Digital Treasure Fantastic Finds

It's February. Already.

December and January vanished in a haze of 14 hour days, conference calls and Powerpoint, barely a glance at Facebook, Twitter left lying sadly neglected, barely a pause for Christmas celebrations.  My friends are having an awful lot of fun with the real and not so real answers to "what did I miss" question. I'm struggling to tell what might be real and did happen and what didn't.

Apparently there was a power cut during the superbowl last weekend. I hadn't even twigged it was on. CES... no idea what happened there... no doubt some bigger and smarter TV screens, but I didn't hear they had yet cracked a smartphone that can bring me a cup of tea in bed in the morning. It snowed... that I did note.

Twitter I miss so much during such periods of mad intensity that I can't indulge my curiosity with distraction.  But for all of that I have tripped over two things of digital awesomeness during the last week or so.

One is another genius Firefox plugin to add to my evangelism list (I already love love love love Fireshot)... and now my inner SEO nerd has uncovered.... SEOQuake.  Clutters my browser with amazing stats and has a really really simple diagnosis report for the headlines. Love it.

The other.... and this is the coolest thing I have found on the interweb in a really really long time... is the Internet WayBack Machine.... an archive of websites past and present.

Pop in your URL....and  out it pops with all the data points you can go back to to follow the evolution of a website overtime.... here's the BBC

Then, select your datapoint to get back to a WORKING, EXPLORABLE version of the site....

December 1996....

February 2003....

February 2007....

I am one ecstatic geek right now. 

I could play with this for hours and hours.  What an amazing archive resource. Truly digital treasure.

Digital GOLD: The simplest ideas are often the best

 This is pure genius:  For those of us that spend hours a day stuck behind a keyboard, often out of sight of nature, then you need to bookmark this RIGHT NOW:

Challenge your ADD, a condition that makes us jumpy and impatient, and (here's that link again - click, you know you want to) take two minutes to just pause and think.  Hands off that keyboard!

So simple.  Made my day.

Trivial Treasure

Thanks to a little bit of crowdsourcing from the teams I work with, what started off with me sharing a random but humorous Tumblr I tripped over somehow somewhere, a flurry of random finds from the interweb flooded my way. Given that in the whirlwind my life has been over the last few months the posts have been a little few and far between, I thought I'd share them just for fun, please hang your PC hats by the door first:

Tumblr for men....

Goats on stuff...

Kim Jong looking at things...

Stickers on the Central Line... 

Dear Photograph...

A fun variation on the myriad of entertaining Flickr groups around what's in my (man/hand/tool) bag :

What would you take from the burning house...  (very insightful and curious selection of what people value)

And with Father's Day fast approaching:

Dads are the original hipsters...

So with that in mind, this one's for you Dad.   [Here with fabulous flares and my little bro]. You rock :-)

Unrepentently geeky but funny

I might not be spending too much time in studios full of techy coding nerds at the minute but I have done in the past, and no doubt will again in the future. So with my geek badging proudly shining I offer you an amusing film trailer style video spoof using people to engender emotion to the otherwise rather dry geeky battle between .Net and Java.  You don't even have to have the faintest clue what .Net or Java are to appreciate it as a good spoof but for those that do, this is absolute digital treasure.