Tag: Friday fun Page 2 of 3

It’s Groundhog Day. So it only makes sense to refer you to several write-ups about this historic day, beginning with Wikipedia:

Groundhog Day is a traditional festival celebrated in the United States and Canada on February 2. It is a cross-quarter day, midway between the Winter Solstice and the Vernal Equinox.

In traditional weather lore, if a groundhog emerges from its burrow on this day and fails to see its shadow because the weather is cloudy, winter will soon end. If the groundhog sees its shadow because the weather is bright and clear, it will be frightened and run back into its hole, and the winter will continue for six more weeks.

Hmmm…not quite the deep, belly-laugh-inducing quote I was looking for.

If you want more detail, check out “The Official Site of the Punxsutawney Grounhog Club.”

Or, better yet, read what Punxsutawney Phil (the groundhog) actually said this morning. (You can find anything on the Internet, can’t you?)

For the record, all the various groundhog-sages consulted this morning predict an early spring.

Other diversions

If you’ve had enough of puzzling over the weather, here’s a site that will let you puzzle over other things.

Mighty Optical Illusions is a website that publishes various optical illusions and usually goes on to explain them. It’s not particularly deep but it does provide some useful options for procrastinating.

I don’t particularly like all the ads that are wrapped around everything, but if you can get past that part — there’s some interesting things in there.

I’m particularly fond of the Stereogram type of illusion, where you have to let your eyes relax and then suddenly you see a 2-D object in 3-D, sometimes with startling results. Here’s an example.

If you like these things enough to see them every day, there are a couple of widgets available that you can download to have a new illusion show up on your desktop every day. Here’s how to get one for your Google homepage, and here’s a link to a Mac widget. (And here’s an explanation of widgets, if you need it.)

And finally, have you ever wondered what people that work at home do to celebrate casual Fridays? Well, now you know.

Have a great weekend.

Today’s topic is laughter. We’re going to look at it from a couple of directions.

First up is a video that proves the old adage that laughter is contagious. I’m not going to say much about this video. But I guarantee that you’ll be laughing your lungs out during it. If you don’t – well, I don’t believe you.

You can watch the video below or click on this link to see it on YouTube.

“A smile is just a smile…”

My second item has a bit more scientific basis. While it won’t make you laugh out loud, it might make you smile. Or at least, make you think about other people smiling.

Courtesy of the BBC website, I invite you to take this simple test to see whether you can figure out the difference between a fake smile and a real one.

Why do I want you to do that? Well…take the test and then let me know in the comments why you think I’ve added it here.

Here’s the link to the test.

I want this guy to paint my building

If you’ve got an extra building in your portfolio, or if you live next door to a blank wall, you should consider hiring this chap to spruce things up a bit.

Check it out for yourself.

He’s so good, I suspect his paintings might be ruled illegal because people keep walking into the walls.

Have a good weekend.

Let’s start off the new year by looking back into the past.

Today’s fun segment is a bit different than the last few.

Rather than just sit back and laugh at a video (not that that isn’t a lot of fun, mind you) I thought you might enjoy cruising through The Internet Archive.

Perhaps you’ve heard of this place. It has the distinction, in my humble view, of having one of the most ambitious mission statements I’ve ever seen:

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.

If you’ve never visited, you should go and take a look around. It’s a fascinating journey. The About page, where the above quote is from, is a great place to start, just to get a sense of what the place is all about.

Then scoot on over to the Home page and take a trip on TheWayBack Machine. This is one of the coolest features of the Internet Archives. There are now over 85 billion pages archived on the site, going back to 1996.

All you need to do is type in a URL of a site and you’ll be given a list of all the pages they’ve got. It’s a fascinating way to look back at how a site has evolved over the years, in both design and content. It’s easy to spend quite a while loohttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifking through the history of some of your favourite places.

The site offers other archives besides web pages, including moving images, live music, audio and texts. They work in much the same manner, where you either browse randomly, or use specific search functions. Either way, you can spend a lot of time noodling around, so it’s a great feature for a lazy Friday afternoon or a weekend.

And finally, head over to the Forums, for some really groovy action. One of the most lively areas is the Grateful Dead forum, where you can imagine what the action centres on. Plus, you’ll find all kinds of other little gems, like one of my favourites, The Conet Project – Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations.

See? There’s something for everyone in The Internet Archive.

Have fun.

Oh…just one more thing (since MacWorld is coming next week.) It wouldn’t be Friday without a guitar video, would it?

Have a great weekend.

By now, I’m sure you’ve realized that I like to find funny and interesting videos on the Web. But there are a lot of videos out there, and you can end up burning a lot of time trying to find the good ones. So this week, I’m going to point you to a cool application I “stumbled” upon recently.

It’s called, appropriately, StumbleUpon.

It works in a couple of ways. First, it’s yet another online social network, which lets you register a profile and search for like-minded friends. But the site uses a unique way of presenting interesting sites, videos, etc. to you that it thinks you will like, based on the preferences you’ve put in.

Note that if you don’t want to give the site a lot of your personal info, it still works just fine. You can either open the site’s webpage, or for real convenience, you can download a toolbar for your browser that makes stumbling as easy as one click.

And while you stumble through the choices offered, you can tell the site whether you like the selections or not, so it learns what kind of content you like.

To be honest, I haven’t used that part of the site very much, although it seems to work just fine.

But its the second option, called Stumble Video, that I’ve been using and really enjoying.

You just sign up and start clicking. Once you’ve entered a list of topics you’re interested in, the site will start serving up video clips from all over the Web that it thinks you might like. Again, you rate them while you watch and if you don’t like it, just click again to serve up a new one.

It’s very addictive and a lot of fun.

For example, here are three sites that I Stumbled Upon in one sitting:

— How to Reach 100,000 People for $1 – Highway Blogger

— Internet from the old days — This is a fascinating report by the CBC’s Bill Cameron about the Internet phenomenon, from the 1980’s, I’d guess.

— Pumpcast News — People pumping gas at a self-serve suddenly realize the video monitor they’re watching is talking directly to them.

And, of course, no collection of video clips would be complete without at least one cool guitar video…

Before we start the weekend fun edition, a personal update.

I’m in Regina this week to visit with my Mom, who’s getting ready for another one of those major life transitions that we all have to deal with at some point.

She’s been living in Qu’Appelle House for several years now. The people there are wonderful and it’s like being part of a wonderful, caring family. Unfortunately, to live there, you have to be able to get up on your own and get down to the dining room for meals.

My Mom has suffered a series of small strokes, called TIA’s over the years and while she’s been able to come back from each of them, this last one seems to have hurt her ability to control her legs. So now, at unexpected moments, her legs just give out on her. And it’s not getting better.

So, I’m here to help get her organized for a move to another home where she can get the level of care she needs now. But it will be sad for her to leave her “family” and start over again at a new facility.

My story is certainly not unique. Since I’ve arrived here, I’ve run into several people who are either going through or have gone through or are expecting to go through something similar. I guess it’s all a part of living, isn’t it? Something else for my kids to look forward to.

OK, this is supposed to be fun, right?

Right.

So as you know, I’ve been busy the last couple of days, so I’ve only got one video for you this week. But it’s a good one.

Here’s a very clever look back at the year 2006, through the eyes of some kids in a school holiday concert. It was put together by the comedy site JibJab. It’s funny, but be warned — you need a sense of humour to enjoy it!

Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing me here.