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Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Monday, September 13, 2010
Lego Star wars themed chess
well, everybody loves lego 
Amplify’d from www.geeksaresexy.net
Awesomely Geeky LEGO Star Wars Chess Sets
Read more at www.geeksaresexy.net
The Lego Empire Strikes Back Chess Set
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The new marketing manager for social media
Friday, September 10, 2010
If Historical Events had Facebook Statuses
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
The Reverse, reverse psychology
Some small self motivating tips
Well, sooner or later we all come to have this problem, about motivation, and in each case we find a solution to go past this problem, but here are some tips and tricks .
Amplify’d from www.dumblittleman.com
There are a lot of times in our lives when we've got an external structure or impetus to stay motivated.
When you're in college, you generally don't cut your compulsory classes just because you're feel like goofing off – you don't want to get penalized, and you don't want to miss valuable content.
When you've got a job, you don't decide to have a long lie-in on Monday mornings. You get yourself into the office – and whether you feel "motivated" or not doesn't come into play.
If you're used to having a lot of external direction, it can be really tough to motivate yourself when you're totally in charge of your own time.
We all have goals and dreams – whether or not we ever talk about them, or write them down. Perhaps you want to lose weight, or start your own business, or carry out a home improvement project. In each case, you need a ton of motivation to get going – and to stay on track.
If you haven't got a boss or parent or teacher looking over your shoulder, here's how to get (and stay) motivated.
Get Support In Place
Although it might feel like you're out on your own, the reality is that millions of other people have the same goals as you.
If you're trying to lose weight, join a slimming club.
If you're starting your own business, find a local group of would-be entrepreneurs – or hang out with some online.
If you want to build a deck for your home, get a bunch of friends together who can help (and return the favor for them at a later point).
Be Organized With Your Time
In school, you had a timetable telling you what to do when. At work, you have meetings and appointments scheduled, deadlines and targets. Even if you're not a naturally organized person, you'll pretty quickly find yourself adapting to what you need to do.
When you're going after personal goals, though, it's very easy to get disorganized. Maybe you've got a big dream but you never seem to find the time to take the first steps towards it. Perhaps you always intend to exercise, but somehow you never get round to it.
We all like to organize ourselves slightly differently. See which of these tips works best for you:
- Put your personal goals into your diary. E.g. "Thursday – 5pm – workout"
- Find a regular time slot to use for working on your goal. E.g. Your lunch hour; every Saturday morning from 9am – 11am
- At the end of each day, write down what you did to make progress towards your goal
- Set a rule like "no TV until I've filled in my food diary" to help you stay on track with new habits
Set Yourself Milestones
One of the challenges with staying motivated on our big goals is that we tend to get overwhelmed. If you're trying to lose 100lbs, or repaint your entire house, you'll pretty quickly find yourself questioning whether it's worth the effort, and whether you'll ever reach your goal.
Instead of focusing on the finish line in the distance, break your goal into smaller steps.
You might go for equally-weighted chunks like:Or you might start with smaller, easier tasks and slowly work your way up:
- Aiming to lose 10lbs, then another 10lbs, and so on
- Painting the bedroom, then the bathroom, then the kitchen
The exact approach you take will depend on your exact goal – but the important thing is that you break that goal into manageable pieces.
- Learn five chords on the guitar, then learn a simple song, then a more complex song
- Write a basic business plan, then do some pro bono (free) work, then find your first client
Celebrate Small Victories
Every time you achieve a chunk of your goal, celebrate! Depending on how big the chunk is, you might:It doesn't matter exactly what you do – the point is that you acknowledge your progress and feel good about what you've accomplished. It's much easier to stay motivated when you're being positive, rather than when you're beating yourself up for not getting more done.Read more at www.dumblittleman.com
- Tell a friend about your achievement
- Write down your progress in a log or journal
- Give yourself a reward, like buying that DVD you want
- Go out for a special meal or open a nice bottle of wine to celebrate
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Friday, September 3, 2010
Laptops that look like race cars
yep, i have to say that I also hate the stickers on my vaio :P, although i would never trade the intel procesor over the amd, only because of a sticker 
Amplify’d from pogue.blogs.nytimes.com
Laptops Look Like Racecars — and Not in a Good Way
At a meeting with Advanced Micro Devices the other day, representatives talked to me about chip sets and clock speeds, of discrete graphics and die sizes. But in passing, they mentioned an additional company initiative that really perked me up: laptop stickers.
When you buy a new Windows PC, as you probably know, it comes festooned with little (or not so little) stickers on the palm rests. There’s one for Windows, one for Skype, one for Intel, one for the laptop company, maybe an Energy Star sticker and so on.
The bizarre thing is that computer companies are trying to make their laptops beautiful these days. A.M.D. reps showed me, for example, a gorgeous new Hewlett-Packard ultralight laptop. Sleek. Shiny. Elegant. Yet grubbed up with a fruit salad of tasteless, competing stickers.
As A.M.D. points out, it’s like buying a new, luxury car — and discovering that it comes with nonremovable bumper stickers that promote the motor oil, the floor mat maker, the windshield-fluid company and the pine tree air freshener you have no intention of ever using.
Never mind that all of this promotional garbage already appears on the box. Do you really need it physically affixed to the actual computer?
Physically — and semi-permanently? I tried to fingernail some of the stickers off that H.P. laptop, and it was a disaster. You can peel them up, but they shred, and they leave adhesive crud behind. When you’ve just spent big bucks on a laptop, should you really be obligated to spend the first 20 minutes trying to dissolve away the sticker goop with WD40? (There’s a missed promotional opportunity for H.P.)
A.M.D.’s research shows that consumers hate the stickers (duh). But they’re not going away, for one simple reason: There’s big money involved. Intel, Microsoft, Skype and whoever else is represented by the stickers actually pay the computer companies for the billboard space. That’s why H.P., for example, would tolerate gumming up its laptops’ good looks with crass ads. (Apple refuses to put Intel stickers on its computers, even though there’s Intel inside. In doing so, it leaves millions of dollars a year on the table.)
I’m not even sure it’s money well spent. If you buy a Windows laptop, it’s pretty obvious you’re going to get Windows on it. If the computer box says “Intel inside,” you pretty much already know that when you open the box.
(One industry argument is that the stickers help salespeople tell one laptop from another when they help out customers. But the box has the same information, and so do the store placards — and besides, how does “Windows 7” and “Intel Inside” and “Skype ready” really help you guide a customer?)
In 2011, A.M.D. will switch to new stickers that peel off easily, leaving no residue; after that, it’s considering eliminating the sticker program altogether. In the meanwhile, it’s going to make affixing its stickers optional. If a computer company chooses not to use the A.M.D. stickers, A.M.D. will still pay it the same marketing dollars to use in other ways.
Look: If we want to adopt the racecar model, where sponsors pay the driving team directly for the right to festoon the car with logos, fine. Let the component makers pay you directly for the right to advertise on your new computer. And you get to choose which ones appear, and negotiate how much you’re paid.
In the meantime, let’s applaud A.M.D. for taking the lead in trying to change this pointless, tacky practice. And let’s boo Microsoft, Intel, Skype and the computer makers for marching on to the same old profit-driven beat — at your expense.
Read more at pogue.blogs.nytimes.com
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/aJPZUH
Thursday, September 2, 2010
The Dark Side of Email
Yep, everything has a dark side, including e-mail ...
Amplify’d from www.spring.org.uk
Email’s Dark Side: 10 Psychology Studies
Like the telephone or the TV, email is a technology so embedded in our lives, we think nothing of it. Both help and hindrance, on one hand it's the internet's original 'killer application' and on the other it's a spam-spewing slave-driver.
1. 59 per cent check email from the bathroom
You don't need to be an expert on Pavlov's drooling dogs to work out why email is so habit-forming. Most of it is humdrum, but occasionally we get something exciting and that's what we're hoping for when we check our email. In psychological terms email is a 'variable-interval reinforcement': we don't know exactly when the good stuff is coming so we have to keep checking.
It's no wonder, according to AOL's 2010 survey, 47% claim to be hooked on it, 25% of people can't go without email for more than 3 days, 60% check email on vacation and 59% check email from the bathroom.
2. You check more often than you think
Participants in a study by Renaud et al. (2006) claimed to check their email, on average, once an hour. However when the researchers spied on them, it turned out they checked their email every five minutes.
Despite the small sample size in Renaud's study (6 people), further research has suggested people do set their email program to check their email every 5 minutes (Jackson et al., 2002) as well as significantly underestimating how often they check their email. As a consequence we also underestimate how disruptive it can be.
3. Email eats a quarter of the working day
When Czerwinski et al. (2004) carried out a diary study of people in various different occupations they found that, on average, people spent 23% of their working day dealing with email.
4. It takes 64 seconds to recover from an email
We often react quickly to incoming email, almost like the phone ringing. In one workplace study, Jackson et al. (2002) found that 70% of emails were reacted to within 6 seconds of their arrival, and 85% within 2 minutes.
The problem is that it took participants in the same study 64 seconds to recover their train of thought after an email interruption.
5. Stressed emailers
Given the effort we put into email and all the task-switching that's going on, it's unsurprising that it generates stress. Of course we each deal with email in different ways, Hair et al. (2005) have identified three types of emailer:
- Relaxed responders treat email almost like snail mail. They refuse to let it control them and get back to people when they feel like it.
- Driven responders try to reply instantly to email and expect others to do the same.
- Stressed responders don't find email useful, to them it is mostly an irritation.
6. Email kills sarcasm (and emotional communication)
People consistently overestimate their ability to communicate effectively with email. A series of studies by Kruger et al. (2005) found that both senders and receivers don't realise how poor email is for communicating things like sarcasm.
7. People feel less co-operative
Email negotiations often feel difficult, especially with people we don't know well. When Naquin et al. (2008) compared them with face-to-face negotiations, they found that people were less co-operative over email and even felt more justified in being less co-operative.
8. Low rapport on email
Another reason negotiations can be difficult over email is that when negotiating with a stranger, because email is so short and to-the-point, there is little or no rapport to fall back on. So if negotiations hit a problem, they can quickly fall apart.
9. Lying feels more justified
People will lie in any medium, but compared with pen-and-paper, they lie more over email and feel that lying is more justified. In Naquin et al.'s (2010) study, participants lied 50% more when they negotiated over email compared with pen-and-paper. They propose three reasons:
- Emails are less permanent: it feels closer to chatting than writing a letter.
- Less restrained: people feel freer online because of the online disinhibition effect.
- Lower personal connection: over email we feel psychologically distant, resulting in low trust and rapport.
10. Irritating emailers
A fluffly AOL survey has classified the most irritating types of emailers by the type of emails they send (Woffenden, 2004). In order of how irritating, from most to least:
- The cryptic: rated the most irritating type of emailer, this person fills their emails with unexplained acronyms, mostly to try and impress the boss.
- The author: thinks they are writing a novel not an email.
- The forwarder: sends on every idiotic chain letter and joke they receive, apparently without exercising their judgement.
- The player: claims not to have received your email. Quite irritating; but in these days of spam filters, hard to prove.
- The smiley: emoticon users were amongst the least irritating types of emailer.
- The succinct: the least irritating type of emailer keeps it short and to the point.
Email cold turkey
The practical up shots of this research are nothing you won't have heard before: check you email less, remember the costs of task-switching, keep email succinct. Finally, remember it can be difficult to maintain relationships online because people feel psychologically distant from one another, so make a call every now and then.
Because email isn't the all-powerful application it once was, with the advent of texting, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, we tend to forget both how useful email is and how dangerous it can be. I've avoided overblown talk of addiction, but given this research there's certainly a case for going email cold turkey every now and then.
Read more at www.spring.org.uk
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/95b1IL
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Anonymous online survey, not what they seem
I am a fan for the dilbert strips, but i think this one is one of the funniest in some time, and i really think it shows and interesting point on surveys
See this Amp at http://bit.ly/9933go
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