A few weeks ago I was standing on the sidelines to cheer on a couple of friends running the Chicago Marathon. They both did very well!

While I was waiting for them to pass, I snapped this photo on my iPhone 4 of a guy wearing a tutu, which just seemed comical in the context of the race.

I uploaded it shortly thereafter from my iPhone to Facebook. Within minutes, a friend of mine spotted my Facebook post and commented, “I know him! That’s awesome!!!”

She tagged him in the photo, which notified him instantly. He responded, “I would have stopped to pose if you asked. What mile were you at? Thanks again for getting it. It’s fantastic.”

We had a bit of conversation and are now friends. This breaks my rule of Facebook friendship, which requires that I have spoken to you in person for at least 60 minutes, but I felt like making an exception.

I have to say as long as I’ve been on Facebook, this is one of the crazier small world moments I’ve had. With more than 45,000 people running, I took four photos and got one of someone two degrees of separation from me. And with Facebook, in a matter of hours I was connected with him.

Maybe oddballs just run in similar circles and another oddball caught my attention.

As we enter an age of facial recognition technology, things like this will become more commonplace. In this case, however, I’m not sure what tech could have recognized the tutu guy.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Mobile, Social Media, Technology

We’re going green at Astek! Now…define green…

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun, Green

We have a double feature for you lucky viewers this Friday! Here we have TWO staff meeting videos for you to enjoy. The first, we were able to do a successful update on the third quarter figures and activity. Unfortunately, we had a bit of an issue with mixing our metaphors.

Then the changes to Facebook happened. Let’s just say we had one staff member who didn’t take it very well.

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun

I have never been able to get into Digg or any of the other sharable interest-tracking type tools. This weekend I heard Pinterest mentioned to me at least 8 times so I figured I finally needed to check it out. What a FANTASTIC tool!

Pinterest is a service that allows you to create online “Pinboards” for things you are interested in. Looking for new curtains for your living room? Create a “Living Room Curtains” pinboard and each time you find one you like, “Pin it” from an easy button you can drag and drop into your browser tool bar. Afterwards you can go back to your board to view everything you pinned, make your final choice and follow the photo back to the original page.

When you create an account you can easily find your Facebook and/or Twitter friends and identify categories of stuff you are interested in (DIY/Crafts, Home Decor, Photography, etc.) and you will see the pins from prominent pinners in these categories.

This is a very easy site to use. I suggest you request an invite today! You will be glad you did!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

They’re called The Tea Party, and have nothing to do with the recent movement in American politics.  Having been around for over 20 years, they are a little dismayed at the constant confusion their name now causes.  However, there is one bright spot for the now unfortunately named band.  They own the domain name teaparty.com.

And they are considering selling that domain, especially since it is valued at around 1 million US dollars.  It’s hard to let that kind of money go, even if your politics don’t jive with who’s giving you the money.  As is apparently the case with The Tea Party.  They say that the option to sell it to the highest bidder is definitely on the table, but that they’re holding off until after their upcoming world tour.  If they pull in enough money there, the band says they would accept less than $1 million, from someone like John Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Web

Planking, owling, and…well, let’s just say memes took over our Astek staff meeting this week. In fact, it got a little out of hand…

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun

Have you ever been frustrated by websites that require you to create supposedly “strong” passwords that use at least one letter (and one of each case), one number, and one punctuation character? Especially if you are forced to periodically change such passwords, it can become maddening. And one way that many of us get around that is by using dictionary words, encoded to fit the password requirements. So sprinkle in some numbers that look like the letters you would use otherwise, some random upper case, and end it with a number and/or punctuation.

Well, it turns out that a smart algorithm could actually crack such passwords in a reasonably short amount of time. While a password composed of a string of seemingly random words, in all normal lower case letters, might take hundreds of years to crack. One of my favorite webcomics lays this out with a (somewhat glossed-over) mathmatical proof:

This is something that I had been wondering about for a while, and I’m glad to see my suspicions confirmed. Not that it does any good for the many “strong” passwords I’m made to remember. One improvement on XKCD’s easy to remember, hard to guess scheme: use misspellings of words that are familiar to your vernacular. “ur” for “your”, phonetic dialect spellings, etc.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Technology, Web

Andy is anxious to hear about the 3rd quarter figures. However he failed to consult the staff’s vacation schedule.

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun

Check out this blog showing five awesome and even slightly practical modes of transportation. Ever wanted a flying car, batmobile, or just to ride more safely on your bike? Now you can!

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Gadget, Technology

That’s what 25,727 passwords look like, displayed one per frame, or 25 per second.  These passwords were stolen by the hacker group LulzSec (link to Wikipedia entry on them, not their site) from a porn site, along with their associated users’ email addresses.  You may have heard of LulzSec recently for their role in hacking the PBS website in retaliation for their perception of bias in reporting about WikiLeaks.  They also attacked Sony Pictures, releasing tons of sensitive company and user information.  And this not long after Sony had recovered from attacks by hacker group Anonymous on their PlayStation Network.

A lot can be said about this recent rash of hacking, but I like the simplicity of this video.  It doesn’t show the associated usernames, so the identities of the people behind them are relatively protected.  Although you can find the leaked information from LulzSec if you put your mind to it.  But the video just reminds you about the volume of sensitive data seemingly being compromised almost constantly these days.  It’s also just fascinating to watch the patterns go by.  Since it’s one password per frame, popular passwords (or password prefixes) stay onscreen longer.  ’123456′ for instance stays up for about 25 seconds. That’s about 625 or 2% of the whole 26K passwords in this set.  People use some really predictable and unsecure passwords.  There are also some pretty funny ones in there, most of which are fairly vulgar, so I’ll refrain from giving examples.

Cheers to artist Joerg Piringer for such a simple, cool idea.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, General, Technology, Web