Cult of MacGyver?
One of my favorite shows from when I was a kid was MacGyver. I know many people are a fan of the show. Even people who only watched an episode or two ( maybe they never watched it ) understand what a MacGyverism is. I am sure the show led some people into a life of science, or at least ingenuity.
The site There, I Fixed It shows the lower end of people's ingenuity. Some stuff is a total win, but most stuff is fodder for failblog.org. For instance, the item in the picture that starts this post is a neat solution to someone needing a bottle opener. At the lower end of the spectrum ingenuity usually collides with procrastination, laziness and budgetary concerns.
An example of one of these lower end "solutions" is the following example. When your bathroom sink is broken or missing what's your first thought? Is it,"If only I had a plastic bin and some duct tape I could take care of this problem." Probably not, but some people do think this. [ad#Google Adsense]
In the world of programming, non-elegant solutions that get the job done ( and usually make the code less stable ) are called kludges. There, I Fixed It! is a wonderful kludge collection. Some kludges, make you smile and others make you laugh. There are some, though, that make you cringe. You cringe because you are scared for your and other people's safety.
For example, some people insist on fixing their own cars.
So for a laugh and a cringe check out thereifixedit.com or subscribe to its RSS feed. Enjoy.
You (Auto) Complete Me
Want to see something funny? Start typing into the google search bar and you might - even before you start feeling lucky ;)
Auto-completing text input fields have made all sorts of applications much easier to use. For search engines, it really helps because we often aren't alone in our quests for knowledge. Auto-completion lets us see very popular searches.[ad#Google Search]
A few weeks ago I read a post that said,"Go to Google and start typing is there." Having a sense that there was something interesting to see I did just that. I typed in is there and the autocomplete field showed me some interesting possible ways to complete my search.
At first you might be thinking to yourself,"Why does anyone care about Transformers 3" but you are probably really thinking,"Oh My God! Is that really a popular enough search to be first?" That was my first thought, but my second thought was
"What other things can I type in to find ridiculous autocomplete results?"
I searched for a bit and found some funny stuff and I shared some of them with my co-workers. The next day someone pointed me to AutoCompleteMe.com. A new site had already sprung up to catalog this phenomena.
There are some great ones, such as when you start by typing in,"I like to t"
Not only did someone want to share their dinosaur role playing habits, but some others have an interest in Jesus that isn't what I'm used to.
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I've seen these results myself, and they are surprisingly real. Are people really typing these things in or is this just a little bit of Google employee humor? I'm guessing its a little of both. Have you seen any interesting results come up in an auto-complete field? If so please share in the comments, maybe you could even take a screen capture and submit it to AutoCompleteMe.com.