Adam's Ideas

Vienna is a fantastic RSS reader for the mac, use it.

Discovery Kids has a series called Endurance that has teams of kids competing against each other to win a free trip to Hawaii. The goals along the way to winning is to collect “pyramid pieces” that are based on simple character traits like trust and commitment (somehow respect isn’t on the list).The premise:

Leaving behind friends, family, cell phones, television, mp3 players and electricity, 10 guys and 10 girls from all across America will join together to compete on Endurance: High Sierras. Not knowing what adventures and challenges await them, they will have to overcome the pain and survive the Elimination Game just to qualify as one of the 14 official Endurance: High Sierras contestants. This year the kids will not only have to face some of the most grueling challenges yet, but they’ll have to use their wits and make enduring friendships in order to last in this exciting new season! 

There is no mention of viewer participation within the game, it’s purely teams of two competing against each other. The challenges that they face are glorified camp games. While the puzzles are literally virtual puzzle pieces that you put together, the interface is frustrating. Their website doesn’t even provide a venue to talk about the show, even where they provide polling to engage the user.

The weekly recaps are not provided as video clips, only long boring text.

The flash player they are using twice crashed my browser and the menus on the left hand side of the site don’t appear if you follow the links from above. The overall usability of the site deters from its impact and, of course, usefulness. Why even bother making a site this choppy?

Holy turds!

I can ride my bicycle with stupid wrist.

I hate you world. I now join the ranks of Stephan Colbert

I broke my wrist and all I’ve been able to do all day is hate the world, that is, until I saw UNIQLOCK

“Having fat friends makes you fat, researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of California says after after examining 12,067 individuals and 38,611 of their relatives and friends. In same-sex friendships, people were 71 per cent more likely to put on weight if a friend of theirs became obese. “It’s not that obese or non-obese people simply find other similar people to hang out with. Rather, there is a direct, causal relationship,” says Harvard professor Nicholas Christakis.”

Thanks /.