Farooq Yousuf

When I first started watching this video, I was like wow this is a downer, but the end proved otherwise, its a masterpiece! Simply left me in amazement. Very well made.

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This short video presents some amazingly interesting facts that MOST people don’t know or even think about:

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Got this in a forwarded email, pretty cool

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A new genre has been introduced into the gaming industry: zen - focusing on nature, peaceful, serene type games. It was discovered by a  John Hight of Sony PS3 at a student showcase and immediately knew this would be a big hit. I think this new genre will only appeal to a certain group and crowd, I doubt it would be appealing to all gamers initially but maybe I’m wrong, only time will tell. Overall I think the idea does seem pretty cool and it just might catch on. When playing the game it gives the player a zen feeling, you make ask what does that mean? Well, read the article below:

Video Game Grad Programs Open Up The Industry
by Heather Chaplin

Traditionally, video game designers learned their trade from other designers, a system that meant the people who made the games were often living in a monoculture. But that’s changed recently; for the past five or 10 years, universities have been offering degree programs in video game design.

The programs are not about coding; instead they look at games as a medium for artistic experimentation and collaboration. And as students emerge, they are gradually making their mark on the industry.

Take Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen. The two graduates of the University of Southern California’s interactive media MFA program exemplify the more diverse group of people entering the field.

Santiago grew up on Nintendo and spent some time doing experimental theater in New York before enrolling at USC. She says she played a lot of video games growing up, but never thought much about making them until she started classes.

“When I took the first game studies class we had, taught by Tracy Fullerton, that really opened my eyes up to, in a way, how video games were sort of the new interactive theater,” she says.

Those games studies classes were also where she met Chen, who had come to the U.S. from Shanghai with the intention of studying computer science. He’d made games as a hobby when he was a teenager, but by the time he got to USC, he was disenchanted with them.

“Even though we grew up with games, at the same time, the gamers are actually outgrowing the games,” he says. “Very few games have actually achieved those qualities that would be interesting to an adult.”

Santiago and Chen decided to collaborate on games that would feel different. Their first game together, Cloud, features a little boy who imagines flying out of his hospital room window and into the sky, where he make shapes out of the clouds, moving white clouds over dark ones to keep the sky from raining.

John Hight of Sony stumbled across Cloud at a student showcase while scouting games for the PlayStation 3.

Kellee Santiago and Jenova Chen created the video game Cloud (above) while still in graduate school. Sony executive John Hight calls the game — which features a little boy who imagines flying out of his hospital room window and into the sky — a "Zen" experience.

Hight has been in the video game business for more than 20 years, and he knew he’d found something special. Cloud was nothing like the typical PlayStation 3 games, which include titles like Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV and Resident Evil 5.

“One of the marketing people asked me, ‘So what genre is it?’ And I said completely straight-faced, ‘It’s Zen,’ ” says Hight. “They said, ‘Zen? What the heck is Zen?’ And I said, ‘It’s a new category.’ ”

By graduation day, Santiago and Chen had formed thatgamecompany with the goal of making video games that “communicate different emotional experiences” — and they had a three-game deal with Sony, for the PlayStation 3’s downloadable service.

Their first game out of school, Flower, makes the player a stream of petals on the wind. You soar past flowers that burst into bloom when you go by, and navigate around a landscape of fallen electrical towers. Inspired by Chen’s reaction to Southern California after growing up in the dense cityscape of Shanghai, the game is both serene and, at times, unsettling.

“It should feel like you have a backyard,” says Chen. “It’s a virtual backyard that leads you to the nature, even though you’re living in a forest of skyscrapers.”

In the game Flower, the user is a stream of petals on the wind — navigating around electrical towers and other flowers.

Santiago adds that she and Chen think of a video game as a version of a poem: “By that we mean that it presents ideas to the player, but it also asks players to bring their own experiences to the table as well.”

Poetry and experimental theater aren’t traditional starting points for video games — and they probably would not have come into the industry if it hadn’t been for the program at USC.

“The challenge when we started the game programs was to create the next generation of creative leaders,” says Fullerton, Santiago and Chen’s professor and mentor.

Fullerton says USC’s program provides its students with the precious time to study the creative process, learn how to collaborate and to experiment.

“Commercial games cost so much to make and take so long to make [that the game-makers are] not free to take risks,” Fullerton says. She adds that designers who work their way up in the industry are not free to “ask a question like, ‘What if we made a game just about an emotion?’ ”

With a new generation that has been trained to ask such questions entering the industry, big changes are sure to come.

Soucre: NPR

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I came across this interesting and funny video of a guy named Matt who was filmed dancing a stupid dance all over the world, I dug deeper and found out it all started out as some fun and turned into him being hired by Stride Gum to do what he does: dance. I guess Stride Gum liked what they saw and thought it would be a nice promo for them. I must admit the video is interesting (at least the first time around) After watching it I feel like traveling the world! haha Check it out:

For more info on this click here: Where The Hell is Matt?

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A few days ago I was trying to get a Watir (Web Automated Testing in Ruby) script working that I had wrote and for some reason it just wasn’t working. It was driving me crazy because I asked my coworkers to run it on their machines and it worked perfectly for them. So something was wrong with my machine not the script.

After Googling I was able to solve the problem. I will list the steps I took in solving it just in case anyone runs into the same thing I did. OK so first things first, what was the problem?

Well every time I tried to execute a Watir  script on my VMware Windows XP I would get this error:

NoMethodError: undefined method ‘goto’ for #<Watir::IE:0×3246f3c>

What you want to do is, type: “gem uninstall win32-api”, you probably have more than 1 installed. It’ll ask you which gem to uninstall, I selected to get rid of all of them.

After you’ve done that then do a fresh install of the win32-api gem by typing: “gem install win32-api”

That should have solved the problem, hope that helped! If not check out this link too.

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I first heard this story on NPR radio in the car, it immediately caught my attention as it was something so random and intreresting. Kogi, a big truck that goes around the streets of LA selling Korean Mexican style tacos are a HUGE success and a large part of that is due to the popularity they gained via Twitter. People stand in line for 1+ hour waiting for these delicious and different tacos, some even order loads of them. They now have 2 trucks, it has become the most popular place to eat in LA at the moment. I think this is truly amazing how Twitter has helped the popularity of their business on wheels, proves Twitter isn’t just for promoting online things but anywhere and anything.

Tweeting Food Truck Draws L.A.’s Hungry Crowds
by Ben Bergman

· Forget Spago Beverly Hills. The hottest place to eat in Los Angeles right now serves food out of a truck and owes a large part of its success to Twitter.

Kogi, which offers a unique combination of Mexican and Korean food, is a modern variation of the taco trucks that have long been popular on the streets of L.A.

“I tracked down Kogi Friday night,” reads a posting on Yelp, the local-business review site. “Life as I know it has ceased to exist. I want Korean BBQ tacos, I want them now and I want them every day for the rest of my life.”

Standing In Line For Hours

On a recent evening, hundreds of people stood in line in L.A.’s Little Tokyo neighborhood to try the much-heralded tacos. Chuck Chun, who drove in from Orange County, waited an hour and a half to place his order for $26 worth of food.

Chun found the truck with the help of a tool that has become the necessity of any serious foodie these days — a Twitter account.

“You’ve got to go on Twitter to get the most up-to-date news on what kind of specials they have that day or where they are,” Chun explains. “They actually got here late — that’s what they announced on their Twitter.”

It’s so 2009: Customers instantly know where the truck is, even if actually getting the food takes hours.

Mario Duarte also located the truck using Twitter.

“It really was delicious,” Duarte says after scarfing down a spicy chicken taco while sitting on the ground.

“It had the Korean sweetness from the kimchi mixed with the heat of Mexican food and the fire of a taco like you only get off a taco truck,” he adds.

Sidewalk Interaction

There’s a sight here you don’t always see in car-centric L.A.: People hanging out on the sidewalk while eating, socializing and listening to music.

It took the virtual world of Twitter to bring about all this face-to-face interaction. And that’s exactly the point, according to Kogi’s head chef, Roy Choi.

“You have all these neighborhoods now where people come out when they usually just got in their car and went to a mini-mall,” Choi says. “Now they’re coming out to their streets, talking to their neighbors.”

From Four Stars To A Truck

Choi has spent most of his career in four-star restaurants. His Kogi biography points out that he finished in the top of his class at the Culinary Institute of America.

Now Choi is crammed into the tiny kitchen in Culver City, Calif., where he and other chefs prepare the food that goes out on two trucks. Kogi, which means meat in Korean, also recently added a bricks-and-mortar location.

The most popular item on the menu is the short rib taco stuffed with marinated beef and topped off with lettuce, cabbage chili salsa and cilantro relish.

“Our vinaigrette has 14 ingredients, our marinade has 20 ingredients, our meats are all natural meats,” Choi says. “And we sell it for $2.”

With lines so long, it seems like Kogi could easily double prices and still attract plenty of customers. However, Choi says he wants nothing more than to cover expenses and make a very small profit.

Culinary Exploration Of L.A.

He also wants Kogi to stay true to its roots, even if the company is only a few months old.

Kogi began as “an idea born from late night hunger,” the business’ Web site says. Choi and his partners were interested in a hobby, not a job. They wanted to make new dishes while exploring new parts of L.A.

The only problem was that when Choi brought his Korean tacos to the streets of L.A., no one quite knew what to make of them.

“The first couple weeks we were out there, people were laughing at us because they just couldn’t conceptualize what it was,” Choi recalls.

Tech-Savvy Marketing

He credits a large degree of Kogi’s success to hiring a new-media consultant who helped spread the word of Kogi virally.

“As a chef, I always think it’s the food, but I think without Twitter it wouldn’t be anything,” Choi says, “because I could have made these tacos, but I would have had no one to sell them to.”

Kogi not only has over 8,000 followers on Twitter, it has customers so loyal they’ve created YouTube tributes and a song (”Ode to Kogi”) on MySpace.

But the Web hasn’t been all so fawning.

One Kogi dissident created an imposter Twitter account promoting fake events like taco bikini Saturday, and fake dishes like solar-cooked pork, cooked on the roof of the truck. Worse, they lured people to fake locations.

The real Kogi owners take it all in stride.

Imitation, as the saying goes, is the sincerest form of flattery.

Source: NPR

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I came across a nifty little feature Google has released on Gmail: Undo Send. Basically the user is given a few seconds after they press the send button just in case they want to “undo” pressing the send button, its a great feature.

You have to activate it through the Google Labs tab on your Gmail dashboard. I give it two thumbs up!

New in Labs: Undo Send
Posted by Michael Leggett

Sometimes I regret sending a message the morning after. Other times I send a message and then immediately notice a mistake. I forget to attach a file or email the birthday girl that I can’t make her surprise party. I can rush to close my browser or unplug the Internet — but Gmail almost always wins that race.

An email to the wrong Larry pushed me over the edge. I could undo just about any other action in Gmail — why couldn’t I undo send? Many people agreed, including Yuzo Fujishima, an engineer in the Tokyo office. My theory (which others shared) was that even just five seconds would be enough time to catch most of those regrettable emails.

And now you can do just that. Turn on Undo Send in Gmail Labs under Settings, and you’ll see a new “Undo” link on every sent mail confirmation. Click “Undo,” and we’ll grab the message before it’s sent and take you right back to compose.

This feature can’t pull back an email that’s already gone; it just holds your message for five seconds so you have a chance to hit the panic button. And don’t worry – if you close Gmail or your browser crashes in those few seconds, we’ll still send your message.

I’ve had Undo Send turned on for a while and it’s saved me several times. Let us know if it saves you too

Source: Gmail Blog

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This is some extreme, exhilarating, intense, crazy stuff. Their lives must be like a Mountain Dew commercial! hahaha But for real this takes A LOT of guts to do, mad props to these guys, these guys get inches away from the cliffs. Don’t try this at home!!!

wingsuit base jumping

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By Cindy Kranz, The Cincinnati Enquirer

LOVELAND, Ohio — Pranav Veera can recite the names of the U.S. presidents in the order they served in office. He can say the alphabet backward. Give him a date back to 2000, and he’ll tell you the day of the week.

He’s only 6 years old.

At first glance, Pranav is a typical young boy who is highly competitive at playing Wii video games and likes to play outside. A closer look reveals he’s anything but typical.

Pranav has an IQ of 176. One person in 1 million has an IQ of 176 or above. Albert Einstein’s IQ was believed to be about 160. The average IQ is 100.

When Pranav was 4-and-a-half, his parents noticed he seemed unusually intelligent while playing with alphabet sets. He could even recall which letters were certain colors.

“That kind of puzzled us,” said his father, Prasad Veera. “You have to have not a normal memorization, but some other means of recall.”

Now, he loves all kinds of alphabets.

“He loves to collect them, like different colors, different sizes, different materials,” said his mother, Suchitra Veera.

The Veeras decided to have Pranav tested three months ago at Powers Educational Services in Hyde Park, Ohio.

“I said, ‘Let’s try it out, because he seems to do a lot of stuff kind of not quite normal for his age,’ ” his father said. “He tested 176.”

He seems to have a photographic memory, so keeping Pranav engaged and learning is a big challenge for his family.

His mother and grandmother, Shanta Sastri, work with him at home.

They’re guided by his focus and interests.

“The way to get him interested is to associate something with numbers, like presidents’ birthdays … and when they came into office,” his mother said.

“Once we introduced him to the idea, he was asking more and more questions, so we created a spreadsheet for him in Excel, and he keeps on asking us to add more types of information to it, like sort them in the order that they came into office, sort them in the order when they were born,” she said.

In prekindergarten, his teacher had him do more challenging work, such as division and telling time. In kindergarten, his classmates are learning the alphabet and numbers up to 100. He’s counting over 1 million.

“He’s an amazing child,” said Marci Taylor, his teacher at McCormick Elementary in the Milford School District. “He knows so much, yet he’s probably more excited about learning than any child I’ve ever seen. He shakes with excitement.”

Pranav knows so many incredible things, she said, but what’s also impressive is that he’s still a 6-year-old boy.

“He loves to go play at recess and climb on the monkey bars,” Taylor said.

It’s possible that Pranav might eventually have his learning accelerated, even by skipping grades, but his father said they would have to consider that with his social needs. “We want him to be as normal as possible,” his father said.

“Right now, it’s kind of early, and we can do a lot at home,” his mother added. “We have to figure out what works best, because I think it’s different for each child.”Pranav draws his intelligence from both sides of the family.

His father has a Ph.D. and his mother has two master’s degrees.

What does Pranav want to be when he grows up?

“An astronaut,” he said without hesitation.

Truly, for Pranav, the sky’s the limit.

Source: USA Today

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