Oh the difficulties of using sarcasm online! How are you supposed to get across the fact that you are being sarcastic when you can’t alter the tone of your voice, give a little wink-wink, or nudge-nudge? Anyone with a sense of humor that instant messages has surely encountered this problem first hand.

This week I was fooled once again. CNN published an opinion article on why Stephen Colbert’s bid for presidency must be stopped. Here is a sample that quotes Colbert and explains why he would be horrible running our country.

America’s role in world: “If our Founding Fathers wanted us to care about the rest of the world, they wouldn’t have declared their independence from it.” Under a Colbert administration, it appears America would just attack other countries for no valid reason.

The whole time I knew that Colbert’s candidacy and stances are simply a joke, but I thought the person writing the opinion article was taking it seriously. Apparently I was wrong. Upon closer inspection, that little blurb at the beginning introducing the author can be quite important. Usually it just toots the person’s horn and gives you links to their other material, but this time it actually contained something of real value. “Dean Obeidallah is a comedian”. And in case that isn’t evidence enough, if you take a look at the Story Highlights in the sidebar, you will see “he channels Colbert, satirically calls his candidacy a threat to our way of life ”

So the author was being sarcastic and I had no idea. Honest mistake, could happen to anyone. This is an obvious problem. And when there is a problem, we need a solution. Enter sarcastext.

Sarcastext is a idea for a specific font to be used whenever you are being sarcastic. The font itself alerts the user to the sarcasm, just as bold, italics, and capitalization are used for emphasis. Thus, whenever the reader encounters sarcastext font, the joke will not go over their head, which we have seen can have embarrassing consequences.
 

The article even makes some Hitler references, as previously mentioned in my post on Godwin’s law.

Photo: ManyLittleBlessings

This is one of those ideas that just makes you wonder, why didn’t I think of that? Everyone knows bottled water is horrible for the environment, yet that doesn’t stop people from buying it. It’s just so darn convenient to grab a bottle on the go or from a vending machine. And then there is the extreme – the primadonas that refuse to ever drink tap water. With such a diverse marketplace, it sells even without sex.

Let me introduce you to BOXED water. Boxed water solves many of the problems of bottled water. The boxes are made from a renewable resource, ship flat to the filler, ship more efficiently when full, and are recyclable. To top things off, 10% of the company’s profit is donated to water supply charities and another 10% to reforestation foundations. Not too shabby.

Yes, drinking tap water is still better for the environment, but this is a pretty good solution to sate the world’s incredible demand for premium water on the go. What do you think?
 

One of the first Pedantic Posts was about recording various data about your habits in the hopes of finding trends and improving your life. After hours of research, I ultimately decided that I didn’t want to record every aspect of my life. Sure there are tools that make this record keeping easier, but you still have to think about it. It is way too OCD to voluntarily start.

Today I bring the news that there have been great advancements in this field over the last 8 months. The most obvious gain is the ability to track certain activities passively – you just go about your life as you normally would and data is gathered automatically. This might not always be a good thing, but there is also a trend emerging to make this data more accessible to you. And since you have access to your data, numerous tools are popping up to help guide your analysis.

Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter have an incredible amount of interesting information about your life and they are now willing to let you use it. It is yours to keep (and share). But you don’t want to have to scroll through hundreds of tweets over the last few months. Rather, you want to see how they trend over time and splice the data any which way suits your fancy. Well now you can.

A recent Wall Street Journal blog post by Zach Seward opened my eyes to the possibilities. The author didn’t record any data on purpose – applications he was already using had plenty of data about him – Foursquare, Mint, iTunes, Last.fm, Google Earth, Google web history, and Twitter. All he had to do was use some third party tools to graph and analyze the data.

The results are astounding – a heat-map of where he spends his time (above), graphs of his temporary addictions to certain bands, how his music taste trends compared to other users, various graphs that show his most productive computer time and even his decline as an email potty mouth over the last two years. And these are just some of the possibilities.

What is next? It is still slightly too difficult for the general population to take advantage of this – most people don’t want to pull together various tools like Graph Your Inbox or Where Do You Go. But it will only get easier. Will your 2013 Foursquare heatmap become a lazy-man’s scrapbook that you can readily share and take with you anywhere? Only time will tell …

Photo: Zach Seward of the Wall Street Journal with the help of Foursquare, Google Maps, and Where Do You Go

There are thousands of news sources out there, all reporting on roughly the same news with their own slant. Sure, some are specialized like financial news sources, but all financial news sources are still reporting on the same events. If there are so many television channels, websites, radio shows, and newspapers all devoted to the same news, it must be worthwhile to add a new one with a slightly different twist.

As I researched posts for this website, it has become obvious that the same trendy stories run within a few days of each other on multiple news websites. If the story runs at the same time, they all report the same information. Even worse, since they already reported the story, they don’t revisit it again – they don’t update the information as time goes on. Doesn’t anybody notice this? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! Here is my idea: a news website that tracks these trendy news stories and provides updates in the following months and years. A cross between the real-time information of the internet age and “where are they now” (which everyone loves).

Let me provide some examples to reinforce the value of this “new old news” website (I am going to have to trademark that term). I posted about some places in Europe linking speeding ticket fines to the driver’s wealth. If you do a google search for this information, the majority of the results fall between January 7th and 12th 2010. Are more people receiving outrageous tickets? What is the current record ticket amount? Outsourcing drive thru – March 2005 and April 2006. How did those experiments work out? Did they expand the program or shut it down? Smoking two year old – May 27th, 2010 and November 5, 2010. Is this the last we will here about him? Does he have emphysema yet?

Stories change over time – they are alive. The stale information on news websites quickly becomes dated. We need a news service that is committed to keeping tabs on these old stories so that we always have the latest information. Will you create this for me?

Photo: ShironekoEuro

Everyone needs a certain amount of craziness in their life. For some, it is simply enough that Glee does a random episode of Rocky Horror. I hope that is not the only crazy thing keeping your life interesting.

I have been traveling a lot on the weekends to introduce the right amount of hectic-ness and excitement in my life. Unfortunately winter is on its way and this approach is about to loose its excitement. So what other options do I have to throw in a little craziness? I see it breaking down into two categories:

Building Fun Things

I have a mechanical engineering degree for a reason: so that I can build toys for my own amusement. The toy itself will be fun, but the real joy comes from the journey itself – creating something real t(hat is also hopefully big and dangerous). This category falls somewhere in between Mythbusters and Junkyard Wars.

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Doing Silly Things Just Because

The other category doesn’t require any tools, junk, or money. All you need is the miraculous human body and a little creativity. Things like eating a ton of carrots to see if your skin turns orange or having a competition to see who can stay awake the longest. Two Canadians best friends, Kenny and Spenny, had a TV show with weekly competitions – hilarity ensues.

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Anyone Interested?

These types of things are always more fun with a friend. Who has an idea they would like to try? Or if I come up with something, who would be interested in joining in?