Not only is it an amazingly awesome picture, but Emily and I agree her unique suit is super cute. Looking closely at the folds, you can tell it's a wetsuit of some kind, but the logo is unfamiliar. The picture is of Australian surfer Belinda Baggs. Searching the internet, we checked any wetsuit company we could find to see who makes it. We tried looking up info on Belinda to see who she was sponsored by or anything that would hint at this wetsuit. Nothing. Then, yesterday morning, I tried one more time and found an obscure website that had some personal bio-type info on her. On it it's mentioned that she likes Rash Wetsuits from Japan. Yup, they make it. When Emily asked how I even found it, I tried to show her the bio-site that I found using the same search terms I used before. Not there. Go figure. They seem like nice wetsuits from what I can figure using iGoogle's handy little Translation gadget to poorly translate (by copy and paste) the Japanese to English (just now in googling for the translator page, I miss-typed and searched for "igoogle translort" and still got it as the first result, awesome). Turns out, there's even a single California dealer of these wetsuits located not far from my hometown in Oxnard, CA via Laina Imports. So, from a picture and a name, in 3 hours we figured out the makers of an obscure wetsuit company (obscure to us in North America, at least) based out of Japan and a local dealer to purchase them from (not that we can afford it, they're nice, but out of our range. The colors are all customizable on order. Emily wants a pink wetsuit now).
Another set of gems on the internet are recorded TED talks. TED is a conference held in Monterey, CA every year where a variety of experts come and present on a large variety of topics and technologies all loosely based on the theme of improving mankind. A gathering of nerds of the glorified kind.
This one I thought was fascinating, especially after performing less-than-stellar on a hand-skills practical exam to prepare a plastic upper-right 1st molar for a 3/4 gold crown this morning. It gives some comfort regarding my slowly budding handskills, and the take-home message at the very end is worth watching. He speaks of the brain's plasticity and ability to re-wire itself, mostly focusing on handicapped children and elderly. It's about 23 minutes long.
To be honest, I don't actually watch many of these. I hang out on Digg and when the description of one catches my interest, I'll check it out. Digg is full of nerds (or endlessly-curious and fascinated-with-technology sociopaths) and I find lots of good stuff on there to keep me interested in learning about whatever.
2 comments:
That is a cool wetsuit! I really like it, but I'm not sure how warm it would keep me.
Erik's boss, Burt Rutan, did a TED talk. It's on their site. Supposedly, they edited it because he made some jokes about Clinton.
I saw that in the book store the other day and almost bought it. You'll have to save all the old editions so I can steal them and read them when you are done with them :o)
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