So…  A co-worker of mine tweeted that she was enjoying “Crayon Physics”.  I was intrigued and searched the web, and found this TOTALY AWESOME game.  It lets you draw with crayons but simulates physics with what you draw….  Complete with gravity, hinges, even simple machines…  I found some video’s on youtube that showcase it. 

Download the demo here: http://www.crayonphysics.com/

No lie, it’s true.  Typcialy you can only brick your device if you are trying to hack it, but last night every 30GB MS Zune crashed and won’t reset, placing all of these devices on the same level as a brick.  According to a news article here:

Microsoft is just squeezing in under the wire to claim the rights to “weirdest tech story of the year.”Last night at approximately 2 AM, every 30GB Zune model on the planet crashed at the exact same moment. The Zunes reset, powered up, then froze on the loading bar screen, and no conventional method of resetting them appears to work.

This is brought to you courtesy of Microsoft, who has been selling a video game console with a nearly 100% fail rate for three years. The Zune situation is all the more disasterous however, seeing as all of them failed at the exact same moment, which people have taken to calling Y2K9. The comments on the situation on various websites are pretty hilarious, here are a few:

Confuscious says: “Buy An iPod”

So today was our office Christmas party.  I work at the greatest place imaginable.   During the Christmas party the executive team did a typical telling of time and thanking of the people involved in keeping the clock going, than the CEO Clate Mask got up and continued to do maintenance on the clock.  Now, he didn’t maintain the clock in the typical manner.  He didn’t thank all of us for helping (although he did).  He instead gave us a current picture of the world around us, and the current picture of the company.  He praised us and the company.  He didn’t do it with hollow praise either; he made us feel valued, worthy, important, responsible, trusted, etc…  He led us.  When I go to work, I feel privileged to work for a company where I am valued, respected, trusted, etc…  A company that has values like “Authentic, Compassionate, etc…”

As part of the Christmas festivities, $2000 was raised for several needy families, and another family had presents and walmart cards purchased for them on our behalf.

This brings to my mind another topic…

The economy turmoil we are currently faced with is due wholly to lack of productivity.  If we were productive as a nation, we would have no problems.  Imagine this simplified scneario.  There is a town with two occupants, a blacksmith and a farmer.  The farmer and the blacksmith are plagued with lack of productivity.  They both do “just good enough to get by”.  The blacksmith produces a total of 5 horse shoe’s a week, the farmer makes just 5 lbs of crops a week.  It is pretty obvious how everything will play out.  If horse shoes are a dollar a pair, and food is $1 per lbs than you can see that the maximum sallery possilbe for either the farmer or blacksmith is $5 per week.  If however, the farmer and the blacksmith work a little harder and double their productivity, now you can see the the maximum sallery has doubled.  And you don’t have to work twice as hard to double your productivity.   You just work smarter and better.  You put away the bad pride you have in the way you do things, and look to others that do things better than you and learn from them.  A very elusive process our society used to call “learning”.  It is a very difficult concept to grasp I know.  I mean you have to actually accept that there is someone that does what you do only better and that you will benefit from this fact.

All the talk of helping “Joe the Plumber” will just pass more money around, if more money is passed around without more productvity than all that happens is that supply and demand shifts a little and all of our goods get more expensive, thus driving up costs across the board and devaluing our dollar.  And, mind you, it’s not just the devaluation of the dollar that gets to me, it’s the fact that the leaders are either totally aware that they are pulling the wool over everyones eyes, or that they are too blinded by their own pride to realize that they really don’t have the power they think.  They can’t just “stimulate” the economy.  They have to wake it up, and slap it around a little, and tell it (us) that if we all want nice houses, we all have to learn more and work just a little more.  Hey, that might just fix our nations problem with obesity as well!  Laziness has got to go, the couch potatoe in each of us has got to die.  We all need to face our problems and fix them rather than look elsewhere for answers to our problems.

Hey, so I have been working with Uriel Katz ‘s JStORM.  For those that don’t know, it is really really really cool, but has almost zero documentation.  After beating my head against the wall for about3 hours, I finaly have this example.  It should allow just about anyone to get up and running with it in no time.  It doesn’t illustrate relationships but those are pretty easy, and you should be able to use Uriel Katz’s project home page to figure out how to use them.  Anyways, enjoy the app:  JStORM Example

I sat down tonight wondering what to do, and I fealt like trying out the php gd ttf image text function so I created this simple facebook header generator to test it out.

So my wife hooked me on flair…  I don’t send it much, but I LOVE getting it.  I would make more flair, but I hate firing up a paint program.  So I wrote this simple Web 2.0 flair maker that allows you to insert text the correct size onto an image with no photoshop required.  I hope you like it.