Chinese Couple Tries to Name Child "@"

The title says it all. According to the Associated Press, a Chinese couple has tried to name their child the ubiquitous "@" symbol. Apparently there are at least 60 million people in China who have names comprised of "unfamiliar characters."

According to the article:

The father "said 'the whole world uses it to write e-mails and translated into Chinese it means 'love him,'"' Li Yuming, the vice director of the State Language Commission, said at a news conference.

I guess "۞" and "©" were already taken...

Image by: vlauria

Spock, Worst Start-up Idea Ever?

After the MySpace founders cashed out with more money than the GDP of a small nation, a slew of Web2.0-ish start-ups graced our lives with social network rip offs or vaporware. A more recent challenger is Spock which crosses a social network with a search engine. Boring you say? Well things get more interesting if you hear some background on the service.

Here are some things you should know about Spock a) you don't need to sign up for the service, you may already be there without knowing it, b) the company created a mad libs type application where people could fill in the name of a random person and related nouns, verbs and adjectives, c) the company populated its initial profiles with much of the data received from this application.

You can probably guess where this is going. If I'm filling out a mad libs type form with, say the name of my best friend. I will probably be immature and include a description that is probably completely untrue. For example, if someone were to say "John Cramer" is a cross dressing trapeze artist from Prague in the application. A user searching for "John Cramer" on Spock may well find those terms associated with his profile. The company also has a spider that roams the internet and looks for text associated with the various names.

As Wired recently said, if Spock becomes popular - you may have no choice but to sign on so you can police your reputation.

I can't attest to the accuracy of the results. I searched for my name and those of a few friends and (luckily) didn't have a profile.

If you feel the need to try out Spock, you can find a review here. It was the first few matche I found via Google and happens to say some relatively positive things about the site. I think I share the observations of Web Strategist when it wrote that it seems like Spock is something that Google could create relatively quickly and dwarf the site in no time.

New iPod Soon?

Rumors are swirling over at engadget that an update to the 5g video iPod is on the horizon. Retailers have said that Apple is slowing shipments of the gadgets, suggesting perhaps that an update will be coming soon. It should be noted that there doesn't seem to be any hard evidence to back up the rumors... and well... it's no secret one has been in the works for some time. Regardless, when you are talking about the hottest gadget in recent history anything is noteworthy.

Bringing Old Systems Back to Life In Style

Ben Heckendorn is somewhat of a phenom in geek circles for the insane custom video game consoles he has been turning out over the past few years. He has recently converted some of the newer systems like the Wii and XBOX360 into laptops for (somewhat) portable play.

My personal favorites are the portable NES and and the PS2 portables. Yeah the systems Ben mods aren't as small as say a PSP or Nintendo DS, but they also have the entire motherboard of the original system and take full size cartridges or disks.

If you have an old system and about $500 lying around he will mod your system into a working portable version too.

Head on over to his site and check out the masterpieces as well as his step by step instructions for some of the rigs.

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