Today's battle brought to you by the fine folks at VideoSift:

whosagingbetter.com

vs.

Just created this simple but fun little site. Give it a look:
Who's Aging Better?

Basically there's a daily battle between two random entities where you are asked to vote for whom you think is doing a better job of aging. Photos are included as are descriptions of each competitor.

Right now the stable of fighters is extremely limited, so there's bound to be some battle repetition. It takes time to add each competitor because it takes time to find a good collection of images through a person's life and do a half decent write-up, but there are tons more fighters to come.

Tell a friend. And please let me know if there is anyone in particular you'd like to see do battle!

I don't know why everyone dislikes its appearance so much. I find it very nice looking. Plus, it's squared corners make it infinitely easier to keep a hold on than iPods and iPhones (which I drop time after time on a daily basis). Some people take issue with the black edge that sticks out (the right edge in the above photo), but it's really necessary because it gives you something to grasp on to. Without it you'd be frustrated by having to hold on to the screen where you'd be activating things accidentally.

The things I love:

• It feels very robust and sturdy. It feels indestructible.
• It comes with a 16GB SD card and has a replaceable battery.
• It has a 5MP camera with dual LED flash. It's very nice that you can instantly share your photos/videos via gmail or other online services.
• It is extremely responsive. It has a very fast processor (relatively speaking). There is little to zero delay when doing most anything with the phone. Most importantly you can switch back and forth between lots of different processes instantly.
• All programs run simultaneously. This means while you're doing something, if you're interrupted (or you interrupt yourself like to send a text message) your other processes continue unimpeded.
• I get a 3G speed Internet connection everywhere. (If you want specifics, there's a map for that.)
• I didn't know this until I got it, but it has a very large, very loud external speaker on the back. This is an Enormous benefit to me because I usually am forced to wear headphones with my iPod Touch while I'm driving because its speaker is very weak. It also makes speakerphone calls wonderful.
• (Free) voice-guided GPS navigation with satellite view and live traffic updates. I think everyone is familiar with this feature by now.
• Very simple universal search allows you to search for anything (websites, map locations, contacts) typed or spoken, and the "spoken word interpreter" is very smart even able to figure out different spellings than words sound (e.g., "in n out" or "pick up stix").
• The keyboard, while a little small, feels good and is well laid out (as long as you type with your fingertips).
• Instant notification if new Gmail arrives.
• Centralized listing of all notifications needing my attention.
• You can easily manage the content on your phone without the need for proprietary software like iTunes.

The things I'm confused by (because Google should know better or might work in some way that I can't figure out):

• Nevermind this point - see comment below. While the phone is on silent or vibrate mode, you are not given *any* kind of notification that you have received a new text or gmail. What's the deal with that, Google? At the very least the screen should activate so you have the visual notification, but it should definitely vibrate if you have the phone in vibrate mode. Instead it just sits there dark and silent forcing you to manually check it every few minutes to see if there are any new notifications. (I did discover you can set the notification volume separately from the phone volume, but the notification has to be audible.)
• Some things are slightly buggy. When setting the notification volume lower than the general phone volume, all volume became almost mute and would not increase until I restarted the phone.
• There doesn't seem to be any way to uninstall pre-installed apps I don't want, like the "Amazon MP3" app. Perhaps there's some way to do it, but I haven't been able to find it.
• There's no way to set the ringtone individually for different types of notifications (e.g., new gmail, new text, etc.) There's just one ringtone selection to rule them all.
• Though it's a snap to upload tons of songs via a USB cable and your computer and use any of them as your phone ringtone, there's no apparent way to use them as the ringtone for notifications.

Anyhow, just thought I'd share my opinions and also hope that maybe someone will inform me how to do some of the things that appear to be impossible. All in all, it is by far the very best phone I've ever owned (my last phone was an LG Voyager, ugh). It's really like having a fully-functional portable Internet-connected computer and I love it.

[edit]
I have tried this and can verify it works: a commenter on Motorola's site says the following about adding your own custom notification ringtones:

"you can make Android "see" these files by placing them on your SD card in specific folders. The folders by tone type are as follows:

Notifications: media/audio/notifications
Ringtones: media/audio/ringtones
Alarms: media/audio/alarms

I have found that Android appears to be rather picky about filenames. I got mine to be visible by removing spaces in the filename when I placed them on the SD Card."

I submitted this to the Tee Virus workshop and thought I'd share it here. It's a math-centric design and hopefully humorous to one or two of you Sifters.



Here's a follow-up inspired by demon_ix's comment below:

If you haven't or don't on a regular basis, please help us by at leaving your comments and casting your votes in the Tee Virus Workshop. There are a few designers there who often get very little to zero feedback on their creations and it'd be enormously appreciated if you'd just lend us 2 minutes of your day. Thanks for your help Sifters!

(And if you were a Sift member before TeeVirus launched, you already have an account there. Just login with your usual username/password.)

Just had to share this. I think it might be my funniest t-shirt design ever (though I could be wrong and they may all equally be crap):

... more inside ...

And thanks to some suggestive members who thought my original idea was worth a shot, here's the follow up titled "We're Number Two!":

... more inside ...

(If you like it, please click on over to Tee Virus and vote for it. If you don't like it, please stay away.)

I just got an email from Yahoo saying Geocities is shutting down. I took a look at what I have on there and one of the things I found was the first (and only) DirectX game I have ever written from scratch. I created it a few years ago mainly as a learning experience as I also built a nice code library to make my (non-existent) future games even simpler to create.

If you're up to it, download it and give it a go. It's a rather simple game, but does offer a little bit of fun. Please let me know what you think! Oh, and the objective is to match as many pairs as possible as quickly as possible. The more pairs you get in the shortest amount of time, the more points you get. It gets progressively harder as the timer goes faster and faster. Bonus points to anyone who can correctly identify origin of the game music.



Get it here: http://www.geocities.com/lucky760/blocker

Thanks!

Check out http://billietweets.com. It plays the Billie Jean music video from YouTube on the left and on the right it's *sort of* closed captioned. It displays each word from the song as it's sung but it displays each word from a different new Tweet just posted.

You can do a lot of neat stuff with Twitter.

Last week the power apparently went off in my home while I was out because my clocks were all flashing the wrong time. No biggie. That kind of thing happens all the time, and the only consequence is that you have to reset all your clocks.

The next day I realized my PC wouldn't boot. After a whole lot of fiddling and faddling, I decided my motherboard must have gotten fried from a power surge even though it was under the watchful eye of a surge protector.

Since it's a few years old now, I went ahead and decided to upgrade to a new box, so I did a bit of research and bought all the equipment that was cheap, but should also keep me running at good speeds for years to come. This is the story of that computer. I'll probably tell it in a piecemeal fashion, starting with a simple list of all the pieces of my puzzle.

I'm keeping my old hard drives, optical drives, and floppy drive (just carrying it along because it's there), but everything else will be new equipment. I considered keeping the same case, but it was a Dell and custom built for just the hardware that was already in it.

So here's a rundown of all the new stuff:

... more inside ...

I've been listening to my local FM Talk station for many years... probably about 10 of them. After my decade of listenership, tomorrow will be the last day for all the staff of the entire station.

The shows I've grown to know and love listening to five days a week are going bye bye in order to flip the station's format (and all their FM Talk affiliates) to playing Top 40 music and compete with KIIS FM, which is Ryan Seacrest's flagship station for his morning show. They figured it'd be more profitable to just play music and cut into the Top 40 market than sustaining the huge paychecks for all their talk talent. C'est la vie.

Goodbye 97.1 KLSX. It was fun.

Just thought I'd announce a pretty interesting project that has just gone live.

Neatorama.com has a brand new, powerful feature called the Upcoming Queue. Neatorama does now and has always run on the WordPress blogging platform. Until now, only a handful of trusted authors/editors have been able to add neat blog posts to the Neatorama front page.

But in recent months, Alex, the site's creator and proprietor, had an itch to allow all of the site's members contribute their own blog posts to the site. So he approached Sift Partners about scratching that itch with Varo CMS, the software platform that powers VideoSift.

Over the course of a couple of months, a special version of Varo CMS has been painstakingly customized to work hand-in-hand with the existing WordPress blog. After all our efforts, the Upcoming Queue is now live for everyone to enjoy.

It will be of particular interest to any bloggers who want to garner a little attention for themselves because you are allowed to add posts that link back to your own blog. So if you have any neat blog posts you'd like to share at Neatorama, or if you just want to check out Varo CMS powering the new system, head on over to http://www.neatorama.com/upcoming and give it the old once over.

If you do give it a looksee, please let us know what you think.

[edit]
This just in: I just saw the announcement post and apparently the top submitter of February will win a free iPod Touch. Nice.

I was just thinking about all of our very long time members and that got me wondering... Is VideoSift part of your daily routine? I mean there are lots of sites out there that people check out from time to time and others you only go to when you're looking for something specific.

What is VideoSift to you? Is it your daily "I need to check out all the new videos" fix? How often do you visit on average? And when you do visit, how long do you stay?

Finally, how long have you been a member? More importantly how long do you foresee yourself continuing to be a member? There are a few oldies who, for various reasons, have up and quit in the past, but I can't imagine that I would ever have any reason to ever stop visiting VideoSift.

For me it's not just a fad or a phase, but a part of life. Even if I wasn't part of the administration, I imagine I'd always visit on a daily basis at the very least to watch great videos and at the most to partake in some random commentary. (No matter how busy I am with work and other things, I always have the itch to stop everything and take time out just so I can see what I've missed in the top 15.)

On the subject of statistics... Looking at Dag's "Visualizing 2000 Visitors an Hour" blog post I thought it would be interesting to throw together some graphs for various stats for the entire year of 2008. They are presented below in separate graphs keeping categories with similar values together for scale.

Included are: videos published, video down votes, video up votes, comments posted, comment up votes, comment down votes, comment spam votes, new users, banned users, Sift Talks posts, and blogs posted.

... more inside ...

If anyone is interested (and a legal adult) Porn Bumper could use a bit of help with some opinions and beta testing. Your insight and instincts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[edit]
To clarify, this project is not affiliated in any way with Sift Partners Inc., VideoSift, or The Great Dagicus. This is an independent project that happens to be affiliated with me, myself, and I alone, so the only mention you'll see of it on VideoSift is here in my personal blog.

Just giving Desktop Tower Defense another shot, this time trying in hard mode to capture a personal best. I came up a little short only achieving my 3rd best because I forgot to send in the next waves of creeps a couple times and let the flying bosses slip through my noose.

Doggone it.

Just ordered up some large prints of some pseudo oil painting versions of a few photos we snapped at the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Vancouver, BC, Canada from our trip back in September. They're pretty pretty so I thought I'd share. What do you think?

(Click through to see large versions of the images. They will open in a new window.)

... more inside ...

... more inside ...I've knocked Prince Zifnab back down below my high scores where he belongs. ... more inside ...

Just found this via Neatorama and had to share it. I love really old photos illustrating life that was, especially when it's of an interesting culture. This series of old postcards is definitely worth checking out if you're at all into history or geishas.

I haven't heard or read anything about it, but I just performed a google search and I was shocked to see three new little icons next to each search result.

One of them says "promote" which I guess adds to its credibility, another says "remove" which I guess flags a page as being no good, and the third says "comment" and when clicked pops open a text entry box for you to add a comment.

Anyone know anything about this business?

Whoa...

It took me a while but I watched all episodes of the excellent anime Death Note.

I just watched the live action part 1 DVD the other night and it was very well done. The next two days, Oct 15 and 16, 2008, there will be a special engagement of Death Note 2 (live action) in theaters at 7:30pm. I'll be watching it Thursday and I'm quite excited. Part 1 was quite a bit different than the anime and added a lot of intensity to an already very intense story.



Death Note is based on a book series and is the story of a boy named Light who finds a Death Note dropped into the world by a God of Death named Ryuk (because he was bored). Anyone whose name is written in the Death Note dies. Light goes on a rampage determined to cleanse the world of all evildoers. He's extremely intelligent, but there is also a genius investigator only known as L working to stop the unknown killer (known as Kira) who is murdering criminals on a worldwide scale. Light and L play a real world game of chess attempting with all their intellect and psychopathic people manipulation skills to deal the final check mate blow to the other.

If you have the time or are into anime I recommend the full series. Otherwise you should definitely check out the live action DVDs.

Finally got it after a couple months of waiting. So without further ado...



Voila!