Aside from selling my soul in little pieces, have I mentioned lately that I love, love, love running VideoSift?

It's a satisfying feeling to read all the comments and see the connections and friendships that are here on the Sift. I'm not a naturally outgoing person- (kind of a hermit actually) but I value the friends I've made here and feel like I could probably sleep on many of your couches. (always a possibility)

I guess what I'm saying is that this is my dream job -- or maybe more of a dream pastime at the moment with job-like hours (ask Persephone) - but I wouldn't/couldn't give it up.

Beyond the personal connections- I'm hooked on Google Analytics and watching where in the world people are coming from for the first time to reach us. It gives me a sense of how big the Web really is. Today for example, we got linked in from what looks like a fairly tame link-dump site in India which will send us about 15,000 visitors by the end of the day. We also get regularly linked from this French gaming site that I wish I could read. Yesterday we got linked from some BBC radio show. Though I know it's self-serving (narcissistic?) to dwell on this stuff - it's such a blast to follow the web of links that leads back to our community. It's a big Sift world.

I don't usually gush like this, but there you are - big group hug. It is Friday, but I'm not drunk - I promise.

VideoSift received Over 100K visits from Stumblers over the past month. Many of them to this post.

And from our stats it appears that Stumblers are the types to hang around and become members as well.

I have used StumbleUpon sparingly. I have the toolbar installed but to be honest I have to be pretty bored to want to hit a completely random site on a press of the button. But when I do use it I find that the pages it brings me to do pique my interest.

We used to have a row of those little "submit to" icons for Delicious, Digg etc - but they just took up room and StumbleUpon is now the only social site icon we use. ;-)

There's nothing like a new project. Lucky and I have decided on the next new thing to be built on the fabulous VaroCMS.

I wish I could share more. When it's even close to Beta, of course we'll want to get the Sifter stamp of approval before it's released to everyone else.. Please excuse my excitement but we think it could be a pretty big deal. And look, an iPhone-esque line is already forming!

Here it is. A better quality embeddable video would do well here methinks.

From the same site that gave us those amazing Mars pictures. Here are some doozies of Jupiter and its moons.

Here's a very interesting article on cross genre covers - (actually one of my fav. kinds of music) and the last link in the article is to a VideoSift post. Goulet baby!

Following on Lucky's post - I'm giving Twitter another try. I used to think that micro-posts like "I'm riding the train home from work" were kind of pointless- but I've since been following a few Twitter feeds, and it is kind of fascinating to get some insight into people's every day happenings. I've posted the applet in my blog sidebar ---->

Link to me here.

I'm an atheist and my partner (Persephone) is a very spiritual type person. We still say grace at dinner time. It's different from a normal prayer because we focus on saying "thanks" to the food that we have. We've done some reading as parents and decided that being thankful for what you have keeps you from becoming indulgent and unhappy.

So what we do is, we hold hands around our oval table and each night a different person (moving clockwise) says thanks to all the food on the table - sometimes the condiments too if we're short on main dishes.

Lately we've decided to modify this a bit to say more thank yous based on the complexity of the life we are eating. If it's a vegetable we say it once:

"Thank you broccoli"

If it's fish we say it twice:

"Thank you salmon, thank you salmon"

If it's a bird we say it thrice:

"thank you chicken, thank you chicken, thank you chicken"

If it's a mammal we say it four times:

"thank you cow, thank you cow, thank you cow, thank you cow"

So far we haven't eaten any amphibians - but if we do, I'm not sure where it would fit in. Maybe two and a half times?

"Thank you frog, thank you frog, thank y ..."

So, yeah dinner time around the Dag table is a bit strange, but it works for us. Does anyone else have any interesting meal-time rituals?

Found one via reddit, but the rest are pretty funny too.

My first day back at work from our 3 week holiday and I'm feeling - not too bad actually.

Kona was great, but it's been suffering from vog (volcanic fog) for the last few months. The whole place is a bit hazy and rich in sulphur dioxide (yum). It was still beautiful and a great time.

Everywhere we stayed had wireless access - so I never really took a break from the Sift. [Cue Persephone rolling her eyes]

Every time I go back to the US I feel a little more like a stranger in my home country. This time it was the little things that left an impression. There's so much water in American toilet bowls! It lets you see your leavings in gory 3D detail as it swishes down.

Also, Cadillac Escalades ... people who buy those - what are they thinking? Isn't a "luxury off-road vehicle" kind of a contradiction? If I paid 50K for an SUV I would not stray an inch off the pavement.

major purchases included clothes and a 7 piece set of Kirkland stainless steel cookware from Costco. I love that place.

Just had to share this one. Absolutely amazing.

I’m sitting on the train winding my way to the Brisbane airport. We’re off for 3 Weeks to Honolulu and Kona. It’s a big family reunion, my US parents haven’t seen my Australian kids in a couple of years.

So, my presence on the Sift will be sporadic. Lucky’s in charge – I want to hear a good report when I get home – no wild parties.

This short little post hits me in my "aha!" nerve. I think that culture is something that has evolved in the right way around here. I know what he means about the "paint" of artificial culture created in many start-up type sites.

This is in relation to the latest Zero Punctuation review.

I was going to go in and get some video- ask them if their recent Internet celebrity has added to the bottom line. But today is ANZAC day and therefore the whole Robina Town Centre was closed. (Except for the Cinema - saw Forgetting Sarah Marshal)

Well, we don't really know why- but at least we've identified that you are all not crazy or lieing (my first assumption- naturally)

Here's a graph that Lucky put together. It represents the load on our two web servers. Something is making them spike almost hourly. We thought it might have been some scheduled processes- but that doesn't seem to be the case. We're still investigating and trying to find the problem- but the first step is admitting we have a problem. We have a problem.

Swampgirl and I had brief discussion on owning guns- spawned from this blog post.

SG asked me if I thought all gun owners were nutso. I most definitely do not. I created this Venn diagram to show where I think the problem lies:



I understand the arguments for gun ownership, "if guns are criminalised, only criminals will have guns" - "a well armed militia, to take up arms against tyrannical government" etc, etc.

The problem is, that these statements are emotive- based on gut feeling and not backed by any stats or logic.

Do you think that anarchic countries in Africa are well served by a "citizen militia?" and if a criminal comes into your home with a gun to rob you- do your chances of survival go up if you have a gun in the house?

In the VA school massacre, do people honestly think that if students were packing heat- that it would have ended better? Life is not a cop show.

I like Colbert but I don't like the way he shills for Doritos. I know it's all tongue-in-cheek nudge-nudge kind of stuff, but Doritos are trying to buy some street-cred for their shit product through Colbert's connectedness with the youth of America. It's yucky.

Here's the first clip where Colbert creates this wacky marketing ploy to connect his recent Peabody award to Doritos:



Interestingly, his guest on this same Friday was the author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (something close to my heart)

His guest explained that what would really prove the premise of his book, is if people went out and did something unexpected and creative with those Peabody labels that were supposed to placed on the Doritos bags:



I decided to take Colbert up on the challenge. I've re-engineered the labels to have a more appropriate message for affixing to to the Doritos bags:

Original:



Modified


You can download the Word document of modified stickers for your label printer here.

I can feel the Hillary bias coming from the editorials on the New York Times. I guess it's natural, Hillary is the senator from New York- and then there's that whole Chicago/NYC rivalry thing.

I thought however, that this front-page article trying to make sweeping comparisons between two black politicians was a bit beneath them.

Oh no, a black politician who ran on hope & change is struggling in his first term- vote for Hillary, or this fate awaits the country.

The Dag family watching season 2, episode 2 of Lost in Space. (they love this show)

Hulu has gotten a fair bit of sneering press. The bastard child of multiple networks, it's seen as an attempt to do something to stop the *ahem* torrent of TV content being shared informally.

I'm here to report that- you know - they might be on to something. I love having a library of shows at my disposal that I can watch full-screened from the Web instantly without waiting for a torrent- or having to worry if it's got enough seeds or if the tracker has gone kaput.

It actually just works. The video, though not HD or DVD quality is about what you would get with a standard Divx or Xvid compressed download. We experienced no buffering and smooth playback.

Yes, there are commercials - but at the moment there is only one per regularly scheduled commercial break. I'm sure though- if the service takes off this will increase.

The other downside is that Hulu is only available to residents of the United States. So how am I able to watch it from sunny Australia you ask? There's a really easy workaround tool for Mac and Windows called HotSpot Shield



Hotspot Shield gives you a VPN IP address that makes you look (to Hulu's servers) like you are inside the US. It really works well. It's free, and it does spawn a little banner at the top of the browser- but you can close it.

This doesn't mean I will stop downloading via other methods- they don't have all networks on board- nothing from Comedy Central, notably. But it's a good start- and a good place to go when you're not sure what you want to watch.