Popularity Contest

Ever wonder how popular your name is now, versus 10, 50, or even 100 years ago? Check out NameVoyager for a nice graphical display of this info.

Disappointingly, my name has declined in popularity now (#137) versus 1900 (#4!). But the name DOES have some connotations with a current world leader, so I don't blame parents (ed. note: I will blame them starting in 2008).

Google Movie Search

Cool new feature from Google. If you prefix your search with "movie:", you get to limit your search to movies. This includes:

• Searching for famous quotes in movies - movie: "shall we play a game"
• Searching for movie scenes - movie: red pill blue pill movie: sharks eat LL Cool J
• Searching for where a movie is playing in your area - movie: Constantine
• Searching for movies playing in your area, by theater - movie: seattle

Friday Curling Action

Last Friday, I joined my team from work to an afternoon of beer, snacks, and curling. "Curling?" you say? No, not a workout. The sport!

In a nutshell, curling is a team game that's all about sliding granite stones across a sheet of ice in an attempt to get the most stones in a certain area. To help matters, teammates use brushes to sweep the ice in front of the stones in an effort to make the stones go farther. Sounds bizarre, but it's quite fun.

After a morning of work, we trekked over to the Granite Curling Club. There, we proceeded to have some food and drink, learned how to curl, and played a few games for the remainder of the day.

What I learned:
- Curling's harder than you think, technique-wise. It takes quite a bit of accuracy to get the stone going with the right amount of force & rotation to land roughly in the right spot 120 feet away.
- Sweeping is harder than you think, physically. Rubbing ice with a broom while you walk briskly, making sure you don't fall, and listening to directions from your teammates, is not trivial.
- In curling, everything has a name. And I do mean everything.

An action shot, courtesy of a co-worker of mine.

"Like a train wreck for your ears"

That's how a friend described this sound clip when he sent it around at work. It's an a cappella rendition of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Turns out the artist, Dokaka, has a claim to fame for mixing himself humming along with famous tunes. He's got a whole page full of these things.

It's funny at first, but then it gets quite annoying. At the end, I couldn't decide which was worse: this or nails on a chalkboard.

But I'll cut him some slack. He looks quite fly in that yellow cap, don't you think?

"Halo - The Movie" article indirectly disses me

According to this article in the Seattle Times, there may be a Halo movie in the works. But what I noticed in the article was this line:

To be sure, there is little else in Microsoft's product library that could similarly inspire Hollywood. "The Adventures of SharePoint Portal Server 2003," anyone? Anyone?

Hey, wait a sec - I worked on that product! I'm sure we could have 90 minutes of entertainment in, er...building intranet portals, crawling documents, finding information that I need...yeah...that's it.

Cartography for the masses

Google has launched a new tool, Google Maps. Nice interaction model and pretty graphics for an online app (drag handles, zoom in and out, "pins" in the map). Interesting to try a general search like "starbucks seattle" and...Oh look! 8 Starbucks in a 10-block radius downtown! :)

Chocolate Chocolate!

I posted a review of Starbucks' new Chantico beverage in the new Marketplace section of the site. Read it for a virtual chocolate buzz and sugar high.