A Different Kind of Christmas Tree

Feeling crafty? Find out how to make a 6 foot tall recyclable Christmas tree using soda cans.

What you need:

Materials: Approx 400 soda cans

Construction Materials : PVC pipe for the trunk, construction markers for the branches, a drill to get the constructions flags into the PVC pipe.

Time: 3 Months of soda drinking / 4 days of building

Great New Social Networking Site

I am amazed by the amount of social networking sites. A librarian friend, Beth Gallaway, invited me to iLike today and I LOVE it.

Here's the description:

Discover New Music
Check out what your friends are listening to, browse the libraries of people with similar tastes, and get Free MP3 downloads by new artists matched to your own music tastes.

Share and Compare
Share music libraries with your friends, browse and sample their most played songs, and compare your compatibility scores.

Get the iLike Sidebar for iTunes
Auto-organize your iTunes library, share your music tastes with friends, and get music recommendations directly in iTunes.

See my taste in music by looking/listening at my profile page.

Favorite Videos from YouTube

Even if you don't spend a lot of time at YouTube, I recommend setting up playlists.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Sesame Street Pinball Countdown

Taiko Drums

Johnny Cash on Sesame Street

For long time Mac fans

Whether or not you remember when Guy Kawasaki was a software evangelist for Apple, you'll enjoy Guy's interview with Steve Wozniak. Start with Guy's blog entry, The Top Ten Things I Love Most About Woz or go directly to the video of the interview.

Intriguing Slide Show

Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders is a fascinating collection of photographs posted on Flickr. It "explores the possibilities afforded to artists, architects, designers, and others for the creation of new types of objects, buildings, and products stemming from the increasing use of and integration between digital technologies for design and fabrication."

If you want to see all of the photos at once, click on the detail view.

Creative Fun Websites

Drawn is "a multi-author blog devoted to illustration, art, cartooning and drawing. Its purpose is to
inspire creativity by sharing links and resources."

International Association of Fake Universities (IAFU) is a great site if you need a laugh or a novelty gift. You can create your own fun diploma free using the IAFU Magic Mill diploma generator.

More Fun Websites

Am I Annoying
At this fun site you can vote on how annoying people and organizations are. After you read some background information you vote by choosing annoying, not annoying or undecided. You can also search for a variety of categories of celebrities. Here are a few of the A’s —A.C.L.U., Hank Aaron, Alexander the Great, Gene Autry. There are also lists of the most annoying of the year. For 2005 celebrities, Tom Cruise was most annoying and Gene Hackman least annoying.

Love Marmite
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, defines marmite as “a British savoury spread made from yeast extract, a by-product of beer brewing. It is a sticky, dark brown paste with a distinctive, powerful taste that polarises consumer opinion and prompts its advertising slogan that you either love it or hate it.” Unilever Bestfoods, a major UK supplier of Marmite, maintains two websites: Love Marmite and Hate Marmite; check them out for lots of laughs.

City Museum
Even if you aren’t planning a trip to Saint Louis (MO) anytime soon, you will find the descriptions and photos of the attractions at this unusual museum interesting. There are caves built within a historic shoe factory's spiral conveyor tunnel system, a circus cabaret show, and The Museum of Mirth, Mystery and Mayhem. Don't miss the photo of the world's largest pair of men's briefs.

FOUND Magazine
This website showcases photos of “found stuff” from FOUND Magazine. It all started when “one snowy winter night in Chicago a few years back, Davy went out to his car and found a note on his windshield—a note meant for someone else, a guy named Mario.” That first find has developed into “the witty, inexhaustible, much-lauded periodical featuring an edited array of things formerly misplaced, dropped, or otherwise left behind by others.” Examples of the items are “love letters, birthday cards, kids’ homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles—anything that gives a glimpse into someone else’s life.”

Dashboard Of Best Webcams On Net
This site lets you search through the best webcams of the world in real time and set up your own “dashboard” to view up to 15 webcams simultaneously. You can select the speed refresh of the images in the monitor and watch it using your customized dashboard or with one click go to the official website to view just one webcam.

Websites That Will Make You Laugh

Darwin Awards
The Darwin Awards "salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally kill themselves in really stupid ways." If you don't find black humor entertaining, skip this site. Founder, Wendy Northcutt, a graduate of University of California at Berkeley with a degree in molecular biology, began collecting the real stories in 1993. Besides her award-winning website, she has published two books of examples. One example is "the legend of the terrorist who sent a mail bomb with insufficient postage. The package was returned, and the absentminded terrorist opened the package and blew himself up."

Simply Fired
Online job search engine SimplyHired.com, collects stories from those who have been fired. The day I visited, the featured story was about a woman who worked for a local natural bread baking company in Wisconsin as the President's secretary. She created and wore a "cheese-bra" to a Packer's game in the hopes that she would be featured on television during the game and her brothers on the West coast would see her. She was fired because her "display of dairy product was unbecoming."

Blending Mystery and Technology

If you like both mystery books and technology, check out You've Got Murder by Donna Andrews. Her main character is Turing Hopperan artificial intelligence personality (AIP).

Another must for mystery lovers is Stop You're Killing Me, a "site to die for" with hundreds of authors, chronological lists of their books and even a character index.

Interpreting Statistics

Malcolm Gladwell, author of two of my favorite books, The Tipping Point and Blink began blogging in February. While all of his posts are interesting, The PitBull Paradox is great food for thought especially since statistics have such an impact on our lives.

Revisit Your Childhood

Take a look at Kidzworld's list of kids' favorite pranks and practical jokes for April Fool's Day and see if it brings back memories.

Did you ever do these?
• put plastic wrap over toilet seats
• set hidden alarm clocks to go off at very early times
• put sugar in salt shakers
• stick chalk in the blackboard erasers

Word of the Day

There are a variety of ways to keep up with teen lingo offered by Aaron Peckham at his Urban Dictionary website.

You can subscribe to the Word of the Day, use your cell phone if it can send email or has a WAP browser, add a feed to your RSS reader, or put an auto-updating Urban Word of the Day on your website. See info on all of the cool tools.

Unusual Personalized Gifts

If you need something really different for that special gift, try a custom bobblehead doll from Headbobble.

The custom dolls are created from your photo. Prices range from $69 for an individual to $179 for a wedding couple. If you want dolls seated on the motorcycle of your choice, the bike will cost an additional $40.

Here's the description, "Each one is specially made and goes through 3 full days of creation. Including 3D modeling of the face and head, fine tune sculpting, molding, and finally painting by the professional artist to match you skin, eyes and hair color. The custom made head is then attached onto the bobblehead body of your choice with a spring in between."

Another idea is custom printed M&M's. You can choose two colors and have 2 lines of 8 characters per line on each.

For iPod Lovers

If you own an iPod, don't miss Techeblog's Top 10 Strangest iPod Accessories.

Are You Podcasting?

If you are doing podcasts, check out the excellent tips Carson McComas, Internet marketing consultant, entrepreneur, search engine marketer, and web developer provides in his 20 Ideas for a Great Podcast blog entry.

Cute iPod Protector

I just discovered another wonderful Japanese character, a domo-kun—a small brown open-mouthed monster hatched from an egg who lives with a wise old rabbit underground. You can learn how to make a domo-kun ipod protector using this tutorial.

LEGO Robot

I mentioned the MAKE Magazine blog in my last post. In case you haven't checked it out yet, you may be intrigued by a recent entry—a LEGO Mindstorms robot—that detects the direction of sound and follows it!

Two New Blogs

Check out these two blogs I've added to my RSS newsreader:

MAKE magazine's blog - way cool info on do-it-yourself technology

Guy Kawasaki's Let the Good Times Roll - an eclectic mix of thoughts about innovation, technology, entrepreneurs and more