Best I’ve seen in a long time. Awesome.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

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About this blog.

Shot right here in Michigan in the city of Grand Rapids, Roger Ebert calls this ‘the greatest music video ever made’.

That’s called starting your week right.

(Via Daring Fireball)

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

So.

It’s a Friday before a holiday weekend and I’m not sure who’s reading, but the fact is I have embarrassingly little time to tell you about the time a bunch of us, when we were 10, went out into the woods and made spears out of dead saplings and began to wage a sort of medieval war with one another, and my buddy Shawn, wearing football pads for armor, had the unfair advantage of a wooden shield fashioned out of plywood, onto which he had used a soldering iron to inscribe his initials in thick black charcoal jags, and quite instantly this slapdash war turned into one of the Great Moments in my life, pure Lord of the Flies style, right up until a bunch of older teenagers (dirts) showed up at the top of our most tactically-important hill, at which point we spooked – even Shawn with the shield – and went back to another friend’s house to play Intellivision football until our thumbs became afflicted with blisters.

Yes, we were sissies.  And yes, the preceding paragraph was one sentence.  I get all Wallace/Pynchon before weekends during which I know huge, bacon-fetishist BBQs are imminent.

But before the sausage hits the grill, some links (get it?):

Here is a baby eating a cat’s tail.  Cuter than it sounds.

Amazon is now selling more Kindle books than print books.  This notion, once thought impossible, took less than 4 years.

Fool your eyes: the best optical illusions of 2011.

Finally, since probably nobody’s reading, here’s Maru the cat.

Have a good weekend everyone! Happy Memorial Day to all of our U.S. readers!

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

Know This

Steven Soderberg’s media stream: here’s a list of Soderberg’s favorite books, movies, TV shows, plays and short stories he enjoyed over the past year.

The science of why we don’t believe in science.

Does anyone in Silicon Valley care about Windows anymore?  Robert Scoble on the PC-to-Mac ratios he’s seeing in major tech companies, universities, and startups the world over.  Nutshell: there’s a pronounced move to Macs that corresponds to a marginalization of Windows.

Google Video is going dark, and fast.  Here’s the scoop and what you can do to help save it – or at least salvage some of its best content.

The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, reviewed by Wired’s Mike Isaac.   Can you believe it doesn’t have a native email, calendar or contacts app?  And that it only supports tethering to BlackBerry phones (for now)?  Why was this released in such an unfinished state?

Read This

Malcolm Gladwell postulated in his book Outliers that it takes someone 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.  Well, Dan McLaughlin is putting it to the test: for the next six years, for six days a week and six hours a day, Dan will practice golf to see if he can get a shot on the PGA Tour.  He’s one year in.  You can follow his daily progress here.

Is sugar toxic?  An absolute must-read, especially if you’re keyed into the diabetes and obesity epidemics that are gripping this country.

Watch This

Speed climbing mountains!  In this case, the mountain in question is an ascent of the north face of Eiger, a 13,025 foot tall mountain in the Swiss Alps.  The first ascent took three days in 1938.  Here’s Ueli Steck making the same ascent in 2 hours, 47 minutes and 33 seconds.  About halfway through, he’s literally running up the mountain.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

It’s Spring, and you know what that means: sometimes-incoherent preambles here on this blog, especially on Friday when most aren’t looking and I get to use the computer by myself.  So here are some random thoughts, in no order whatsoever, hastily blurted forth before I get in trouble:

• I still can’t find an iPad 2.  Maybe I will when tablets are busted for being a giant fad and nothing else.
• In a tiny, insignificant act of defiance against our endless winter we’ve got going here in MI, I started up my snowblower a few nights ago and let it run out of gas.  I am such a counterculture leader.
• If map applications where the only thing a person could evaluate to choose between iOS and Android, very few iPhones would be sold.  In some ways, iOS is looking very dated relative to Android.
• I had a Founders KBS imperial stout the other night, and I found out that it’s one of the rarest and highly-rated beers in the U.S.  And yes, it was that good.

And now, the links:

Know This

The libations of James Bond, painstakingly researched: “From Casino Royale (1953) to Quantum of Solace (2008), find every alcoholic beverage consumed by the world’s most famous secret agent.”

GOOD Asks the Experts: Is the Paleolithic diet really better?  As someone who has has tremendous success on the paleo/primal approach, I can say it works tremendously well – but it’s not magic.  It’s just some basic science (not necessarily anthropology) and discipline effectively interwoven.

Firefox users?  Experience slowdowns after messing with a bunch of add-ons?  Mozilla says add-ons can be to blame for browser slowness/instability.  See the culprits here.

Read This

I am a 91-year-old bodybuilder.  Inspiring.

Expansive waistlines could significantly increase your chances of late-life blindness, research says.

The Morning News declares a winner in its 2011 Tournament of Books.  The final was between Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad.  Here’s the final shootout.

NYC’s newfound ‘loosie’ market.

Watch This

Pi is (still) wrong. Hilarious and way, way clever.  Math nerds, buckle up.

Tell me: which cat do you think is guilty?

Have a good weekend, everyone.

###

More links:

MIPRO Consulting main website.

MIPRO on Twitter and Facebook.

About this blog.

Know This

Vanity Fair’s A. A. Gill has posted a downright funny (and thorough) review of L’Ami Louis in Paris, which he has decided is the worst restaurant in the world.

Anthony Atala, a tissue engineer, prints a dummy (but biocompatible) kidney model onstage at TED 2011.

The Reddit community interviews a 4 year old boy, with his father moderating.  Love this.

Read This

Serious Eats’ J. Kenji Lopez-Alt goes full-mongo and reveals to you the ultimate In-N-Out Secret Menu (and Super Secret Menu).  Have no idea what I’m talking about?  Secret menus?  Wha?  That’s why you need to read this.

Julien Smith with a smart blog post about the advanced tactics of saying no, which should indeed be required learning in our information-saturated, distraction-filled 21st century.

Watch This

Tiny Wings is going to be a huge game for iOS devices – like, as big as Angry Birds huge.  Featuring procedural graphics and gameplay that reminds me of a cross between Angry Birds, Solipskier and Canabalt, it’s a perfect game for touch devices.  Here’s a gameplay trailer.

Finally, nothing says Friday like a dog on a scooter.  And maybe some pre-summer mojitos, but that’s another discussion.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Linkology posts.

Here’s a time-lapse video of a 20-hour blizzard compressed into 40 seconds. How quickly the snow accumulates on the tabletop is surreal. Also, I love the way the videographer takes the time to keep the clock face unobstructed as the snow piles up.

December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.

What else says ‘almost Friday’ like a collection of Liz Lemon flashbacks from 30 Rock?  Not much.

Enjoy.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More humor posts.

So I have an Droid X and iPhone sitting here, right in front of me.  My iPhone 4 drops a ton of calls, which led me to look at alternatives.  Here in Michigan, Verizon is a very strong network, so I picked the baddest phone in its lineup: the Droid X.

So far, between the two, I have mixed feelings.  The iPhone is by far more polished and has the best UX: the OS is smoother, navigation is much more consistent and intuitive, apps are a full order of magnitude better.  WiFi performance is notably better than the Droid X.  The iPhone’s camera is outstanding, easily besting the X’s 8 MP unit.  The phone itself – the hardware – is better.  The soft keyboard, while not Swype-enabled like the Droid X, seems designed to perfection; not a pixel is out of place.  But, the huge downside is that it drops a lot of calls.  And lately, if you call me, often the phone won’t even ring.  It’ll just send you to voicemail.

On the Droid X side, it’s…different.   Notifications are endlessly better than the iPhone.  I can customize anything I want (still learning about that).  Voice-enabled text fields are perhaps the killer feature.  Google apps are exponentially better, and I’m a total Google slappy: Maps, Gmail, Calendar – all of them.  But, on the downsides, there’s battery life.  And the app catalog is what Apple had back in 2008 (PaperToss is a ‘hot’ free game on Android).  The OS is klunky, stuttering in weird places, with some of the icons and art looking like it came right out of a b-grade art school.  But the coup de grace, the biggie, the reason it’s called a smartphone: calls are rock solid, if a little tinny (I chalk that up to CDMA vs. GSM).

So, what to do?  No idea yet.  I’ll ride out my 30-day window with the Droid X and Verizon to see what other (hopefully more conclusive) impressions I come to.

In the meantime?  Links, baby.

Please do not click on this link unless you want a completely inexplicable picture.

Positive self-talk: the greatest adaptation. Fantastic 7 minute video featuring Greg Amundson.

USC Law hosted a discussion with David Simon, creator of The Wire. Fascinating stuff.

E-Z Fynd is the safest, most secure way to search the internet. The video explains the concept.  Also: peppermints.

‘Tall Women Carrying Heavy Things’.  Google CEO Eric Schmidt on The Colbert Report.  Worth it.

Finally, here’s some footage from a camera on board a cruise ship when some very rough weather hit (25-foot waves, 50-knot winds).  Crazy.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Linkology posts.