slamboard

I have actually taken a course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I chose my title based on my experience. People who are learning English as adults generally love idioms. This post is mostly a shout out to a school with a very cool advertising campaign. I first saw this video on something called The Pop Culture Translator. This thing is a promotional tool for the Canadian College of English Language.

I have two personality traits that are often at odds with each other. I am very curious. I am also very frugal. This means, for instance, that while I may have been dying to know how fast various objects were moving around in my life experience, I haven’t been spending hundreds of dollars on radar guns in order to find out how fast these things were moving.

I hadn’t noticed until now that they are marketing affordable radar guns. They are also easy to use and quite versatile. RadarGunSales.com has US made guns and ships them free in the US. On top of that, they have warranties. If you are doing unusual experiments with your radar gun, I would suggest you read the warranty carefully first.

Typical stuff that people like to clock include balls, pucks, boats, bikes and cars. I can imagine that some people like to find out how fast their dog can go. This is easy to find out if your dog chases cars because cars generally have a meter that measures speed (they are not very accurate).

It might be fun to gear up a radar gun to an unpopular politician and then throw pies at his face. Pies are not very aerodynamic, so I don’t think the numbers will be very impressive.

Aviary is an incredible web based suite of tools for creative people. I have to confess that I don’t even have a basic understanding of Photoshop, but I jumped on the beta bandwagon for this shiny new thing anyway.

One very interesting thing that I saw on my as yet unedited Aviary profile is that there is a default setting that states that EVERYONE can edit my uploaded images. That could get interesting.

I just got my beta invite and I am going to try not to let this really cool new thing become a major time suck for me.

This invisibleSHIELD video might be the biggest workout that these geeks have ever had in their lives. They spend most of this video piling weights on a stretched sheet of their polyurethane film product. Scratch proofing is a smart investment for pricey gadgets like the iPhone and this material is obviously not flimsy. This is the same material that is used to protect the leading edge of helicopter blades by the US Army.

A cute girl walks by partway through the video, BTW.

Livescribe has an amazing new product. It is a smart pen. It is so powerful that I can barely understand what exactly it is supposed to do. It records audio and when you take notes on special dot position system paper, you end up with synced files. When you review notes, you can tap the pen on your paper and review the audio that was recorded when you were writing. I can see how this gadget might look useful to a university student. Other targeted niches include your CSI types.

I was just checking out a global internship placement agency. I was surprised to see that they have an office on Second Life. Students and companies can sit down for a free consultation in that virtual environment during their regular business hours. I personally wouldn’t feel like I was really doing business in that kind of environment. When I did some research, I found that it really does seem like more of a gimmick than a real business tool. One business even had some over the top stereotypical receptionists.

Second Life has opened an office (IRL) in China. I can’t see Second Life being very successful in that totalitarian state.

I was checking out a contest at some random girl’s blog and I discovered an interesting web tool at Random.org.

If you have a list that you want to put in random order, you can just paste it into this box and click on randomize to have your items put in a truly random order. I think this would be a cool way to organize polls for your blog.

The creator of the website warns against entering sensitive, private information into this tool because there is no encryption. Third parties could intercept the data.

The Aptera has a certain appeal. It is an electric car that looks sleek and goes fast. It is competitively priced. I am not sure how the oil companies are going to kill it. It is interesting to note that the company thought outside the box when it came to dealing with present regulations. In the eyes of the DOT it is a motorcycle.

The unique venture that is Gift Card Lab is now up and running. You can use their service to create a personalized gift card for someone you care about with an image that you either choose from a gallery or upload to the site.

You choose an dollar amount to load onto the card when you make your order and the person that receives the card can spend that value in any place that accepts VISA, which is basically everywhere. The cost to you for the creation of a card is only $5.95. They are a great ‘last minute’ gift since they can be delivered in 5 to 10 business days. I know, I am a guy and ‘last minute’ always meant the 24th for me. If you are reading this after Christmas, make a point of checking out the site for all the other occasion specific card images. I like the one that has a photograph of a gasoline nozzle stuck into the gas tank opening of a new car. That would be a great extra to stick in the glove compartment of a gift car.