Birds of Paradise


It almost looks like just another video of cute birds and nature – though this one has an interesting moment towards the end of the video. Without giving too much away, I’d say the bird looked a whole lot cuter – and almost like something coming out of a computer game.

Alright, if you’re that impatient, push the bar to the 2:10 mark.

Added another video below at Linyou’s recommendation – another bird called the Lyre Bird with amazing talents in imitating sounds: from bird chirps to decidedly more…man-made sounds like machines and sirens. The first case of music piracy in bird-land:

 

Read At Work

readatwork

Now what did those pictures look like? A really boring and not-to-mention uglily laid-out PowerPoint deck in Windows XP? Perhaps it even resembles what your work computer screen looks like? Perfect! That’s actually a screenshot from Read At Work, a website dedicated to making your sneaky non-work reading as ‘official’ as possible. The web site now appears to belong to a gambling web site.

When you enter the site, it goes into a fake full-screen Windows mode, with several folders of ‘books’ for you to choose. The texts from these e-books are then churned into pseudo-PowerPoint slides, so you could while away your time reading your classic while appearing to be digesting a colleague’s PowerPoint presentation.

The lengths we go…

Don’t Look at the Gorilla!

gorilla-glasses

There’s probably very few designers who can boast of a design brief as unique as this:

On 18 May a gorilla named Bokito escaped from Rotterdam Zoo. During his escape the animal attacked a female visitor, who had frequent eye contact with the animal. This presumably led to the attack, since gorillas do not like direct eye contact. Health insurance company FBTO always offers simple solutions, so the weekend after the escape we distributed more than 2.000 so-called BokitoViewers at the entrance to Rotterdam Zoo.

Now the gorillas will probably be wondering why’s everyone looking in that direction…

Coca Cola Unhuggable


Made me smile – in many parts of the world, a great football (soccer, or actually any good sports game) match can unite fans in cheering for their nation (or their favorite team). Coca Cola wants you to think that they’re a big part of this fan-camaraderie spirit through this humorous clip.

Extreme Pants-Wearing

Hypothesis: There are always people who do things that are technically difficult, and yet you cannot fathom exactly how do they come up with the idea of doing that act in the first place (not to mention capturing it on photo/video and posting it onto the Internet). Case 1 would be the dedicated art of extreme ironing, which surfaced quite a few years ago.

And here’s another new meme – extreme pants-wearing:

With all due respect to their tremendous agility, I must admit I’m quite perplexed at how did they decide to start this extreme pants-wearing thing? Do they just wake up and say, “I feel like stunt-jumping into my pants today to see if I could.”?

Old Creative Video

Apple has the ‘demo-guy’ – you know, the guy wearing all black demonstrating how to use an iPhone etc in their guided tour? Well, it turns out that Creative Technology have their own equivalent too – and it probably pre-dates Apples.

It’s quite old, but I’ve just stumbled on it. Check it out:

Now don’t you feel like rock-and-rolling already?

Life Ambition Chart

life-ambition

I’ve been thinking about a shift in my mindset from pre-University days to post-graduation (and subsequently working), as I noticed my ‘I-can-conquer-the-world’ mentality starting to wane and fade. And so when I stumbled upon this comic from PHD it struck me quite strongly.

PHD Comic is primarily about post-grad education – check out their most popular ones here.