Steve Jobs is Darth Vader?
Taiwanese people are too funny. Maybe they have too much time on their hands, haha
They're also the ones that brought you the CGI reenactment of Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno fiasco and Tiger Woods' midnight car crash.
For your enjoyment
Old Spice Man
I gotta give credit to Isaiah Mustafa and the creative guys that made those commercials possible. Cases in point: Questions (making of) and The Man Your Man Could Smell Like ("Helllo ladies. Look at your man. Now back to me... Sadly, he isn't me")
Believe it or not, those commercials are taken in one shot. No CGI.
I think what's ingenious is their recent PR strategy: utilizing social network and YouTube to generate buzz and publicity.. for FREE. (*Ahem* RIAA, you can learn a thing or two - you know, instead of getting less than 3% of the money invested back.)
You can find the Internet video responses the Old Spice Man gives by visiting his official YouTube page.
Here's a few notable ones:
- To Ellen DeGeneres, Apolo Ohno, Perez Hilton, Isaiah Mustafa, Ryan Seacrest, Demi Moore, Alyssa Milano (one, two, three, response from Alyssa)
- I dont know to label this. Check me out?
- Starbucks, Huffington Post, Twitter, Gilette
- To 4chan, Gizmodo, MrBabyMan,
- A few lulz: painting, space shuttle, a huge gold key, manly bs, tattoo bs, Old Spice bs, presidential bs
With all those links, Googlebot must think my blog is spam D:
By the way, I'm using this video to make my own voicemail. 
-edit-
A better overview: Alyssa Milano To Old Spice Man: Are You Strong Enough To Be My Man?
When Intuition is Wrong and Math is Right
Got two math puzzles, see if you can figure it out 
FTA:
Alice secretly picks two different real numbers by an unknown process and puts them in two (abstract) envelopes. Bob chooses one of the two envelopes randomly (with a fair coin toss), and shows you the number in that envelope. You must now guess whether the number in the other, closed envelope is larger or smaller than the one you’ve seen.
Is there a strategy which gives you a better than 50% chance of guessing correctly, no matter what procedure Alice used to pick her numbers?
Second one. FTA:
I have two children, one of whom is a son born on a Tuesday. What is the probability that I have two boys?
Answers are in the links. Damn these puzzles. Anybody got a good source of puzzle like these?
A Different Perspective
Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you're someone else? Sergey Brin, Victor Gonzalez, President Obama?
Well, the White House launched an official collection of photos depicting Obama's first 100 days in office today, and Pete Souza, the photo journalist for Obama, tells a really good behind-the-scene story, so to speak. It's really interesting to browse through those photos, and they also made me wonder what Pete's life is like. I kinda envy him - one for getting paid to take pictures, two, for owning a 50D Mk II, three, for getting so up close and personal with the most important person in the world, and lastly, for getting a free ride on Air Force One.
Damn you, Pete, haha.
First meteor shower viewing!
Today, I stayed up late to study for the physics test I have tomorrow. As the time inched closer to four in the morning, I couldn't help myself but keep glancing at my alarm clock every few minutes. All I wanted is the four o'clock mark to hit.
But twenty minutes to four, I'm already tired of this Ampere's Circuital Law and B-field crap that I just wanted to call it quits. At the same time, I am excited to go lay out in the grass and watch my first meteor shower with my friend.
When we got to the Drill Field, I was surprised to see a few tents pitched, presumably they were waiting for tonight as well. I laid down and gazed upon the sky. It took a while for my eyes to realize that I'm not imagining the little dots in the sky. You cannot get a sky like this in Dallas.
A few minutes in, and someone shouted, "Look! Is that it?" Everybody turned to look. "That?" someone replied. "That's an airplane. See that blue and red lights?"
Because I didn't do my homework, I had no idea what part of the sky I'm supposed to keep an eye on. My friend saw five separate occurrences. She would yell, "Look! Look!" and I'd become frantic and scan the sky really fast and yell back, "What, what?" But lucky for me (and to her credit), I caught two glimpses of the faint red steaks trailing its way through the sky.
I was completely ecstatic when I sighted my first meteor shower. It's similar to what you'd see in the movies, but 100 times dimmer. But seeing a red blaze streaking through the dark and starry night was very satisfying, and I couldn't help but think how fast that meteor must be going and how tiny and insignificant I am.
I was completely in awe when I saw my second shower. Instead of just one meteor, there were five or so meteors in a '>' formation, like a flock of birds, passing through the center of the sky. I would describe it more in detail, but 1) words can't describe it, and 2) it happened so fast and so faint.
Googling now, what happened today is the Lyrid meteor shower. NASA has a headline news on it.
Despite the cold weather and having to stay up until 4 in the morning, I must say the experience I shared with my friend today was priceless. Definitely worth it. And I must go to bed now. I'm a bit disoriented and hungry right now.
Fly, little fly, fly!
Haha, can't believe someone actually attempted to do this
That is too epic. Too bad the flies didn't felt like flying.
source: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/fly_plane.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890
And on an economic-related note..
Change has come?
Sudo make me a sandwich
I should totally make one of these.
Maybe sudo make me ramen, since I don't have any bread or cheese...
-edit-
This was inspired by xkcd, a wonderful webcomic that has influenced quite a few things (including the YouTube audio comment preview feature...)
source: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/02/sudo_make_me_a_sandwichrobot.html, http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2009/2/27/sudo-make-me-a-sandwich-robot.html
New domain!
Everytime I have to type in derivewilliam.com, I found it too long. That's a total of 11 characters (which is quite short compared to woot's uber long domain name)
Anyway, lemme introduce myself: iam-chen. Rather, will.iam-chen =D
Think outside the box
See if you can solve this; it took me a while but I got it nevertheless. Use these four numbers, 1 1 9 9, add, subtract, multiply, divide any way you want and get 10 as the answer. Yes, you must use all four numbers.
Off to Taiwan, but not off to a great start
The total time spent on sitting on UA economy class seats is around 17 hours, but if you add the time I had to wait for flight transfer, baggage claim, shuttle bus, and traffic, the total time that it took me to get from my Dallas home to my Taipei home, it'd be a seemingly never-ending 26 hours. I left Dallas at 5 a.m. and got home at 8 p.m. (equivalent to Dallas's 7 a.m.)