In following up the list of my favorite viral videos, here are some YouTube videos which I think show some incredible skills. They’re not “virally popular” but they probably should be!

Piano Playing Juggler

Can Throwing

Ball Throwing

Dice Stacking

David Belle demonstrating Parkour

Face Catching Raybans

I was re-watching Weezer’s Pork and Beans video and am still impressed by the number of outstanding viral videos they managed to squeeze into it. In tribute to the YouTube stars, here’s a summary of my favorites:

Canon Rock by Funtwo

Diet Coke + Mentos by EepyBird

Numa Numa by Gary Brolsma

Evolution of Dance by Judson Laipply

Kung Fu Audition Gone Wrong by Afro Ninja

Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday

T-Shirt Guiness World Record by Matt McAllister

July 1 marks my 6 month anniversary as a Vegan.
And still going strong!

Pay up Kenny

I was going down the highway *cough* slightly above *cough* the speed limit, when my front right tire blew out. And it was a serious blow out, as you can see from these pictures.

Never had a tire blow out on me at any speed, so I’m not really sure what would have happened. I suspect the car would have been pretty uncontrollable.

That’s when the Mercedes safety stuff kicked in. First thing I know is that the red alert comes up on my dash saying tire pressure was lost (don’t recall the exact message). Then I notice the engine drop power (probably as the computer reduced the power going to the wheels). For the entire time, the steering wheel was completely responsive: no pull to either side. I didn’t slam on the brakes (they say not to in a blowout, but I didn’t know that until later), but the brakes were working normally (no pull to either side). As I quickly gathered my wits, slowed down and pull over to the right lane, I notice a slight bumpiness on the right side of the car (which I later discovered was because the tire had pretty much completely deflated because so much of the side wall was gone). Words cannot express my gratitude and amazement at how the Mercedes safety systems worked! You can only tell how safety systems work when it actually deploys, and in this case it was spectacular!

After pulling over, I called used their Tele-Aid system (like GM’s OnStar). Sadly, their Tele-Aid system failed me. I was in an area where their in-built phone system had no signal! I had to resort to my AT&T iPhone (which had 5 bars!) to call Tele-Aid.

All up, it took 30 minutes for their Roadside Assistance guy to come. Great service, changed my tire out in under 10 minutes, and pointed me to the nearest tire shop.

Because the spare tire is for “emergencies only”, it is only rated for a top speed of 50mph. So I had a leisurely ride to America’s Tire Co which was the only nearby company that had my tire in stock (that’s one of the problems of having low profile sports tires… very few people stock them!).

Hours spent getting everything fixed … 4
New front-right tire … $343.13
Getting to live another day because of Mercedes Benz safety … priceless!

Nowadays, I communicate alot with people remotely (e.g. my family who lives overseas and people I outsource work to). Sometimes what I want to say cannot be communicated via email or even chat. That’s when screen captures and video captures really help.

I’ve been a huge fan of TechSmith’s Snag-It. The $49.95 cost is well worth its capabilities.

I’ve also tried TechSmith’s Camtasia video capture utility. And while I did find it useful, I just found the $299 cost to be just too high for the few times that I’d actually use it. Every so often, I’d smack my head and seriously consider buying it to solve a particular problem, baulk at the price, and then figure out a solution without needing Camtasia.

Earlier this week, a fellow geek pointed me to Jing. Jing, which interestingly enough is a product from TechSmith (makers of SnagIt and Camtasia), is totally free. It has screen capture and video capture capabilities. While the user interface is slightly different from SnagIt and Camtasia, the functionality is the same plus more! With Jing, you also get free access to Screencast (where you can host the videos you make). It’s not time limited, but it is bandwidth limited. So if you’re doing a serious amount of sharing, you will have to pay to upgrade your account.

But you don’t need to upload your captures to Screencast. You can easily save them as local files or you can move it into the clipboard (so that you can paste it on-the-fly to programs such as Photoshop).

I’m just totally amazed that such an awesome program is free. Check it out now!