Category: quirky

How much would you pay to own the same sneakers that Barack Obama owns?

Rare sneakers

There are only two pairs of these shoes in existence. One pair is owned by Obama.  The other pair can be owned by you, if you can afford them. As this article (Barack Obama’s Nike Hyperdunk PE Sneakers | Uncrate) explains, these Hyperdunk sneakers…

… were designed in 2009 for Obama building off of the Hyperdunk created for Team USA at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing for Nike’s “United We Rise” collection. This customized pair adds the official Presidential Seal on the tongue tag, the number ’44’ by the toe, and insoles with bald eagles, and the date ‘1776’. The size 12.5 hi-tops go up for sale via Sotheby’s Buy Now platform on February 12th.

That’s right: Sotheby’s. Starting bid? $25,000.

 

Visio – not just for IT diagrams

As an IT architect, I use Microsoft Visio for some of the diagrams I do. (I do use IBM’s Rational products as well.) Little did I imagine you could use it for non-technical things the way David Salaguinto does to make funny comics like this one:

For more on this, see Office Hours: Drawing a daily comic strip with Visio – Help and How-to – Microsoft Office Online

Autogenerated blog? And for what purpose? Ad revenue?

I noticed this blog was driving traffic to my blog, Just Being Rich. When I read the entries, it appears like they are automatically generated (based on the syntax is wrong). It appears that someone is autogenerating a blog on various topics, likely for the purpose of generating Google AdSense revenue.

Interesting idea. It’s not the type of blog I would read, but I could see this becoming part of a trend.

I hear the Mermaids / IBM 1401 singing.

What is this?

YouTube – IBM 1401, a User’s Manual Part I – IBM 1401 Processing Unit

(Reply) The IBM 1401 was an mainframe computer back in the 60’s. It was this huge beast of a machine that had a small flaw in which it leaked electromagnetic radiation in a frequency that AM radios could pick up. It didn’t take long for the geeks of the day to figure out how to make music out of it! That wierd instrument you hear at the start that sounds kinda like a claironet but isn’t… that the 1401!

Small side note: I have a mint condition hard cover manual on how to program the IBM 1401.

Random fun with Microsoft Word and Russian Literature

I was sending someone an email tonight, and I was discussing one of my favourite books, The Brothers Karamazov. I noticed that Microsoft Word underlined “Karamozov”. Oh oh, I thought, better fix that.

Now if you type in “Karamozov” instead of “Karamazov” in ScribeFire, and then right click on it, it will tell you to replace it with “Karamazov”. But if you do this in Microsoft Word, you get “Kalamazoo”.

Now the first thought I had was: what, Word has been around since at least the early Dostoevsky novels, and it certainly ain’t small, so you think it would be smart enough to at least know leaders of major world literature? My Cyrillic is non-existent, but I am willing to bet money that the Cyrillic spelling of Karamazov NEVER translates into Kalamazoo.

My second thought was: maybe it’s me. So I right clicked on “Karamozov” and “Karamazov” and changed the language to “Russian” and the spell check error went away! Hmmm, I thought, Word IS smart! You just have to tell it the word is Russian! And it is smart enough to know that there are two ways to spell Karamazov!

But then I thought: I wonder if that is true. So I quickly typed in the another “Russian” word:

“Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” and did the same test, and lo and behold, “Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww” is also the name of someone is Russia! (Perhaps this was a minor character the Dostoevsky later dropped to get the book under a 1000 pages.)

So, if you are a developer, and you are providing multilanguage support for your product, and you are asked to specify what standard you will be supporting, I recommend you say: the same one used by Microsoft Word! 🙂

 

The history of getting heroin, cocaine and opium from the corner store

The Addiction Research Unit from the University of Buffalo has a fascinating page on how

The prohibition of psychoactive substances has evolved gradually in the United States and in Europe. The opium-containing preparation laudanum had been widely available since the 18th century. Morphine, cocaine, and even heroin were seen as miracle cures when they were first discovered. During the mid to late 19th century, many manufacturers proudly proclaimed that their products contained cocaine or opium. A few, like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup for infants which contained morphine, were more guarded in divulging their principal ingredients. By the beginning of the 20th century, problems with habitual use of cocaine and opiates was becoming increasingly apparent. This led to the removal of these substances from some products (e.g., Coca Cola) and to the introduction of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) in the United States which required the listing of ingredients on product labels. Nonetheless, standard narcotic remedies like paregoric remained readily available into the early 20th century, and Benzedrine inhalers were marketed without prescription until the early 1950s. Codeine wasn’t removed from most over-the-counter cough suppressants until the early 1980s.

Before Prohibition: Images from the preprohibition era

Thanks to Jean-Francois for this one!

The world’s ugliest cars


Some of them don’t seem so bad now, while others are STILL ugly. Actually, the comments make you realize that the cars weren’t just ugly, but dangerous and deficient. Perhaps the article should be titled: The World’s Worst Cars.

It’s a fun read, and if you had one of these cars, you might cringe a little. 🙂

See The World’s Ugliest Cars over at BusinessWeek.com

Wonders of the world: a triple sunrise

The site oddee has a great collection of oddities and wonders. I’ll post more later. This one is of an….

event that occurs twice a year. What we see here is a set of ice halos, recorded on a cold winter morning near Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA. Produced by sunlight shining through common atmospheric ice crystals with hexagonal cross-sections, such halos can actually be seen more often than rainbows. The remarkable sunrise picture captures a beautiful assortment of the types most frequently seen, including a sun pillar (center) just above the rising Sun surrounded by a 22 degree halo arc. Completing a triple sunrise illusion, sundogs appear at the far left and far right edges of the 22 degree arc. An upper tangent arc is also just visible at the very top of the view.

Go see the rest at 10 Most Amazing Illusions

On the need for Post Mortem P.R. flacks

If this Telegraph obituary is any indication, in the future, rich people should put aside some money in their will to deal with scathing obits such as this one! I have a quote here, but you really have to read the whole obituary! I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that after the funeral, the author went and stole the flowers from the grave site!

Count Gottfried von Bismarck | Obituaries | News | Telegraph

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.