the people at thinkgeek have finally found out a way to make you want to wake up on time. with the snuznluz, everytime you press snooze when the alarm goes off, you donate a minimum of $10 to a charity you hate.

the clock is connected via wifi (or cable) and comes with an embedded configuration browser utility, that lets you set your bank details and to which charity you’d like to donate.

for example they say, if you’re a butcher you might want to donate to PETA, and vice-versa.

i’m more of a morning person, so snoozing doesn’t happen all that often… but how efficient would this be to you?

seen on bb-blog. shame on me that i’m so late on this april fool’s joke… but it would be such a great item! :)

thank you! i mean it, i wanted to say “welcome, and thanks for coming around!” even if this is your first or last visit to this site.
i declare today “meiadeleite.com visitors’ appreciation day”!

(edit: yes, feed readers are included as well. :) )

“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it and the imagination to improvise.” – Sylvia Plath

i love threadless. they’re a company that works with user-generated content at its best, while giving a good part of their profit back to the community that makes them successful. sounds like a recipe to success to me.

still doubtful? let’s see. you submit a design and win a couple thousand bucks if it gets selected (by the users) to be printed, plus several bonus. if you’re not a designer, you can still buy a tshirt, submit a photo of it and get $1.5 worth of discounts. or if your picture is really good, $15! how cool is that?

to tell the truth, i think the average picture that users upload isn’t exactly “gallery-material”, and anyone can do a far better job with a little imagination. sooooo, right after we bought the camera, i kept bugging p. to take pictures of our tshirts, and guess what, so far, with 2 pictures taken, i’m stocking $16.5 in discounts! i’d say it’s well worth the shot, even if you’re a little camera-shy!

oh! btw, they’ve just opened their shop in chicago, and i heard it has some cool features. besides being a perfectly good example of how an online business can break boundaries and stretch towards the real world.

i would tell you more about it, but a (recently upgraded) super-typhoon is scheduled to hit shanghai this evening and i’m super-excited and semi-worried and i can’t think of anything else. our first typhoon. some 200k people have been evacuated and let’s hope i remember to park the bike indoors. basements are spooky. i tend to avoid them.

and now, on to the bigger adventures. take care!

on one of the last weeks in groningen, i was listening to “adventure.exe” by owen pallett while writing the neverending thesis. i had found the song on a orange commercial, some time ago and then fell in love with it…

anyway, if you’ve heard anything else by owen, you’ll know he’s a violin player and well there isn’t much violin on this song… it’s more of a guitar solo and some instrument i can’t recognize, playing towards the middle of the song… and there is rain in the background and a sort of scratching sound, if you hear carefully. those scratching noises were intriguing me for some time – they sounded familiar.

and then it hit me. because it’s something most people don’t do everyday or never even heard of it, and because i was damn happy and proud of my minute of geekness, i’m going to tell:
he’s scratching rosin on his violin bow. over and over again. sometimes on the edges, sometimes across the full length of it. and sometimes he blows the excess off.
the noise is so familiar, i must have done it hundreds of times before. :) can you hear it?

he did get the violin in the song afterall. owen rules.

more:
* orange videoclip, though you can’t hear the sounds there.
* adventure.exe comes on final fantasy album “he poos clouds”.
* violin bows and rosin.

* i’m almost back :)