to netZoom el número cuatro, the fourth article in the series where I share interesting discoveries and news from the series of tubes we call the Internets.

Today’s we’ll be taking a look at how dangerous water can really be.  We’ll also be having fun with an interesting LinkedIn plugin and we’ll explore the internet’s obsession with the word Wiener.

So let’s get to it already!

Water Poisoning

Our first story today is a little old, a little strange, and quite sad.  In 2007, a radio station in the US had an original idea for a contest.  Dubbed the “Hold your wee for a Wii” contest, participants were given 8 255ml bottles of water every 15 minutes, and the one who could drink the most bottles without going to the bathroom would – after finally going to said bathroom – get to go home with a new Nintendo Wii gaming console.

One of the participants, a 28 year old mother of three named Jennifer Strange, left the contest after complaining of severe headaches.  She would be found at home a few hours later, dead from Water Intoxication.

As it turns out, she had drank so much water that the normal chemical balance of her blood had been altered.  Even the winner of the contest, a certain Lucy Davidson, was reported as being severely sick while receiving her prize.

Prior to the competition, the radio station had been warned by a caller that they were putting people’s lives at risk, but unfortunately for Jennifer they dismissed the caller and ran the contest anyways. Jennifer’s family ended up suing the radio station in court, and were awarded $16 million in damages.

So remember, if you gotta go, don’t hold it in, just go…

LinkedIn Maps

My InMap

With over 100+ million users worldwide, LinkedIn touts itself as “the world’s largest professional network on the Internet”, and rightly so.

Unlike other social network services like Facebook and MySpace, LinkedIn allows its members to keep in touch with their professional and business connections.  They enable members to build business oriented profile pages that can be used by other professionals around the globe to read through work experiences, education, and recommendations, among other things.

So why am I talking up LinkedIn?  Well, I recently found an interesting website called LinkedIn Labs, which is a site created by LinkedIn to host “a small set of projects and experimental features built by [LinkedIn] employees…”.

One of these experiments – inMaps – is a tool that studies your list of contacts and groups them based on their relations to each other.  This generates a cloud of interconnected contacts and allows you to interpret your professional network visually.

Though my inMap (that weird looking cloud/spiderweb thing up above) only contains ±70 contacts right now, you can get an idea of how the cloud of a person with several hundred contacts might look.

Here’s a quick rundown of my cloud: (click on the image to see a larger version).

• Starting from the top and going clockwise, the first multicoloured group are my friends and school buddies.  I did not work with them anywhere, and so even though they are linked together amongst each other, they are not linked with any other of my contacts.
• My previous employer is the second group in blue and my current employer the third group in green, and as you can see there aren’t any ties between the two (both companies are fairly different and in different geological locations).
• On the other hand, my current employer does have common ties with another company: the fourth group in brownish-orange.  Many of my contacts share contacts with this group as well, and so both groups are more closely related.

If you have a LinkedIn account, I invite you to try inMaps.  The more contacts you have, the bigger your inMap will be, and as you can see on the inMap site, some of the biggest maps are actually quite amazing.

In Other News…

• Brain Scans reveal link between Guilt and Cooperation
• Women spend more time on Facebook than Men

And On This Day In…

• 1497– John Cabot lands in Newfoundland, the first European to do so since the Vikings
• 1717 – The first Masonic Grand Lodge in the world is founded in London, England
• 1880 – The first performance of the O Canada, the song that would become Canada’s National anthem
• 1985 – Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is the first Arab and first Muslim in space
• And a lot more…

Video: The Weinerlogues with Bill Maher and Jane Lynch

In the last netZoom article we discovered that cell phone auto corrects can lead to hilarious messages.  In the conversation posted in the article, a son told his friends he could not join them because his father wanted to play with his wiener (auto corrected from the Wii gaming console).  Well imagine my surprise when I discovered that, over the past week, a US Politician by the name of Anthony Weiner was caught in a sexting scandal.

So, at the risk of having too many Weiner references on the site, I’m proud to share with you a video of the back-and-forth that got Mr. Weiner in trouble in the first place.  In this video, dubbed the Weinerlogues, Bill Maher and Jane Lynch read through the entire sexting conversation that was published.  The video was originally aired on HBO as part of the show Real Time with Bill Maher.

I warn you that, although hilarious, this video does contain graphic language, is not safe for work and also not safe for young children.

Ok? You’ve been warned.  Now enjoy!

And that’s pretty much it…

for this longer-than-usual fourth netZoom article. Thanks for reading, and if you have any discoveries of your own, feel free to share in the comments below!

5, 10 and 17

Well done.  Now let’s multiply all of these together twice!

5 x 10 x 17 x 5 x 10 x 17 = 722,500

Perfect, you have the result, yes?  No, no, don’t tell me just yet – this is a magic trick after all.

Now, it’s my turn.  Please bear with me for a moment while I pull out my trusty calculator.

(2011 - 33) * 365.2422 is...

*reaches for calculator and turns it on*

Ok, assuming our calendars are correct, and assuming Jesus Chris was crucified on April 1st of the year 33, how many days has it been since this event took place?

(2011 – 33) * 365.2422 = 722449.0716 days

Now, tell me your number.  722,500?  Perfect!  Let’s take that number and subtract mine:

722,500 – 722449.0716 = 50.9284

We round that up to 51 (because its easier math), and add 51 days to April 1st.  What do we get?  We get today!  Tada!

*hold for applause*

So, what’d you think of my trick?  You didn’t like it…

What if I told you that it proved that Judgement Day was today? It reminded you of the movie The Number 23, but worse… Ouch…

Truth is, the math above is exactly the reason why millions of people have stopped going to work.  Instead these people began donating time and money to an organization called Family Radio in an attempt to warn everyone about what they believed to be absolute proof that today was the end of times.

There was to be an earthquake that rattled the world, and then ±200 million people would be raptured into heaven, while the rest of us just disappeared into nothingness.  So far northing’s happened, and I honestly doubt anything will.

This isn’t the first end-of-days I’ve lived through, and it definitively won’t be the last (yes, I’m thinking of you December 21, 2012).  Truth is, whether it be through Rapture, Judgement, sickness, or just plain old age, everyone dies.  In the meantime, there’s nothing we can do other than to celebrate our life by living it to the fullest.

And to help with that, here’s a fun vid about the end of the world:

Enjoy!

They're back: Blog Tool Reviews

Blog Tool Reviews

One set of posts I want to bring back to the mix are my Blog Tool Reviews.  These posts detailed the different tools and services I commonly use on Folaji, and served to document helpful hints and tips for those out there who were looking to create their own blog or site.

The series, which originally started on this site, was moved to a new site a while back.  I was hoping to use this new site to post Software Development and IT posts, but quickly found out that I did not have the time to run two sites at once.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed writing these posts, which is why I will be bringing them back into the Folaji fold.

This dog will be replying to your emails (when she feels like it, of course...)

Ask Koji

A new series of articles I’m going to be bringing to the site are fan letter responses written from the point of view of my dog: Koji (a 3 year old female Basenji).  This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a while now, and I believe it’ll be fun to see how Koji would react to certain fan written letters.

So if you have any questions or comments you would like to send our way, you can leave a comment on this post or take a moment and write an email to koji@folaji.com.

Equanimity

Obviously one of the new series on the site will be Equanimity: the short story I’ve been preparing for almost the past year.  I expect we’ll see some posts for this story before the end of the month, so keep an eye open for them!

I have a camcorder!

Some Kind of Video Project

I’ve finally taken the plunge and bought a camcorder a couple of weeks ago.  I’ve since been walking around and taking random videos of things, but I’m looking for ideas for videos that I could post online.  As some of you may know, I had a blast making videos with friends while in highschool (take a look at this for an example, though I warn you that its both in French and pleasantly horrible  ), and with my new camera, I hope to start making videos again.

I’m not quite certain what I want to do just yet.  I have a few ideas rolling around in my head (mini web series or mini documentaries for example) but nothing concrete at the moment.   Regardless, once I’ve something ready to show, you can bet I’ll post it here.

In the meantime, if you have some ideas as to what I could do video-wise, feel free to share!

I’ve been working on this new site for a couple of weeks now, and noticed that the content of the Blog Tools Review articles was much more suitable for this site than for Folaji.com.  And so I’ve ported the series over, and will continue on publishing Blog Tools Reviews everyweek on FuglyCode.com.

With the launch of the new site, I’ve not yet had the chance to publish Chapter 7 of Rise of the X-Syndicate.  I can say for a fact that it will be posted this week, so keep an eye out for a new Chapter of this World of Warcraft story.

In the meantime, I leave you with a montage of my dog Koji, playing with an 8 week old black lab named Ramsay.  Aren’t they adorable?

Back in June of last year, a couple of friends and I came out with a RockBand video of Disturbed’s Down With The Sickness. At the time I was unable to add the video to YouTube because of the song being copywrited.

While I was moving files around on the site, I found the video and in a fit of nostalgia decided to look at it again. I found the post on Folaji.com, and noticed the video wasn’t showing up. So I took advantage of this opportunity to try my luck with YouTube again, and I got the video to work!

So, check it out (if you hadn’t already) and enjoy!

“Mystery is the catalyst for imagination.”

- J.J. Abrams

I stumbled upon a pretty interesting YouTube video a few days ago.  The video (which I’ve embedded below) is of J.J. Abrams talking to a group of people at TED about what makes a good story.  In the end, it all boils down to this small decades-old cardboard box which he never opened.  This Mystery Box, J.J. explains, is the manifestation of infinite possibility, hope and potential, and is a very important and all-to-often forgotten element of good story telling.

The bike trip is going great, we are currently on our 6th day overall, and our second day in Manitoba’s capital.  Since we’re staying here for two days, we decided last night that we would sleep in this morning.  Being more of an early bird than my two other traveling buddies, I’m taking advantage of the situation to write a post .

So, if you havn’t already, I’d invite you to read Vikas’ Journal Entries, which you can find using the links below:

• Vikas’ Journal Entries – Page 1
• Vikas’ Journal Entries – Page 2

Also, before I left I uploaded to youtube a video we did when we were in high school.  The 45 minute movie, entitled “La Science et vous – La Sécurité en laboratoire”, was our attempt at creating a 70s-style, satirical movie about laboratory security while in high school.  The video is in french, and is chopped up into 5 parts (since youtube doesn’t allow for videos longer than 10 minutes).  You can find each of the vids below:

WARNING: The video does contain the original version of the song, which may not be suitable to some. I did my best to find a way to mute the lyrics and add our own, but unfortunately this always greatly reduced the audio quality.

Click on the Play icon below to play.

For more information on our RockBand band, visit the 3 Macas and a Reject Blog!

In the meantime, enjoy…