January 2008


Jan 31
Zurn Introduces Green Urinal System By Betsy Kraat

ERIE, PA– Zurn Engineered Water Solutions, one of the largest manufacturers of commercial plumbing products, is introducing a urinal system that uses only one pint of water per flush.

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“Spook Country” an engaging mix of spies, cyberspace and über coolness

Posted on Oct 2 2007

“Spook Country” an engaging mix of spies, cyberspace and über coolness

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The Anxiety Maze

Posted on Oct 2 2007

The Anxiety Maze Magic capitalism and crazy Russian typewriters

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Beyoncé and Prince - My Night at the Grammys

by Jeanne on December 4th, 2007

Beyoncé and Prince’s performance at the 2004 Grammy Awards came in at #7 on the “My Night at the Grammys” special.  Here’s a video (Bey’s right - that look they gave each other at the end was totally classic!!!!):

POSTED IN: Beyoncé Appearances, Beyoncé Awards, Beyoncé Videos

Westboro Baptist Church Crazies to Picket Heath Ledger’s Funeral

I don’t know enough curse words to even begin to explain how stupid these people are.

Click the picture or click here to view a pdf of the press release.

heathledgerfuneral.jpg

Southern Racists replace the N-word with “Canadian”

Two horribly wrong posts in one day — I should probably just quit for the day.

Last August, a blogger in Cincinnati going by the name CincyBlurg reported that a black friend from the southeastern U.S. had recently discovered that she was being called a Canadian. “She told me a story of when she was working in a shop in the South and she overheard some of her customers complaining that they were always waited on by a Canadian at that place. She didn’t understand what they were talking about and assumed they must be talking about someone else,” the blogger wrote.

“After this happened several times with different patrons, she mentioned it to one of her co-workers. He told her that ‘Canadian’ was the new derogatory term that racist Southerners were using to describe persons they would have previously referred to [with the N-word.]”

Link to article

The Dark Domain #2: Nintendo’s Wii-Loaded Hardcore Holiday Season

Digg!

Quick Intro: The Dark Domain is a weekly post that I will make on Wednesdays, and it will be about anything Nintendo. If there’s anything you want me to discuss, leave a comment or email me.

Before Wii, there was Revolution. Revolution was unveiled at E3 05 but its mystery controller wasn’t. Tokyo Game Show 05 came and the Controller was revealed. The fans went wild. Wild Game Speculation Began. In April 2006, Revolution became Wii. At E3 06, Nintendo showed us what Wii could do. And on November 19th, 2006, Wii launched. This was the moment of truth. A gaming revolution was unleashed and gamers everywhere desperately tried to get a part of the gaming action. But over the months, things changed. Wii became the #1 best selling console this gaming generation, beating out the PS3 and even the 360 in sales. But something else happened. Many gamers stopped their cry to be a part of the revolution.

Before the revolution, gamers dreamed of being able to play some hardcore games with Wii’s motion controls. But now that the revolution is here, the gamers aren’t satisfied. We got Zelda, Metroid, and other hardcore games, but we also got Wii Play, Super Monkey Ball, Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, Cooking Mama: Cook Off, and countless other mass appeal games. The hardcore gamers are getting disappointed. Is Nintendo betraying the hardcore gamer kind? The answer lies in this week’s Dark Domain…

Nintendo has said right from the start that their goal is to reach out to new gamers as well as the hardcore veteran gamers. And they succeeding at their goal on launch day. The hardcore gamers got their dose of Zelda, Red Steel, and many other hardcore games. But as the months went by, things changed. It got rarer and rarer for a hardcore game to be released on Wii. Nintendo continued to say that they supported all kinds of gamers. But it seems they changed their focus. The casual audience has gotten countless more games than the veteran gamers have lately. Is Nintendo slowly transitioning from a company that provides some of the best, most intuitive games out there to a company that produces okay games that the family will love? There is nothing wrong with games that appeal to a mass audience, nothing at all. But what about the huge portion of their gaming community that is left unsatisfied?

Nintendo has a choice to make. They can do what they said they would and release hardcore games and casual games, or they can change their focus and set it completely on the casual gaming market. The holiday season is coming up and by looking at Nintendo’s Wii line-up, they have made their choice. While they are releasing more mass appeal Wii games, Nintendo has not forgotten the gaming community that it has had for a long time. These past few months have had barely any hardcore games released, aside from one or two like Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Nintendo is about to make up for all the time they missed. This holiday season, hardcore Nintendo gamers will not be disappointed. This holiday season, Nintendo is sending out a whole wave of new Wii games, and this time they’re loaded with hardcore gaming goodness.

In the next few months, Wii is getting what will probably be some of the best games ever. Battalion Wars 2, Super Mario Galaxy, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, Manhunt 2, NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, Ghost Squad, and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles are just a taste of what is coming this holiday season to Wii. Hardcore gamers everywhere will be rocking out on Wireless guitars, Shooting down some baddies, Brawling it out with their favorite characters, and more. But the thing about hardcore games is that they can’t just be normal games, they have to have special features that will satisfy a veteran gamer’s need. What kinds of things? Well, two things are the Wii Zapper and online gaming.

The Wii Zapper is built for FPS games, which don’t usually appeal to the casual market. Games like Ghost Squad and Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles are built to work with the gun attachment. The Wii Zapper also comes with a title called Link’s Crossbow Training, which shows off the star of a huge Nintendo franchise in a way that incorporates the Wii Zapper. Another game that is designed for the Wii Zapper is Medal of Honor: Heroes 2. This game is every hardcore gamer’s dream. Not only is it built for the Wii Zapper, but it has great graphics. And what’s best of all? It has online play. But not just any online play, 32 multiplayer over Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. And I am not joking.

You want to know what makes Wii’s online even better? Today, it was announced that Super Smash Bros. Brawl will have an online multiplayer mode. Getting to fight against others all over the world in a game that has all things Nintendo and more is one of the best moves that Nintendo could have possibly done. Also this holiday season, Mario fans get to take a ride in the galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy. This game looks to have all the fun of Super Mario 64 and more. And that’s not even all of the games coming out this holiday season. The beginning of 2008 also counts, and it’s very possible that Mario Kart Wii and Animal Crossing Wii may come out in the first few months of 08. Those two games may not totally be hardcore games, but they do have a huge following that consists of many hardcore gamers.

Nintendo told us a revolution was coming and when Wii came, we were amazed. It was all true… for a while. The months went by and gamers became disappointed at the lack of games that appeal to the hardcore audience. But this holiday season, Nintendo aims to change that. They’re unleashing gaming goodness at us like crazy and it’s about time. I don’t know about you, but I certainly won’t be able to get every game I want this holiday season. So whether you’re jumping on goombas out in space, running through a combat field while 31 others are shooting each other, or unleashing final smashes on some of the greatest video game characters of all time, remember that Nintendo does not disappoint.

Thanks to wiiboi91 for the banner! If you would like to submit your banner or ideas for a Dark Domain post, please leave a comment or email me. Thanks.

love story

she was what he always dreamed for. he, he was what she always dreamed as well, so life was good; but not everything was perfect, there was a problem: they didn’t spoke a common language. they felt incomplete because they couldn’t say all they wanted to their loved one.
but, love can move mountains they say, and they were the perfect example of it. caring so much for each other, magic came into play and has built an enchanted device that translated their languages.
on a normal story, they would had lived happily ever after, but this is no normal story, so they got divorced some years later. nevertheless, what is relevant here, is how it all started.

leonard and sandra managed different computer networks at standford university, that, not only were apart, but also used different and incompatible technologies. they were unable to communicate with each other and that didn’t pleased them, so they started working on a device that would connect both networks. the result, was a blue box - that nowadays is known as router - and the cisco systems company, which 7 years later was worth $170 million, back in 1990 when they moved away from it.
that’s how it all started, more or less, and i kinda like the idea that i’m gonna work for a company that started from a love story. although unknown to many, cisco is one of biggest giants and is today leading company on internet networking devices. if one thinks that pretty much every single bit of information that travels on the internet (e.g. take this text for instance) crosses several cisco devices, before it arrives at our computers, then it becomes more obvious how present and relevant cisco is in our daily life and why they grew so fast: the internet boom was the cisco boom, in a way.
according to fortune magazine, it’s the 25th best company to work for. well. might be just a number, but that’s pretty much what i’m about to become, a number. with 37k employees, it will be quite a jump from my previous job where we were only 7, me and boss included.

adding to that, the fact that i’m about to cross the atlantic ocean and move to a different continent, then one can imagine how big is the leap, at least for me. for the last 9 months of this year, i’ll be living in boulder, in the american state of colorado. more about it, on my next post - now keep practicing your uncertainty avoidance level.

posted by paulo @ Mar 21st, 2006 - 01:57am

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  1. super awesome!
    many thanx for the email, that was pretty cool!

    wishing you the best of luck — sent you a hi5 msg, too, perhaps you have the time to say sumthin??

    Comment by Teo — 006.3.21 @ 22:33

  2. ; )

    Comment by tc — 006.3.28 @ 16:57

  3. This story is absolutely fantastic!
    I’ve got here when I was surfing Internet.
    I’m a member of your amazing project POSTCROSSING.
    (my login is ulpa). And I only want to congratulate you! And this site is also nice….mysterious…magic(?)

    So take care Paulo!
    And don’t stop doing things you like! :)
    Best wishes from Poland,
    Ula(ulpa on Postcrossing)

    Comment by Ula — 006.3.31 @ 15:42

  4. and only one more thing!
    I also like UNDERWORLD film.And I have weblog but in Polish(some words are in english;p)
    http://blog.tenbit.pl/ula_bno

    Comment by Ula — 006.3.31 @ 15:45

  5. hey paulo! fantastic to see you work for the same company. hard work - good money - many opportunties. if you ever get stuck, pls contact me. it really helps to have friends across the company. my heartfelt advice is to work on that, laddy!
    and if you ever need a new continent… cisco south africa urgently needs more qualified people :) really. that’s why we are here.
    all the best over there and we expect to see a ski champ next year :D

    Comment by nrrdgrrl — 006.4.20 @ 20:42

  6. What a great story and perspective on what brought you here. I live in Denver and visit Boulder several times a month. What an interesting place! I enjoyed your other post about Boulder as well. Found your blog through someone referencing postcrossing on 43places.com =)

    Comment by Melissa Axel — 006.7.23 @ 04:04

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Total Fighting Alliance Conflict on the Coast Poster

Filed under: Total Fighting Alliance — erin @ 01:52:34 pm

TFA


Total Fighting Alliance Press Release

Filed under: Total Fighting Alliance — erin @ 10:14:52 pm

From the Total Fighting Alliance Myspace

“We are just three and a half weeks away from the next event, “War on the Shore,”– Saturday April 28th at the Santa Monica Civic. Our last event at the Civic was said to be the best event in the history of California MMA. Later this week, we will have the highlight reel from February 24th. If you would like to see a little footage of the last fight, go check out our new commercial for the April 28th Event on our myspace page. The commercial will be airing on Spikes Ultimate Fighter April 5th, 12th, 19th, 21st and 26th.
www.myspace.com/totalfighting

A big addition to TFA is an AMI Promotions After Party. Jani and Jared of AMI have signed Tomorrows Bad Seeds and The Darlings to play the VIP after party.

Tickets are selling fast. Purchase your VIP tickets to assure entry to the VIP after party. To purchase tickets go to www.Totalfighting.net

Thanks for the support,
Richard Rasmussen
Director of Operations
TFA
Richard@Totalfighting.net


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