David Pitlyuk

I happened to stumble on this neat effect where people have made their monitors look like they are transparent. They do this by using photography and their desktop background to make it look like the picture is part of what would be behind the monitor. Here’s a great example:

You can check out a slideshow gallery of Flickr with many more examples. Have you ever done anything like this?

A new U.S. budget carrier, Skybus, is going to start offering one-way plane tickets for $10. The carrier currently flies to locations like Los Angeles, Ft. Lauderdale, Vancouver, Boston, Seattle, and more. The carrier will offer at least 10 seats on each flight that can be had for $10 (not including taxes and fees), keep in mind these are advanced purchases. You are still going to pay a lot for last minute fairs.

Skybus is an interesting concept in budget carriers. They are subsidizing their expenses by only offering ticket sales online (so no call center overhead), charging extra for bag check and priority seating, and offer advertising throughout the inside and outside of the planes. One of the plane’s will display a Nationwide Insurance logo on the fuselage, on top of ads on the tray tables, overhead bins, restroom doors, and refreshment cart.

I realize $10 for a plane ticket is hard to pass up, but it’s just a promotion. Would you be willing to keep paying less for plane tickets in return for worse service and less amenities? What about advertising plastered everywhere? I would to an extent. This all reminds me of the movie Idiocracy. I’m just waiting for everything to have advertising, and Gatorade to replace water.

I was at a store the other day and happened to find a Dora The Explorer toy that I found to be funny. Here’s what it looks like as it comes:

The one I saw had the basket in the front missing:

Obviously the one piece that represents something phallic is just the piece that holds the basket onto Dora.

Here’s a comparison shot next to each other:

Maybe it’s just my dirty mind, but I found it to be hilarious!

Update: I was doing a little internet research and found another dirty Dora The Explorer sexual toy:

Last weekend I went back home to NJ. I’m originally from there, and my mom and brother are still there. I decided to take my ex-girlfriend Crystal to dinner at Acacia (Horrible website, they should hire Tri Megatech), which considers themselves progressive American cuisine. The restaurant is located in Lawrenceville, NJ, right across the street from Lawrenceville prep school, a top private school in the country.

Acacia considers themselves fine dining, with appetizer, dinner for two, and desert, the bill came out to be around $100 after tip. One thing to note is they are BYOB, which means no liquor license. If you want wine with your dinner, it’s your job to bring it yourself.

Appetizer

We started off with garlic roasted shrimp set on a creamy mascarpone polenta. I’ve never had mascarpone polenta before, but it was very good. We ate most of it before I realized that I forgot to take a picture!

Dinner

For dinner I had the grilled black angus filet mignon. It’s set on top of a smoked bacon potato and sweet potato tart. It’s topped off with onion rings.

Crystal had the chicken breast filled with truffled goat cheese. She thought it was very tasty, but it would have been better without so much breading.

Desert

This was another one that I forgot to take a picture of before eating some of it! The desert was excellent, we split the chocolate mousse dome on a triple chocolate brownie with a side of mint chocolate chip ice cream and chocolate covered strawberry:

Atmosphere

Acacia is a pretty small restaurant, that is a bit hidden. Here’s a couple pictures:

The After Party

After dinner we met up with a couple of friends at Top Dog in Cherry Hill, NJ for some drinking and dancing. Top Dog is a great place where you can just hang out and drink at the bar if you don’t feel like dancing, or pay $5 to go upstairs to the dance club.

I was going through my RSS feed of Engadget, and found the Hamster Shredder. This state-of-the-art contraption utilizes 1hp (hamster power) to shred your documents in order to ensure complete privacy.

From time to time I will be linking to posts I find interesting from readers that comments on posts at my blog. Want to possibly get a link in a future post here? Consider posting more comments, and I may just find something of interest at your site/blog!

Knupnet - Do You Twitter? And Why? - I’ve heard about all the Twitter buzz, but I really can’t get into it. I would rather spend my time in other, more valuable ways. See what “Knup” thought.

OfZenAndComputing - Clean Your Keyboard in the Dishwasher, or in the Sink - I go through keyboards way too often…and mainly because they get pretty nasty, and I don’t want to deal with popping all the keys out and cleaning it all up. Check out this washable keyboard solution.

Financial Imbalance - How do I know if I am in a position to buy a new home? - If you’re thinking about buying a house, Thomas brings up some excellent questions to ask yourself before talking with the bank or mortgage broker.

Luke 16.10 - How to save money on groceries - Luke provides tips on how he saved 25% on his monthly grocery bill. With a family of 3, little savings here and there can make a drastic difference in the amount of total money that can be saved. Start with one that can add up to a lot.

Green Llama - Blogging Mistakes Group Project Results - If you are starting a blog, the best thing you can do is learn from other people’s mistakes first, so you don’t make them yourself. The all-mighty Green Llama has compiled a list of other peoples posts where they talked about the mistakes they made.

Community Spark - Improving your website - Martin speaks about the fact that just designing and launching your step is not the final step. He reiterates the importance that constant tweaking and changes are necessary to make your site the most optimal and efficient.

Rehuel punt kom - From fulltime webdesigner to fulltime blogger in 7 steps - Rehuel talks about how he is making the transition from a web designer to a full-time blogger. Find out what steps he is taking to make the transition.

HarpzOn - Predicting PageRank For New Blogs - Mitch came across a neat tool that predicts what your Google PageRank will be on their next update. Mitch just launched his blog in March and is already predicted to be a PR4, exciting stuff!

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Have you ever gone to a sports game or the beach, but not had a way to bring a drink with you? Never fear, just pick up some Reef Dram sandals. Doesn’t make sense to you yet? The sandals have a built-in flask that can fit 3 ounces (or 3 shots) of whatever liquid your heart desires.

The sandals feature a canteen with a screw that can be opened up using an included key, a mini-funnel, and measuring bar to see how much liquid you have left. You can pick a pair of these up for about $45.

These are in succession to the Fanning’s which feature a bottle opener on the bottom of the sandals. My roommate has these, and loves them.

This is a great example of a company thinking outside of the box. While the products aren’t the most intuitive thing in the world, it’s enough to create a buzz and generate a ton of sales that otherwise would not have had any attention.

For the past two years that I’ve been living in Northern Virginia, I’ve been hearing about some great indoor go-cart track. If you know me, you know I love cars, and you know I love driving. So finally this past weekend I decided to check it out. The name of the place is called Allsports Grand Prix, and it’s located in Dulles, VA. The place is pretty much all out, you have to wear a race suit, gloves, and helmet to even get on the track. There are two types of carts, the regular one is 6.5hp and the superkart one is 9hp. This doesn’t seem like a lot, but the regular one goes about 38mph on the straight away. In order to even be able to drive the superkart, you have to be able to get 4 25 second or less laps in one race. To put that in perspective, by best time was 26.846:

Now I know you’re going to call me out on excuses, but I was getting bad times because I didn’t really know what the race line was. Plus on one of the hairpin turns, I kept spinning out. One of the officials was sitting at that corner, and when I left, I asked what I was doing wrong to keep spinning out. He said I was using my brakes, go figure! On the entire track, the brakes are not supposed to be used. The technique for the hairpin turn is to go wide, letting off the gas and turning will slow the kart down enough to make the turn. In the middle of the turn as the kart is sideways and pointing straight is when you can give it full gas again. I wish I knew this beforehand, I’m sure my times would have been much better!

The entire experience is really fun, but it’s something you need to do a few times in order to start getting good at it. The problem with that is that it’s really expensive, $24.50 for just 8 minutes of racing for non-members. 8 minutes gets about 16-18 laps depending on how fast you go. Annual membership is $50, and that includes a t-shirt, 8-minute race, and another 8-minute race on your birthday. It also gives you a discounted rate of $17/race whenever you do want to go. So you can tell, this sport can get really expensive, but it’s great fun! Here’s a picture of yours truly getting ready to race:

Some of you are aware that I was one of the two people behind SmashMyViper.com. I’ve always been a big fan of those quirky ideas to make a million dollars, and SmashMyViper was definitely one of them. I found an interesting concept (although more than likely not a million dollar idea) called “The Big Brown Box“.

The concept behind this is to collect a big brown box worth of stuff to auction off. The box already has almost $15,000 worth of stuff in it. The coolest tangible product is definitely the Dell XPS Laptop, the rest of the products are all provided by businesses, the biggest being a $10,000 web traffic package. So the way I look at it, it’s interesting to see the kind of stuff that are provided to go into the box, especially if non-businesses start submitting things. For the business, they have the chance of getting mentioned on the blog with a link, so that should provide some promotion back to them. This in turn would generate traffic and allow them to monetize the site.

I realize that Alexa is not the end-all-be-all of traffic, but according to them, the site is not generating much yet…but if it does get some press, it has the chance to get much bigger. From a business perspective, you can provide something now, and if they use it and link to it, it has the possibility of generating some good traffic back. Of course this is all based on the fact that a lot of press is generated. Remember, get in early to reap the most benefits. Advertisers on SmashMyViper.com that started out first got the most bang for their buck. The people that started out promoting AGLOCO first will most likely see the most referrals.

Let me know if you decide to donate anything, I know that I’m thinking about it.

If you aren’t already a part of the Woot! revolution, then today is your lucky day.

What Is Woot!?

Woot! is a cool concept for an eCommerce store where they sell just one item per day until it sells out.  They normally have really cool deals and some neat products with hilarious descriptions.  The community on the site is very strong and they have a large following.  Minutes after a product is posted you will see tons of comments with helpful links such as prices online, reviews, opinions, and more.

The most notorious product they sell is known as the “BOC” aka “bag of crap”.  These literally sell out completely in a matter of seconds after going live.  The bag of crap is essentially $8 shipped (They are $1 each, but it is highly recommended you purchase the maximum quantity of 3, and $5 to ship).  Everything on Woot! is $5 for shipping, even if it’s a 60″ plasma TV.  The bag of crap will have very random products in it, but some select lucky people can end up getting things like a 60″ TV or an expensive MP3 player.  It’s always funny to see people post pictures of what they got in their BOC’s.

What Is A Woot! Off?

A Woot! Off is a day where Woot! decides to sell a bunch of products one after another.  As soon as something sells out, a new product pops up.  Normally they will throw in a random BOC in there, so be on the lookout.

Best Way To Track Woot!’s

The best way to watch the Woot! is to use the WootAgent.  The WootAgent is a simple application that runs in your taskbar and will show a popup notification when a new product comes up.  Especially for days like today, you don’t have to keep refreshing the site to see when the next product is up…so when something good comes on, you have the opportunity to buy right away.

Good Luck!

Good luck on the Woot! Off today, and let me know if you end up getting anything.  I’ve come very close to getting the rare BOC once to the point where I had my credit card info in, but by the time I finalized my order they were gone.  I will be on the lookout for another one today!