Surely this will be posted to every blog in the world in a matter of days, but I just couldn’t resist…

From CNN’s Man relives college life with beer-tossing fridge:

An engineering graduate has built a contraption to help remind him of campus life: a refrigerator that can toss a can of beer to his couch with the click of a remote control.

It took the 22-year-old Cornwell about 150 hours and $400 in parts to modify a minifridge common to many college dorm rooms into the beer-tossing machine, which can launch 10 cans of beer from its magazine before needing a reload.

Video found at Deadspin:

The Hole – video powered by Metacafe

The Baltimore Sun has a fascinating article this morning (link) in the fact that women are increasingly finding tha using the Internet is a more efficient use of their precious time than watching morning shows on TV… Should come as no surprise but the change seems quantifiable now:

When her children were young, Jenny Lauck flipped on Today or Good Morning America as she brewed her morning coffee and tended her babies.

But several years ago, the 34-year-old mother of three stopped watching the morning shows. After getting TiVo, she had no patience to sit through multiple commercial breaks during a live newscast. On top of that, the segments seemed frivolous.

“Watching morning television for me is the equivalent of reading People magazine in the dentist’s office,” said Lauck, who writes for Web sites from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif. “It seems like a lot of fluff. I feel like I can get information faster and cleaner on the Internet.”

Lauck is not alone in souring on network morning news programs. In particular, this season has seen a significant erosion of the shows’ demographic sweet spot: 25- to 54-year-old women.

Almost 450,000 of these women – coveted by advertisers because of their household purchasing power – have turned off the three broadcast morning programs this season, a decline of 10 percent compared with the same time last year, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. Male viewers the same age also fell by 9 percent, but they make up a smaller portion of the audience.

It’s difficult to trace the exact cause of the drop. It comes after two popular morning hosts, Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, left their shows to be evening news anchors. At the same time, the popularity of online news sites and the frantic press of daily life appear to have led many women to forgo morning TV. Women are also turning increasingly to “mommy blogs,” which now number 6,400, according to the blog search engine Technorati, to swap tales about modern motherhood.

Please check out the rest of this article, this really shows the impact that access to community and content is having on our lifestyles.

If anyone out there had any doubt about the utility of OpenID, there are now 63 million AOL/AIM OpenIDs.

63 million AOL/AIM users can now login to your application using OpenID if you support it…

63 million…

Kathy Sierra answers the question: How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company? Wrong question, she says.

The company should behave just like a good user interface — support people in doing what they’re trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way. Applying the employer-as-UI model, the best company is one in which the employees are so engaged in their work that the company fades into the background.

…

Finally, if you really want your employees to be passionate about the company, take lessons from UI and Usability: let people do what they want and need to do, and get the hell out of their way. Unfortunately, too many of our employers are like really bad software–frustrating us at every turn, behaving inconsistently, not giving us a way to learn new things and develop new, cool capabilities, etc.

She offers this 4 question test to see if you have passion for your work:

1. When was the last time you read a trade/professional journal or book related to your work? (can substitute “attended an industry conference or took a course”)
2. Name at least two of the key people in your field.
3. If you had to, would you spend your own money to buy tools or other materials that would improve the quality of your work?
4. If you did not do this for work, would you still do it (or something related to it) as a hobby?

A must read.