Author Archives: The guy

Chrome vs. Explorer TV ads

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Has anyone else noticed how much Internet Explorer is promoting their new browser in TV commercials lately? To me, it’s really interesting to see how different they are from Google’s Chrome commercials and the two different angles each company is taking. Google Chrome commercials are sentimental and personal. Internet Explorer commercials are loud and flashy.

Just watch these two ads back to back and you will see what I mean. I have to hand it to Google, they definitely in my opinion although I am a fan of the soundtrack for the IE ad.

Touchless Camera Pulse Sensor…whaaat?

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This is an example of why I love technology. I no long am using an iPhone so I can’t test this app, but it just goes to show the imagination that people have of how to leverage technology we have to do something different.

Cardiio is a Touchless Camera Pulse Sensor App for the iPhone that can apparently turn your phone into “an accurate, touch-free heart rate monitor.”. How awesome is that!? It uses the camera to measure to analyze the amount of light reflected off your face to measure your pulse without any physical hardware.

The things people do with technology still amazes me. If you want to see the review of the app for yourself, it’s in the app store here.

Bing vs. Google Search Off Challenge

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We were watching TV on a Saturday afternoon and saw a commercial by Bing that promoted a Bing vs. Google Challenge with the claim that in a blind test people picked Bing results over Google.

I went to Bing to see if they had really changed anything and it turned out you could take the actual challenge itself that was featured in the commercial! It was pretty cool to see.

Anyways, the girl and I proceeded to take the challenge and as you can see by the results, Google won as I expected. Although I admit that I did like that it was a blind side-by-side search off.

So next time I need to find the best new TV show to watch, I’ll be using Google.

Inaccurate Smoothie Recipe – Banana-Strawberry-Raspberry

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I bought a blender recently and have taken on making my own smoothies for myself and the girl. I’ve decided to start with breakfast smoothies as they seemed like the easiest ones to start with. I started out following a smoothie recipe that I found to the exact measurement and although it turned out pretty good, it got me thinking…you can’t really mess up a smoothie as long as you’re working with the basic principles so I’ve started to make up my own smoothie recipes that are easy and pretty much follow common sense and my own taste buds.

First up, a banana-strawberry-raspberry smoothie. Here’s my first inaccurate smoothie recipe that was quite delicious:

  1. Add handful of ice cubes ( or frozen smoothie cubes if you have them!)
  2. Tear up a couple of bananas and throw in
  3. 5 to 7 strawberries with the tops cut off
  4. A long squeeze of honey from the bear
  5. A fistful of raspberries
  6. Lastly, a couple of spoonfuls of plain yogurt
  7. Blend well and enjoy

Protecting yourself against zombies

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I don’t really know what the trigger was for all of the zombie conversations these days, but it seems as though this is the perfect invention for any individual who is extremely worried about a potential zombie attack in the near future. Who wouldn’t want to sleep on top of their entire gun collection? It also seems like this could double as a place to just store your money and would take the idea of hiding money under your mattress to the next level!

Two thoughts I had after I watched this video were 1) It seems like the whole key thing slows down this entire process, why not have a bio-metric scanner of some sorts? and 2) The guy’s face at the 1:01 mark when he tried to look like a bad-a$$ is pretty sweet.

Best Beer Commercial of the Year – Carlton Draught

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I have to say, when Ryan on my team at work sent me this link in a chat window, I wasn’t sure what to expect…but I was very pleasantly surprised that I found this commercial to actually be worthy of its title! There’s so many types of commercials out there and this one is by far one of the better ones that I’ve seen recently, let alone that there’s finally another commercial for Australian beer that’s NOT for Foster’s. The music is epic in this and it’s just funny to see the faces of the people as they do the chase scenes. My favorite part is probably at the :43 second mark when the “police car” backs backs up in reverse to continue the pursuit. Enjoy!

To watch this video, click here – Best Beer Commercial of the Year

Food Truck – Part 1

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After watching the new episodes this season of The Great Food Truck Race it has only further validated to me that I think it would be awesome to own a food truck. I’ve started to try and brainstorm ideas for what my food truck would be and after talking it over with the girl, we think that it would be super sweet to have a food truck that is half bakery/half regular food. We’re still working on what type of food cuisine we would feature and a name…but the wheels have started spinning! (Figuratively of course)

The 1% Fake

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Recently there has been a lot of articles being written about how to assess the quality of your followers, especially with the article from Mashable citing that the main @Twitter account likely has almost 33% of its followers potentially being spam bots and “fake” followers.

I find this really interesting and have started wondering to myself what the  Fake Follower trend would be if you compared individuals’ accounts vs. brands’ accounts…who would have more fake followers more often? I used the StatusPeople tool mentioned in the article to check how many of my Twitter followers were fake, thinking that it might be some huge number because would 768 people (As of September 2012) really find what I have to say interesting? As it turns out, maybe! I only had 1% of my followers as potential “fakers” with almost 95% of my followers being “good”. What a pleasant surprise! Long story short, it will definitely be something to keep an eye on in terms of how organizations start dealing with spam bots and fake followers and what organizations like the IAB might do to help control this sort of spam.

Write-up by Mashable with more details on this here – http://mashable.com/2012/08/22/twitter-facebook-fake-followers/