If you read this site through an RSS reader you’ve probably noticed that I’ve merged the feed from my Flickr account with the site feed. Now up to five of my recent photo uploads will show along with my regular posts. What do you think of this? Good, bad, neutral?

I wish it would show recent uploads as one single post instead of five individual posts. A mosaic of thumbnails of recent uploads would be cool. I know I could do that myself and make a new post with it, which in a way would be better because then I would have the added benefit of the post showing on the actual site, but this is automated and therefore easier.

Thoughts?

Crazy Christmas Traditions – Photo Essays – TIME.

It Happened on Christmas Day – Photo Essays – TIME.

Anyone living in Florida, or even someone that visits it often has to be somewhat interested in sharks. I mean, how could you not be given the stats?
I’m a little disappointed this chart doesn’t have 2007. While 2007 was supposedly a low year for shark attacks, Florida had 32, highest in the world, followed by Hawai’i, which had seven. That’s a big difference.

While I don’t play many online games, Discovery keeps advertising their “critically acclaimed” Shark Runners game so I had to play it to see what all the hype was about. The goal is to track down sharks and collect data on them, but the cool thing is is that it is using real sharks and their real movements, taking advantage of GPS tracking. But then when I got to the part of the site where I realize that the game is going on all the time and it’s going to email me alerts giving a certain amount of time for me to log back in a do something, I decided this was something I didn’t want to get into. If you want to try it out, let us know what you think in the comments.

I did try some other games, though some of them aren’t really games, like voting for the coolest shark? I guess voting is a game for some people…I actually prefer other games on discovery.com that are not part of Shark Week, like Life or Death: Lost at Sea. Basically you’re given sets of three items to choose from and you have to choose the right items that will keep you alive, it’s tricky.

While Discovery does have great pictures on the site, like this one:

if you want something high enough resolution for a wallpaper or if you want a shark screensaver, NationalGeographic is your best bet.

The best parts of the website are the interactive features, like the dive, and the pictures. But really, I think the site could have been better. I especially don’t like that they don’t have an option to embed their videos (though the videos are great), and the commercials before them are extremely loud compared to the actual video.

As for the shows though, what I’ve seen so far is awesome. I love MythBusters anyway and the Shark Week Special that aired last night was not to be missed (if you didn’t see it, it airs again Wednesday). See a clip of the robotic shark they created here.

I’m also looking forward to Dirty Jobs tomorrow night. Mike thinks they should have monkey week.

For more Shark Week, see the official Discovery.com site.

Now those look like crepes to me and not what I would call pancakes, but great video anyway.

Okay, so this one is not real food, but it’s still really entertaining and I love the different things they came up with and how they used them. This video is made by PES, you can find more stop-motion videos from them on their website: EatPES.com; “Human Skateboard” is a good one to check out.

One of the things that I wanted to post when I originally decided to post about the water crisis was this photo essay from TIME, which includes photographs from the book Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World. Right now you can download the book for free, in pdf form, from that Amazon page. Though, if you can afford to, you can purchase the book from Charity:Water and $70 of the purchase goes to the charity.

While Charity:Water is a great organization, I know more, and feel more strongly about giving to Blood:Water Mission (yes, the charity started by members of Jars of Clay). Blood:Water exists to provide sustainable water sources in Africa by building wells with emphasis on reducing the HIV and AIDS epidemic. Check out the site for information on what they’ve already done, what they’re doing now, and how you can help.

There’s something special about viewing these stunts as still images as opposed to live action; I think it adds a certain tranquility and really shows that it is an art. Check out the rest of this photo essay from TIME. You can see that the traceurs take their art seriously planning out the moves and noting precautions they need to take.

Of course there is also some pretty awesome live action videos of parkour online.

Though do be aware when searching for these videos that you will find some pretty lame ones as well. Actually, you’ll find mostly lame ones on video sharing sites, but do a google and you’ll find some good parkour sites like American Parkour.

More info about parkour on Wikipedia.

I used to be into freestyle walking, which is somewhat related to parkour, anyone remember that craze?