NoahW, of my last company Instructables.com, decided that it made sense to write an instructable on breaking wooden boards with no training. Here’s me giving my try:

Yes, it was fun. However, I was lying about the profit.

UPDATE: The full instructable that this video comes from is called “No-Experience-Necessary Board Breaking”. Below is the video from Step 4. Highlights include Sarah’s amazing face of joy upon board breakage and also Christy breaking a board while nursing her baby!

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

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Here’s what I’m thankful for: ridiculous foodie friends. This is what’s on the menu for today:

Thanksgiving at Acadia

Menu:

Appetizers 4pm

• Mulled Apple Cider
• Acadians (cocktails)
• Brie/Walnut/Honey Appetizer
• Soup – fresh pea
• Soup – hearty and brothy with smoked ham, heirloom beans and cabbage
• Deviled Eggs
• Cookies – mollasses and chocolate chip
• Rum Cupcakes

Dinner 5pm

• Turkey
• Gravy
• Corn Bread with Honey Butter
• Mashed Potatoes
• Green Beans
• Salad – goat cheese, pickled beets, orange, and sunflower seed
• Yams
• Stuffing – w/Hot Sausage, Granny Smiths, Cranberries
• Mustard Cranberry Sauce
• Iowa Corn Casserole
• Baked Potato Awesomeness

Dessert 7pm

• Pie
• Popovers
• Ginger Apple Upside-Down Cake
• Yummy Dessert (Wanda)
• Fernet Branca w/ginger

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

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A few months ago, I helped my friend Erik Walker get his company’s portfolio site up and running: Binzen&Walker Photography. Binzen&Walker create beautiful panoramic photographs that, in contrast to mechanized techniques (e.g. GigaPan) are hand-shot and hand-stitched for artistic effect.

It’s a basic and relatively clean WordPress site, based on an existing theme. Aside from a bunch of CSS changes, my contribution was mashing up a couple WordPress plugins to create a nice interface for exploring examples of their panoramic photographs. Showcasing such huge images online is difficult because of very limited resolution of computer displays. In real life, a print of one of Binzen&Walker’s prints could easily cover twelve feet of a gallery wall. Online, a zooming and panning interface was needed.

To get this working, I did a simple combination of two existing plugins: Flexible Lightbox and YD-Zoomify. I’m calling it Flexible Zoomify. You can see a screenshot below or click on the images in this portfolio gallery to try it out.

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

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To celebrate our 1,000,000th registered user, last month, Instructables.com celebrated by getting lessons from Trapeze Arts. We did some basic trapeze and messed around with the roomful of circus gear they had on hand. Here are a couple vids:

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

Shared Homage to Radiolab. Here’s another beautiful visualization from Flight404. He’s driving a gorgeous animation using sound inputs, in this case a highly-appropriate RadioLab segment on how sound is "kind of like touch… at a distance." Interesting to listen to, beautiful to see.

The allure of microfiction is that I can write quickly and imagine that I’ve written well. Here’s a little piece that I may submit to a competition, “Stories for the end of the decade.”. I wrote it in twenty minutes, and most of that was spent getting it down to exactly 100 words, so I imagine they’re going to be swamped with entries.

Tulum

Your hand runs along ancient stone. You contemplate this forgotten polity, once ascendant. These walls were defended with the blood of countless people.

You. What brought you here? A feed sparked your interest, maybe. You let your browser book a flight.

You ponder the gulf that separates you from your brothers, the ones who gasped, dying on this wall. You try to divine their minds in the hieroglyphic curl of pelican wingtips, see their gods in the gathering clouds.

You think of those who will come after you. Not long, you imagine. You hope they will see you more clearly.

Every week, this little bot pulls my tweets, shared links, posted photos, and other bits and bobs into a single post for your perusal. Enjoy!

	Shared Introducing the YUI 3 Gallery. This is kind of cool. YUI3 is using GitHub patches to select open-source modules that will be automatically served by its content delivery network.
	Shared The Dancing Weatherman. This man has achieved mastery over his body. I’m serious: it must have taken a lot of practice to look so consistently awkward.
	Shared Upgrade your career. This is an incredibly value they’re building. Like LinkedIn’s public recommendations, having a log of all your Stack Overflow activity and achievements enriches what would otherwise simply be a resume. For developers, however, this beats the pants off LinkedIn. And, on the other end, having this level of investment in Stack Overflow will only continue to drive top-notch answers and questions, creating highly useful information for the web. Talk about a reputation system!
	Shared Introducing Closure Tools. Out of nowhere, Google releases a set of Javascript tools to join the ranks of YUI, jQuery, and Prototype. I’m browsing the docs, now, and seriously impressed. Bonus: great logo.
	Shared Building With Whole Trees – NYTimes.com. Beautiful architecture based on whole trees and curving, branched supports. "According to research by the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, run by the USDA, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree." Living trees would be next-level.
	Shared The Incompetence of American Airlines. Sad, and a cautionary tale to keep in mind throughout my own career.
	Shared 2 photos.
	Shared indosole.com. Indonesian-made sandals with soles built from salvaged moto tires.
	Liked Pigeon: Impossible.
	Shared Is Brent James the savior of American health care?. An opinion on automated decision support in medicine. This is a huge way for us to save on health care and get better health outcomes. Plenty of other countries use it.
	Shared Inappropriate.
	Shared YouTube – Class Day Lecture 2009: The Uniqueness of Humans. Where are humans unique in the animal kingdom, and where are we not? Here’s an entertaining overview, with fascinating anecdotes and experiments that illustrate those unique aspects.