When I was growing up my mother forbade me and my brother from having toy guns lest we grow up to be card carrying members of the NRA, or even worse, hunters. I once asked her why she hated hunting so much since we regularly enjoyed meat products in our home and she confessed that it wasn’t the hunting that bothered her as much as the idea that we might actually bring home something that she’d have to clean.  Obviously she’d never seen me shoot and had disregarded my lack of desire to freeze my butt off while waiting for an animal to wander within three feet of me, which was my effective range of accuracy. 

Of course her toy gun ban simply caused us to continue a proud American tradition of turning any inanimate object into a weapon with which we proceeded to slaughter each other and our friends in continuous mock battles loosely predicated on our abyssmal knowledge of great American wars.  You can be sure that we would have given anything, and I mean years’ worth of 50 cent weekly allowances, to possess the rubber band gun featured below.  Heck we thought our Daniel Boone replica rubber band guns were cool, so this thing would have been revered.

NVIDIA invited the MythBusters guys to do a demonstration that would highlight the difference between a regular computer processor (CPU) and a parallel processor (GPU).  For the CPU they rigged up a little robot with a paint ball gun that painted a simple smiley face.  For the GPU they created a paint ball contraption that shot over 1,000 paint balls simultaneously to paint the Mona Lisa.  The video is in three parts on YouTube, and part one shows the single paint ball gun, part two is the lead up to the Mona Lisa trick, and part three has the grand finale which you can see below.  One of the reasons I love MythBusters is they’ve made being smart cool again.

Esbee sent me the link to the Annoy-a-tron so you can thank her if your ears are tortured any time in the near future. Here’s the description:

The Annoy-a-tron generates a short (but very annoying, hence the name)
beep every few minutes. Your unsuspecting target will have a hard time
‘timing’ the location of the sound because the beeps will vary in
intervals ranging from 2 to 8 minutes. The 2kHz sound is generically
annoying enough, but if you really really want to aggravate somebody,
select the 12 kHz sound. Trust us. The higher frequency and slight
‘electronic noise’ built into that soundbyte will make a full-grown
Admin wonder where his packets are.

Applications I’m considering for this ingenious device:

1. Next PTA meeting.
2. Car dealership show room, sales area.
3. Forsyth County Commissioners meeting, behind the commissioners’ table.  Set for loudest setting during the sectarian invocation.
4. Anywhere that teenagers gather en masse; they bug the hell out of me all the time so I think I’m due some payback.
5. Anywhere that pompous, self-important blowhards congregate en masse; see reasoning in item 5. (Yes I’m aware that this could be considered redundant to item 3).

Yes, yes, yes.  Much fun.

I just saw the video about Google’s 411 service on bookofjoe (I’ve added it below) and decided to give the service a try.  I called the 1-800-466-4411 number and when prompted asked for "Winston-Salem, NC" and then when asked for a business name I said "Cicciones" which is one of my favorite pizza joints.  I figured you couldn’t get much harder than that for voice recognition.  The results?  A+

Google gave me four choices and after each one I could either press the key for what I wanted or say the number.  Option 3 was the Cicciones right down the street from me and when I said "three" it automatically dialed the number for me.  Best of all is it’s FREE.  There’s also an option to have the restaurant’s info text messaged to my phone and since my Blackberry is web-enabled it can send a map to me as well. These folks continue to amaze me.