You've probably seen one or both of these videos, but watch each of them all the way through anyway. Right now. Go. I can wait.

Okay, so what do these two videos have in common?

Let's get the really obvious out of the way: they both involve dancing. But instead I'd like to focus on the type of dancing. Neither one falls into the traditional "wow, that's good dancing" category. In fact, when you really watch them, both dances are actually kinda bad.

But they don't seem that way when you watch it. In fact, there are few people I know who can watch either one and say "I don't wanna do that one day". They make it look fun, because they are having fun. They're just off dancing, doing their thing, ignoring how it looks to the rest of us. And because of that attitude, it ends up looking good.

They're not dancing for the rest of us, they're dancing for themselves.

Just your random thought for the day.

Brilliant comic brought to you by XKCD.

Thanks to imajes for the pointer to eBoy where you can buy a copy of this poster. The more I stare at it, the more awesome detail I keep finding.

What cool stuff do you see in the poster that you think other people might miss at first glance? It's like a "where's waldo" but better!

Can you spot...

• The bluetooth symbol
• laughing squid
• a reference to Google's search algorithm
• someone with a wireless-symbol t-shirt
• a puppy
• astronauts
• flickr
• last.fm
• boingboing
• wordpress
• evidence of what city this is in
• google talk
• the "foo" bar
• 43 folders
• del.icio.us

...and there's oh so much more!!

From: [Person]
To: [Catspaw]
[Person] has requested to add you as a friend. Before we can do that, you must confirm that you are in fact friends with [Person].

[Person] says, "Are you the legendary catspaw?"

To confirm this request, copy and paste this link into your browser:
http://utoronto.facebook.com/confirminvite.php

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

---

From: [Catspaw]
To: [Person]
Heh, that's me.

I don't have Facebook though, sorry. Got a linkedin account?

---

From: [Person]
To: [Catspaw]
no i don't but that's okay. i have msn? haha Anyways, It's really cool to meet you though so that's an honor in itself ever since pol108 i've been reading about your exploits at the citizen lab. You Nart and Graeme are my heroes lol

cheers!

This email thread was followed by another e-mail from someone else entirely:

Hi [Catspaw]. I'm a first year CS student at UofT and I've heard all of the legends about you! My friend Jim doesn't believe your real so I decided to email your old university account to see if maybe it still works. Could you reply so I could show him that your real?

Thanks!

Alright, either someone's going around campus, unpaid, and performing the role of being my minstrel, or there's a secret society that goes around handing out pamphlets about the story of my life. These are the only two explanations that I can think of.

However, it makes me think that at some point in my life I desperately want to write a 50% fictional story of my life! :) Half of it would have to be fictional, of course, to make it believable. Otherwise no one would believe it.

Recently I've been gently nudging members of the dragon army who are still back in Toronto to move to SF when they graduate and need to look for jobs.

It's 80% selfish, and 20% because I really do think that they would enjoy the lifestyle here. The same personality that makes them members of the dragon army in the first place are the characteristics that would make them love this area; like being techy but not socially stupid. (Except Edeel.) There's a bakadrillion awesome jobs and tons of awesome companies here. Seriously. Especially for you guys.

Though part of me enjoys the thought of all of us heading in different directions so that no matter where you go, you stumble upon one of us, another part of me knows that we work better in large concentrations.

So get off your lazy asses and start looking in this direction.

There. Now I've contributed to my share of the brain drain.

I've recently been having tons of fun going through Jonathan Coulton's collections. I first saw him live when he was touring with John Hodgeman.

Not only do his songs highly amuse me, but I'm just so impressed that he licenses them under Creative Commons. It makes him all the more awesome. About Creative Commons, he says in his FAQ:

Q: Gah! Creative Commons, DRM, blah blah blah. I will give Jonathan Coulton $100 if he will keep his mouth shut for five minutes.

A: Everyone in the world should read Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture. I saw him speak about CC at PopTech 2003 and I was so excited by it that I nearly wet my pants.

He sings about important themes like a self-loathing giant squid appalled at his own capacity for destruction (I Crush Everything), a mad scientist who dreams of destroying the world and presses a gift of a half-monkey, half-pony monster on his reluctant bride (Skullcrusher Mountain).

Start by listening to Code Monkey and work your way from there. Then donate money! Cuz he rules. I've bought half a dozen of the songs already.

My life is weirder than your life.

If you've been following my blog for longer than, oh, thirty seconds, you probably know this already. Here's more proof.

Since I'm leaving to head back to Canada in a week, I decided to get everything in order. I hadn't been able to find my passport during my quick scan of my place earlier, but at some point this week had remembered that I'd put it in a particular spot. Yay.

So today I grab my passport from my box, and for no good reason, decide to flip through the pages.

It doesn't take me very long (because I'm clever like that) to discover that this isn't my passport. "That's strange, I thought that I was in the UK, not China, during that period of time."

Oh, and also the picture of the 30-year-old guy on the first page also tipped me off. "That's strange, I don't recall looking like that..."

Soooooooo...the passport that I have? It isn't mine.

This is forcing me to ask a couple of questions:

• Who the heck is this guy?
• Where the heck is my passport?
• Why do I have this guy's passport?
• Am I a sleeper agent who has periods of amnesia during which I fly to other countries and embark on secret missions?
• Since this explains so much about my life, why didn't this possibility occur to me earlier?

So, uh, yeah. My life. Weirder than your life.

Joi invited me to watch the ceremony this evening where Lawrence Lessig handed the torch of the head of Creative Commons to him.

The party simulateously took place in real life and in Second Life. What was more, you could watch one of the events from the other!

Here we are, inside a Second Life colosium, watching the big screen where we can see projected the live videocasting of the real life party.

Having never visited Second Life before, I was incredibly impressed with the level of detail that people poured into their avatars. I don't think I've ever seen such dedication and art in avatar form. Suddenly all those news stories about people who made a living designing second life characters for cash made so much more sense. These avatars were designed with incredible skill.

When the creative commons torch was passed from Lawrence to Joi (with Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame in the background), the Second Life auditorium broke into uproarious applause.


I had a lot of fun virtually celebrating Creative Commons' birthday and finally having an excuse to try out Second Life -- something I may play with more in the future.

Congratz, Joi in your new position. We know you'll represent Creative Commons well!

Twitter is apparently the Next Big Thing in social networking. It's a kinda cute idea: you get to see live updates of what all your friends are doing at the moment. We have fun with stuff like that at Google -- everyone updates their status message frequently and it becomes kinda like an in-joke or a status-message-conversation.

So I sign up and then it has a field for me to invite all my friends.

Within a few minutes, I set my Twitter status message to be: "No longer using Twitter cuz, yeah, yawn."

That's the thing that drives me nuts about these new social networking sites. Every time you join one, you have to drag your friendslist with you, like some sort of heavy weight. Go down your IM list, make sure you didn't leave anyone out. Search through your friends' friends list to see if there's anyone you missed. Linkedin, Orkut, MySpace, whatever, they all have that same problem. I don't want to start using them because I don't want to have to invest the time and energy needed to bootstrap my friends list.

If you're thinking of starting the next big social networking site, here's my advice to you: make it easy to import lists from other places.

Cuz if I have to choose between my friends or your new product that I haven't even used yet, your product ain't gonna win.

I'm connected to the internet basically, well, basically always.

Before my eyes are even fully open in the morning, I have my laptop open and I'm chatting with people. Usually closing my laptop is the last thing I see at night before I fall asleep.

So it's weird to be on an airplane and totally unconnected to the internet.

They were showing some movie and I recognized an actor in the background and thought to myself, "Hm, I've seen him before, where's he from?"

And I sat there...... and had no way to look it up.

In my head I imagined how I would look this up with Google and imdb in about 40 seconds. The answer would be right there. "Oh, he's the guy from ______".

But sitting on an airplane, I had no way to check. So I had to just sit there and let the question hound me. Where's he from? Where's he from? This genre? That? What can I remember him doing? Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

Sitting in a small plane didn't make me feel claustrophobic, but sitting in a small plane with no way to get access to the information outside the plane???

Lemme out!!