Category: fun

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Redactle – It’s like Wordle but for censored WIkipedia articles

Thanks to a coworker, my latest obsession is Redactle. Each day, it takes one of the 10,000 most popular articles from Wikipedia and censors every word that isn’t a common preposition or article. Each time you make a correct guess, the word is uncovered, slowly revealing more and more of the article. It’s sick and  it’s fun.

Essentially, this turns into an all day affair as I take breaks and then come back to try and solve the puzzle. Yesterday, I determined the article was about “Sparking Wine” after about 276 guesses… 🙀

Get guessing!

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An ngnomo’

Due to downsizing and restructuring, last week was my last week at DeNA San Francisco (formerly ngmoco). Past ngmoco alum have a special saying for this type of thing: “I’m an ngnomo’!”

The past year or so has been a blast! I met so many great people and I know we’ll cross paths again. We did a lot of great work together and had a lot of fun in the process, plus we learned a lot and taught each other a lot too.

Anyway, I’m excited for new opportunities and even bigger and better things to come. Stay tuned! 🙂

A look back at the last year:

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It’s Monday, but it isn’t…

I’ve been messing around with the ridiculously cheesy (but pretty fun) Songify app on the iPhone which auto-tunes spoken word and applies it to a backing musical track.

I thought I’d make my own musical debut. Rebecca Black, watch out!

It’s Monday. (Only it isn’t, because I’m dumb and recorded this song this morning — when it was actually Tuesday.)

[audio:http://daveschumaker.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Dave-Schumaker_-_Its-Monday.mp3|titles=Dave-Schumaker_-_Its-Monday]

[MP3 link]

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Word of the Day game

My sister and I have been playing a little game that involves texting each other a sentence based on Dictionary.com’s word of the day.

It’s especially fun when we start trash talking each other using past words of the day.

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Fighting dirty in Scrabble

Word with friends - getting owned

Recently, I downloaded a game for the iPhone called “Words with Friends.” It’s very similar to Scrabble, with a different board and slightly different letter values (one would assume to avoid Scrabble’s IP lawyers).

Many of my family and friends are playing the game and we’re all having fun trying to best each other’s scores. I like to think I have a good vocabulary, but apparently I don’t know how to effectively play for points, as evidenced above by the 60-point bomb that Kerry dropped on me, two moves into the game!

No matter though. I’ll just have to brush up on the following video, “Fighting dirty in Scrabble.”

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Ovo by Cirque du Soleil

Last weekend, Kerry and I saw the latest Cirque du Soleil show, Ovo, which is currently playing in San Francisco. It was stunning! This was the second time I’ve seen a Cirque du Soleil show and it was every bit as impressive as the first time I saw it! I’m pretty sure my mouth was hanging open the entire time.

Here’s the trailer for the current show.

One of the coolest parts of the show was towards the end, when a number of actors started using a series of trampolines and running up and down a wall. It looks incredibly fun! (Unfortunately, an awesome video showing the Cirque crew practicing this routine was pulled from YouTube)

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Rolling my own URL shortener

Thanks to the popularity of micro-blogging sites such as Twitter, URL shorteners are popping up everywhere. Bit.ly, one of the most popular shortening services, has raised over $2 million dollars in funding!

Despite their popularity, URL shortening sites are by no means a permanent fixture on the internet. A perfect example of this was tr.im, which announced last month that it was shutting down (and taking down all the links users had generated with it). Fortunately, tr.im decided to reverse its decision soon after. However, this shows how potentially vulnerable these services are.

For fun (and peace of mind) – I decided to experiment with creating my own URL shortener for personal purposes! This would allow me to periodically backup my database of links and also serve as a way to bookmark and share content that I find interesting. Plus, I was able to acquire a fun URL as well.

Say hello to dave.ly!

If you see links from it, you know it’s from me and is something I thought was interesting enough to share! Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think. I’d like to do some more things in the future as well (i.e., show a list of the most popular links).

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Pranks Around the Apartment Building – Esoteric Humor

Among our friends, my roommates and I are known as pranksters, constantly pulling random jokes on each other and other people that we love.

Over the holidays, our landlord posted an interesting sign in the lobby and elevators of our apartment building. It basically said that the building could not accept 12″ x 12″ x 12″ boxes over the holidays. Included with this announcement was a helpful drawing of a 12″ x 12″ x 12″ box, just in case someone didn’t know what a square looks like.

"Reminder to Tenants"

These signs had been posted for over two weeks. One evening, when my roommates and I were taking the elevator up to our apartment, we thought of a potentially funny idea (at least to us!). We thought it would be funny to have the sign say the exact same thing, except that the drawing would be a rectangle with 12″ x 12″ x 12″ dimensions. Below that would be a message that claimed the drawing was not to scale.

A quick trip to Kinko’s resulted in the following:

"Reminder to Tenants - Drawing not to scale"

We set about posting these around the building one evening. Happy with our work, we went to bed. Upon awaking the next morning and setting off for work, we found that someone had scrawled in angry block letter on one of our signs, “YEAH, NO KIDDING!!!!” with a giant arrow pointing to the “Drawing not to scale” message! Hah. Pretty funny.

By the time we returned home at the end of the day, all the signs had been replaced with correct ones. Ah well. I wonder if our landlord at least laughed?

Us science geeks can have a pretty esoteric sense of humor at times.