guy schmidt

# It looks like nerdly delights aren’t the only thing I’m missing at SXSW. It seems Austin is the Mecca of breakfast tacos. “For less than $2, you get a warm tortilla filled most commonly with eggs, meat, and cheese. This is prime morning-after grub, and in a town of college students (and adults acting like college students), that’s no minor point.” /via

# Handmade maps often have “… an error detector, something that tells you something’s gone wrong.” (If you see the red barn, you’ve gone too far.) They adhere not to mapmaking norms but to the user’s particular needs.” My favorite direction from my day’s of hunting for parties in high school were the hand drawn maps and instructions like “roll down your window and listen for the music.”

# Marwencol is a fictional model town built by a man recovering from a severe beating that almost took his life and left him physically and mentally damaged. The model/story building is helping him recover in both regards. /via

# @anywhere sounds like Twitter is getting into the comment business. This may be good as it relates to comment trolls and my idea that Twitter is like Whuffie.

# Life as we know it. /via

# A day in the life. /via

# My son’s explanation of a rather large bird poo on my car: “Maybe a bird picked-up a dog and it pooped on your car.”

# I picked up Lethem’s latest from the library yesterday. I just finished a steampunk/zombie banger that was decent.

# I have a thing for bags. Two nice ones I ran across recently: Hard Graft’s 2UNFOLD Laptop bag and Archival Clothing’s Mussettes.

# What I learned today: Zenati are people who enjoy “… wearing a full body suit (typically Lycra, though other materials fall into Zentai labels) for private enjoyment or exhibitionism.”

# The next Sy-Fy movie: Great White Sharks vs. Giant Squids.

# The Drive-By Truckers’ new album, The Big To-Do comes out tomorrow. 

From a walk in the rain today.

On the 13 year anniversary Biggie Smalls’ death Francis Lam writes about how his music inspired his food writing.  Here is Lam on a line (The milks was chocolate; the cookies, buttercrunch.) from Sky’s the Limit:

” … but it was the cookies, buttercrunch, that made me understand food’s potency as a symbol, its ability to bridge enormous gaps between him, his characters, and the listener, whether that listener hustled on his corner or was a Chinese kid from the suburbs.”

Also, I love this bit: “For years, I tried to listen to other tapes in my little suburban family sedan, but I would just keep going back to the Black Rhinoceros of Rap, listening to him drop unexpectedly like bird shit.”

ESG’s 1981 song, UFO, has been sampled in dozens of hip-hop songs, including LL Cool J’s Mr. Goodbar, Public Enemy’s Night of the Living Baseheads, and Q-Tip’s Let’s Ride.  Just to name a few.

Incredibox lets you create your own animated beatboxing extravaganza. /via

This photo of waves of clouds along the east flanks of the Andes Mountains taken from Gemini 7 is phenomenal. Full story and bigger sizes can be found on NASA’s GRIN site. /via

Propane tanks, books, weed whackers, and good oral hygiene are just some of the items on the last person on Earth’s essential to do list. A fascinating thread on Reddit. /via

What Lies Beneath by Q-Tip from Soundbombing III. I can honestly say that I have never heard this before. Cool! /via

We are still over a week away from the official first day of Spring, but my son and I loved wearing flip flops yesterday.

Catch phrase!

A blog on the creation of Mimeo and the Kleptopus King, an iPhone game in the style of old Nintendo games. It looks like a blast. More from the game’s creator, Shaun Inman.

NPR did a story on the Women Airforce Service Pilots, a program that ” … trained civilian volunteers to fly planes stateside so men could report overseas for combat duty.” One of the pilots took a ton of color photographs.

The A.V. Club picked 25 songs they would like to see covered. Twenty-five invited bands will get to pick from the list and the results will be posted every Tuesday. My guess is that Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here” will be the last song standing.

Google added directions by bike to Google Maps. Maybe I will now be motivated to bike the 5.8 miles to work. Maybe.

“So we lose forever the pleasure known to humanity for 500 years of taking a stroll up and down the aisles of someone else’s brain by perusing their bookshelves.” Bookshelves, a casualty of the coming e-book explosion.

No more pagers in Baltimore.

Samberg and Parnell perform Lazy Sunday live backed by The Roots. /via

Top Billin’ by Audio Two. Straight from ‘87. /via

Stephen Hawking’s words are pretty haunting in this video. Oh yeah, and stuff gets busted in slow motion. /via

Lifetent
Designer: Dan Ostrowski
Based on the reports coming out of Haiti, I decided that a natural disaster refugee was a transient person that would migrate to new locations in search of safety, food, and/or medical help. I developed an inflatable tent because of its lightweight, easy transport, and minimal storage space when not in use. A GPS tracker was added so that rescue teams could know, before entering a ND zone, where they are most needed. The Lifestraws were added in an attempt to stave off water born pathogens and the use of mosquito repellent fabric was indented to stave off malaria.

The winner of the Core77’s 1 Hour Design Challenge on Emergency Shelters.

A panoramic picture of Mars’ horizon created in 2004 by Spirit, the robotic rover. /via

Hot Lava is a game for all ages, in which the players imagine that the floor or ground is made of lava, or variably as any other unsavory substance, such as acid, and thus avoid touching the ground lest they get burned or otherwise injured. The players stay off of the floor by standing on furniture or the room’s architecture. The players generally do not remain still, moving from one piece of furniture to the next. The game can be played with a group or alone for self amusement. There may even be a goal, to which the players must race. The game may also be played outdoors in playgrounds or similar areas. You can set up obstacles to make the game more challenging. This is a variation of an obstacle course.

We used to say if you fell in the lava you became a lava monster and tried to attack the survivors as they jumped around the playground. The indoor version rarely involved the monsters and was more of an excuse to jump on your parent’s furniture. I was reminded of this awesome childhood game by this drawing.

Created exclusively for the Royal We by Oliver Jeffers, this is a signed print of a hand drawn map of the world. The whole world. With pins. Each print comes with 202 pins to chart your path to total global domination. 200 of the pins are black, one of them is red and one of them is blue. red is for headquarters, blue is for next target.

Black and white kinda makes the old Batman look bad ass. Adam West is The Dark Night. /via

The Nessie Lamp. /via

The ghosts were captured in two vials of holy water during an exorcism. The holy water “… dulled the spirit’s energy and put them to sleep.” The purchaser need only poor the contents of the bottles out in their house and let the liquid evaporate to awaken and release the spirits. No thank you.

Sometimes it’s so the competition doesn’t catch wind of a killer title and steal it. Sometimes it’s so crews can film on location undisturbed by a public who’ll pay less attention to a trailer marked with an unknown name than a famous franchise. And sometimes it’s so a production won’t get overcharged by suppliers. After all, the studio behind Star Wars: Episode VI—Return of the Jedi probably has deeper pockets than whoever’s filming Blue Harvest, right?

The codename for Alien was Star Beast and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial’s was A Boy’s Life. Apparently the studio wasn’t too worried about name stealing for Snakes on a Plane since it’s codename was Snakes on a Plane. /via

This mini-album experiment could help fix two problems. First, it could help keep record labels on the store shelves on retailers wary of falling CD sales. Second, cheaper albums will probably do more to lure buyers who would have otherwise bought a single track. The current gap between track and album is about $7.70 – a $9.99 digital album price minus $1.29 track price. At iTunes, Shelton’s Hillybilly Bone costs $5.99 while each track costs $1.29. That’s a difference of $4.70. If the price gap is reduced to the $4 to $5 range, labels may be better able to convert track buyers to album buyers.

I’m surprised more artists don’t release singles. Not just singles that lead up to an album, singles instead of full albums. Kind of a Johnathan Coulton thing a week model. /via

Includes some Broken Bells, Spoon, and others. It’s through iTunes just in case thats not your bag. /via

14. Long John Silvers: Side of Crumbs - This is a (Free!) box of fried batter parts that have fallen off the fried fish or chicken. Great to put on top of salads.

Mmmm … fried niblets. /via

Should be Working by MAMMOTH. I never had the cajones to take up skateboarding. I injured myself enough on a bike, I figured a skateboard would spell doom for a klutzy fat kid. That being said the dudes in this video have cajones for days. /via

Yesterday’s sun rising over the Monocacy River.

The Sandpit by Sam O’Hare. Yup, still a sucker for tilt shift, especially the helicopters. They look like little bugs.

Photos never taken that weren’t meant to be forgotten. Opportunities missed. Simple failures. Occasions when I wished I’d taken the picture, or not forgotten the camera, or had been brave enough to click the shutter.

I actually just had my own missed photograph opportunity. I was meeting my family for dinner and the darkening sky all around the parking lot of the restaurant was full of black birds. Thousands of them swarming and squawking. I had my camera, but forgot the memory card. I tried with my mobile, but it turned out to be a crappy shot. /via

This is the The Rally Fighter. It was designed by a community of thousands. And if you want one people will come to your house and help you build it. All cool stuff, but I just think it’s one bad-ass car. Does it come with a wrist crossbow? I mean if you drive this it’s almost a guarantee you will have to fight off mutant bikers and feral children with razor boomerangs at every turn.

Nicknamed ‘Crabzilla’ after the fictional giant monster, the Japanese Spider Crab has a body the size of a basketball and its legs can straddle a car. They will eventually measure a massive 15ft.

I have never seen something so horrifying yet so delicious. I wonder how much melted butter it would take to eat Crabzilla?

Three MC’s and One DJ was the first song I heard this morning. I love it; so basic and fun (Sweet and sour like a tangerine / Fresh like a box of Krispy Kremes / Kenny Rogers’ Gambler is my gambling theme).

Enthused by re-hearing this song for the first time in a while I did a little Googling and came up with this video. It’s a single camera view from the full music video. Skip to 1:45 for the action.

From illustrator Brian Rea’s collection of fears.

What a fraction of a second look/sounds like.

The skull of regret is not to be toyed with. /via

NPR is streaming the Danger Mouse and James Mercer collaboration, Broken Bells, in its entirety.

Thawing of the Russian tundra’s permafrost is spewing forth about 50 tons worth of woolly mammoth bones a year. Entire villages are surviving on the cash made from harvesting and selling the fossils. I wonder what other businesses will pop-up as the Earth cracks and shifts; revealing more if its secrets?

Ten Word Wiki is an encyclopedia for the ADD generation. Example. /via

A blog dedicated to fictional brands, like the Swingline Staplers and Dapper Dan. /via

Some people still think the earth is flat. From the current president of The Flat Earth Society: “I haven’t taken this position just to be difficult. To look around, the world does appear to be flat, so I think it is incumbent on others to prove ­decisively that it isn’t. And I don’t think that burden of proof has been met yet.”

Time talks to McDonald’s head chef. Funny, for some reason I picture McDonald’s having a head chemist instead of a head chef.

I have to agree with Bradley, this video made me smile. Especially starting at 1:28.