My son just celebrated his first birthday this month and we held a big party for him. He received many gifts, and below are two of the gifts he received. I find it interesting to write about these two particular gifts for a few reasons. Firstly these two trucks are almost identical but the one of the left is made in China by Xin Ji Qi Toys. The truck on right is made in Canada by Mega Bloks Inc.

The mold is the same except for the truck’s load. The Canadian truck seems to be made with a higher grade plastic than the Chinese one as it is already broken. Both trucks came with a plastic figurine that sits in the truck along with a few bricks that lock together like Lego. The blocks that came with the Chinese truck do not actually connect to the studs on the truck whereas they do on the Canadian truck. The figurine that comes with the Canadian truck locks onto the supplied blocks. But guess what? The Chinese one does not.

Another interesting thing is the sticker on the bottom of the Chinese truck. It doesn’t make much sense. It reads:

“The intelligence development educates the series. The hand eye brain integration moderates”.

Just another example of bad English translation from Chinese imported goods.

I’m not sure if Xin Ji Qi have just ripped off the Mega Bloks truck or if they have made it under a license but they’ve done a pretty crap job of it. No worries though, my son enjoys them both and he couldn’t care less.

Since the birth of the internet we have seen it empower compelling metrics that has lead to innovation of leading-edge partnerships. Besides this we have seen it recontextualize leading-edge infrastructures through the extension 24/7 architectures. That’s right, the web is sweet as bro.

Now you are probably wondering WTF I’m talking about. Well, I don’t know either. This post was written with the help of the Web Economy Bullshit Generator. Next time you’re applying for a job in the IT workforce, give this thing a try and you’ll be sure to impress any potential employer. Good luck!

I don’t really care much for fashion but what I do like seeing is clever and funny t-shirt designs. Especially designs that satirise well known trademarks. An example being the Dunkin’ Donuts shirt remixed to say F**kin Go Nuts. Or the McDonalds shirts that read McS**t. I got the idea to remix the the logo for Dick Smith Electronics last night as I walked past one of their stores. A stencil artist had painted blood pouring from poor Dick’s eyes. It looked pretty cool. Dick Smiths is a pretty good electronics franchise/chain that I used to work for. So anyway here is my first attempt at trademark remixing. I’d like to get that screen printed onto a t-shirt. I’d have mean geek street cred then.

You know what to do. Leave a comment as a caption for this photograph.

Janice had to book an emergency appointment with her stylist. The 90s were just around the corner

I have not posted in a long time. There is no excuse really. But anyway recently I was having a clean out of the lab and I found some old computer science books from the 70s and 80s. Some of the pictures in these books are so funny. So I though I’d scan and share them. I thought of some funny captions for these but I think that you the reader could come up with some better ones. Unfortunately the book is in a skip now so I can credit it.

Please leave a comment if you have better captions.

Frank’s iBrick was nice accessory to his hardhat

While browsing the the Thinkgeek store recently, I came across the TIX Clock. This unusual clock uses flashing LEDs to tell the time. To somebody unfamiliar with the clock, it is pretty hard to read the time. It just looks like a bunch lights flashing at random. Below is a little JavaScript version I made. Can you tell the time?

The clock is made up of four numbers. You just count number of each colour. So if you have 1 green light, 2 yellow lights, 3 red lights and 4 blue lights. The time is 12:34. I made this clock for fun. I hadn’t coded anything in JavaScript for a while so I though this would be a good little project to kill some time. If would like to see the source, click here, then view the source from your browser