Welcome to another edition of TGIF. I hope that you have all had a good, happy, productive week and that the weekend is like the cherry on the cake. Here the weather is getting warmer as we move into spring, and many of you will be moving towards autumn. Regardless, make sure you have a wonderful time seeing friends, family and getting out and about. Fresh air is underrated I tell you, so get as much of it as possible. Think "mmmmmm fresh air. Goodbye computer".
Without further ado...
Stuff I really liked this week:
All sorts linguistic experiment - collects collective nouns from Twitter, I liked "a skittle of rainbows", "an orchid of macbooks" & "an inanity of comments".
MIT Personas project - type in a name and see what it evokes on the web, very pretty too. It's hard to explain so give it a spin (rather addictive).
Old Bell Labs photos - Lawrence Harley "Larry" Luckham worked at Bell labs in the late 60's and took his camera to work one day. He posted the pics on his site and they are awesome.
X-ray paintings - Nick Veasey made some spooky weird and wonderful art to look at, I love the bus.
ClubCreate - drag the blocks around and press the buttons to make some music.
Facts:
Larry Landweber (University of Wisconsin) created THEORYNET in 1977 providing email between over 100 researchers.
Fred Williams and Tom Kilburn developed the first Random Access Memory (RAM) "Williams tube" in 1947.
The ASCII alphabet (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) was introduced in 1963 and Bob Bemer was the chief designer.
The 1st instance of online transaction processing began in 1964 with IBMs SABRE reservation system set up for American Airlines.
The term "Internet" was first used by Vint Cerf and bob Kahn in a conference paper in 1974, the year the floppy disk appeared (for perspective)
Quotes:
All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you cant get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer. " IBM Manual, 1925
If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done. " Ludwig Wittgenstein
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. " Bill Gates
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. Thats where we come in; were computer professionals. We cause accidents. " Nathaniel Borenstein
XML is not a language in the sense of a programming language any more than sketches on a napkin are a language. " Charles Simonyi
Tune of the week:
Painting by Chagall - the Weepies (beautiful, chilled tune)
Cool video footage of the week:
Don't even ask why I chose this, I don't know. It just made me smile 🙂