PC) using their excellent desktop apps, as well as online through their website and even my iPhone.

In fact I like Evernote so much that I’ve already upgraded to their premium service.

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Last night at Mikl & Danielle’s annual Christmas party, renown SubGenii Michael Peppe channeled People’s Temple founder Jim Jones from their backyard as a dry run of a performance that he was doing later that night at the First Satanic Church’s Black X Mass hosted by Karla LaVey (daughter of Anton LaVey) at the Elbo Room in San Francisco.

When Michael first arrived at the party he was telling me about his Jim Jones gig and the research he was doing for it. During our discussion I reminded him that it was not Kool-Aid that they were forced to drink in Jonestown, but rather the less popular Flavor Aid, a common misconception.

photo by Scott Beale

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“The Black Hole” by Olly Williams and Phil Sampson (interview with the directors).

via The Art of the Prank

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For five decades NORAD has been tracking Santa Claus has he makes his way around the world on Christmas. NORAD has teamed up with Google once again to help pinpoint Santa’s location on the globe using Google Maps, Google Earth in 3D, phi-res Santa Cam videos and updates for mobile devices.

This year NORAD is also posting Santa updates on Twitter, just follow @noradsanta.

You can also follow Santa himself on Twitter at @SantaClaus.

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Back in 2003 Triumph The Insult Comic Dog make a hilarious guest appearance doing the local news weather report on KHNL NBC Channel 8 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

via Jay Adelson on Twitter

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The Periodic Table of Awesomements by The Dapperstache lists all the elements of awesome. My favorite awesomement? That would be #60 of course.

Thanks to David R. for the tip!

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Violet Blue has just announced this year’s The Top Ten Sexy Geeks 2008.

Researched and culled all year, then boiled down with nominations and my own personal invention: the trademarked, nerdlust-powered, drink-dispensing, algorithmic GILF-O-Tron 9000 — it’s the Top Ten Sexy Geeks of 2009.

The music video is “Nrrrd Grrrl” by MC Chris featuring #1 sexy geek Cyan Banister.

See Previously: Violet Blue’s List of The Top Ten Sexy Geeks 2007

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