An online sanctuary for spendthrifts

It's getting easier by the day to blow through a paycheck, isn't it? Sure, gas prices are high from coast-to-coast, but if you're an impulse shopper with a Internet connection, you have about as much chance as Bill Paxton did in Aliens. That's because daily deal sites are all over the web. It's become such a 'thing' that even Newegg is getting in on the action with its NeweggFlash portal.

Through NeweggFlash, Newegg offers daily bargains in a wide variety of categories, everything from technology and consumer electronics to housewares and skincare. Designed to sell out of inventory, you'll find deals for up to 75 percent off the regular selling price. Deals are refreshed each day at 9 AM PST.

"We’re thrilled to launch NeweggFlash and join in on the flash sale phenomenon," said Soren Mills, chief marketing officer at Newegg. "Newegg is proud of the deep relationships we’ve built with our vendor partners over the years. It’s these relationships that allow us to offer very compelling deals on NeweggFlash and give us an edge over competing flash sale sites."

Deals are for members only, though joining is free. If you already have a Newegg account, simply sign in and you're good to go.

To kick off the grand opening of its deals site, Newegg is giving away a number of items, culminating in a grand price award of an Asus Automobili Lamborghini VX7SX-DH72 15.6-inch Core i7 2670QM laptop with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. You have until August 31 to enter.

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When AMD re-branded most of its Radeon HD 7000 series SKUs to HD 8000 series, for OEMs, we saw this coming from a parsec away. AMD's next discrete GPU family for the retail channel will be placed along the Radeon HD 9000 series, and it debuts no later than this October, according to a Guru3D report. Interestingly, the report states that the first parts in the family will be based on existing 28 nanometer silicon fab processes, and will be codenamed "Curacao" and "Hainan."

We've had our run-ins with "Curacao," from time to time. It's been rumored to be an upgrade of existing "Tahiti" silicon, with 2,304 stream processors based on Graphics CoreNext 2.0 architecture, 144 TMUs, 48 ROPs, and a 384-bit wide GDDR5 memory interface. The Guru3D report adds to that with the mention of an improved front-end, which adds four asynchronous computing engines (ACEs), and three independent geometry engines.

Minh Le's Tactical Intervention had a long, arduous journey. Now, many years of development and one not-so-successful launch later, the multiplayer shooter is set to find home on Steam.

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(415): If we had kids we couldn't come home, get high and watch porn together. And that's like the only reason I get up in the morning.

You’ll cringe a bit at this one.

Hey, maybe I'm overly safety-conscious. Maybe I'm a pussy. Either way, doing a wheelie at highway speeds with four other people on your motorcycle seems like a bad idea.

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What’s the secret to finding your passion in life?

 

What is a passion?

Researchers found there are two types of passion: harmonious and obsessive. The latter is a bad thing, more like an addiction or being a stalker. We’ll focus on the former, thanks. So what defines harmonious passion?

Robert Vallerand and colleagues came up with a “Passion Scale.” How many of these are true of an activity you engage in?

Via Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined:

1. This activity allows me to live a variety of experiences.

2. The new things that I discover with this activity allow me to appreciate it even more.

3. This activity allows me to live memorable experiences.

4. This activity reflects the qualities I like about myself.

5. This activity is in harmony with the other activities in my life.

6. For me it is a passion, which I still manage to control.

7. I am completely taken with this activity.

 

Passion is good for you

As long as it’s not of the obsessive variety, having a passion can really be a positive.

Via Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined:

The positive benefits of harmonious passion can be explained by the repeated engagement in positive emotions. Barbara Frederickson and her colleagues have conducted an impressive amount of research showing that positive emotions lead to an “upward spiral” of adaptive behaviors and better psychological adjustment.

And:

Via Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined:

Elderly individuals who were harmoniously passionate scored higher on various indicators of psychological adjustment, such as life satisfaction, meaning in life, and vitality, while they reported lower levels of negative indicators of psychological adjustment such as anxiety and depression. 

And it wasn’t just inherently “passionate people” who saw these benefits. Given the freedom to choose what they studied and pursue what interested them, otherwise “dispassionate” students saw the benefits of passion in academic subjects as well.

 

Passion projects are better projects

When we do things because of passion, not money, the quality is higher.

Via Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

“Our results were quite startling,” the researchers wrote. “The commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the non-commissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality. Moreover, the artists reported feeling significantly more constrained when doing commissioned works than when doing non-commissioned works.”

And artists who focus on money over passion are less successful in the long run:

“The less evidence of extrinsic motivation during art school, the more success in professional art both several years after graduation and nearly twenty years later.” Painters and sculptors who were intrinsically motivated, those for whom the joy of discovery and the challenge of creation were their own rewards, were able to weather the tough times—and the lack of remuneration and recognition—that inevitably accompany artistic careers. And that led to yet another paradox in the Alice in Wonderland world of the third drive. “Those artists who pursued their painting and sculpture more for the pleasure of the activity itself than for extrinsic rewards have produced art that has been socially recognized as superior,” the study said. “It is those who are least motivated to pursue extrinsic rewards who eventually receive them.”

 

Can your passion be a career?

Cal Newport points out a weakness in the “follow your passion” argument.

Most people’s passions (sports, the arts, etc) are quite difficult to make a living at.

Via So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love:

84 percent of the students surveyed were identified as having a passion. This sounds like good news for the supporters of the passion hypothesis — that is, until you dive deeper into the details of these pursuits. Here are the top five identified passions: dance, hockey, (these were Canadian students, mind you), skiing, reading, and swimming. Though dear to the heart of the students, these passions don’t have much to offer when it comes to choosing a job. In fact, less than 4 percent of the total identified passions had any relation to work or education, with the remaining 96 percent describing hobby-style interests such as sports and art.

In my interview with Cal he explained that career bliss comes from doing what we’re good at, not chasing passions which may be fleeting and unrealistic:

Long-term career satisfaction requires traits like a real sense of autonomy, a real sense of impact on the world, a sense of mastery that you’re good at what you do, and a sense of connection in relation to other people.

Now, the key point is those traits are not matched to a specific piece of work and they have nothing to do with matching your job to some sort of ingrained, pre-existing passion.

What’s interesting is that most often it is passion that leads us to “10,000 hours” of deliberate practice and subsequent expertise.

Via Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined:

The researchers also looked at the role of passion among 130 undergraduate students enrolled in a selective psychology course. They found a direct path from harmonious passion to deliberate practice: the students who were more harmoniously passionate about their work were more likely to engage in deliberate practice.

 

How to find your passion in life

Cal Newport is right that we are happiest doing what we’re good at. Many people write to me asking “But how do I find out what I’m good at?”

There are quick ways to find out where your gifts lie. Professor Martin Seligman has a strengths test you can take here. Adam Grant points to other great resources here.

But I think there’s a far more important element: Trying more things.

This is deeply obvious yet eludes most people. Want to discover your passion? You need to do new things.

Why doesn’t this occur to most people? Fear of failure.

Fear of failure is one of the most powerful feelings.

Via Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy:

In a surprising 2008 study, researchers at the University of Bath, UK, found that the fear of failure drives consumers far more than the promise of success; the latter oddly tends to paralyze us, while the former spurs us on (and pries open our wallets). In fact, as the study found, the most powerful persuader of all was giving consumers a glimpse of some future “feared self.”

You know what the funny thing is? It’s never as bad as you think. Really.

Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness has studied how long people feel lousy after bad things happen. The answer? Not nearly as long as they guess.

You anticipate regret will be much more painful than it actually is. Studies show we all consistently overestimate how regret affects us.

We need to fail to learn. When we fear failure we limit our ability to succeed. 

So is there a way to fail that isn’t scary?

 

What to do now

Make “little bets.” What’s a little bet?

Via Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries:

A small experiment that tests a theory. It’s just big enough to give you the answer you need but not so big that it wastes too much precious time, money or resources.

A little bet allows you to break out of your comfort zone and try something new knowing that if it doesn’t work out you can quickly recover and try something else.

In Cal Newport’s book So Good They Can’t Ignore You he recommends little bets for someone trying to develop their skills and create a career:

The important thing about little bets is that they’re bite-sized. You try one. It takes a few months at most. It either succeeds or fails, but either way you get important feedback to guide your next steps. This approach stands in contrast to the idea of choosing a bold plan and making one big bet on its success.

The more things you try, the more likely you are to find a fit.

Failure isn’t that bad. But passion can be that good.

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Related posts:

What 10 things should you do every day to improve your life?

What 10 things should you do every *week* to improve your life?

What do people regret the most before they die?

The post How to find your passion in life: appeared first on Barking Up The Wrong Tree.

‘Stop using Google and Facebook’ is the advice from Germany’s highest security official, warning web users concerned about NSA monitoring to steer clear of anything that might pass through US services. “Whoever fears their communication is being intercepted in any way should use services that don’t go through American servers” Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich cautioned today, the AP reports, the latest in escalating German concerns about the extent of US spying programs like PRISM

German politicians have been some of the most outspoken after the revelations of data gathering in recent weeks, though the pitch was turned up considerably once whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed alleged details of how the NSA and other US agencies monitored EU politicians. The country has threatened a full investigation of NSA activities, and warned that civil lawsuits from German citizens are highly likely.

According to Interior Minister Friedrich, a German delegation will fly to Washington next week for a meeting with US officials. On the agenda are the concerns that not only individual European citizens but EU politicians were being spied on.

However, Friedrich’s advice to avoid ostensibly US web services, like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others, may prove tricky to actually follow. Even data used by non-US companies could well travel through US networks – giving them at least one opportunity to collect a copy, even if they then require, officially, a warrant to dig through it – or be stored on servers hosted in the US.

A recent Spiegel feature on how the NSA targets international traffic also suggests that traffic needn’t even reach the US for it to be monitored. The security agency reportedly has involvement “in a number of large internet hubs in western and southern Germany” insiders tell the magazine, with German counterparts supposedly knowing about some – though not all – of the tracking.

IMAGE Adib Roy

Dump Google, Facebook and other US sites warns German security chief is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 - 2013, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Game Company Ubisoft Hacked, Passwords Compromised; Change your Password NOW

So geeks, regardless of the outcome of this flowchart, what movie are YOU going to see this summer? Let us know in the comments section below! I personally can’t wait for Pacific Rim, but unfortunately, I have the feeling that I’m going to be disappointing. Sigh.

[Source: College Humor]

This dog-bites-car graphic by New Zealand's 3 News is by far the best/worst news graphic I've ever seen.

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submitted by badlucklincoln [link] [126 comments]

Grand Theft Auto 5 is trying something new by featuring three lead protagonists, each with their own specialized abilities. But what's to stop you from finding one of your alter-egos and murdering him in cold blood, other than a general sense of right and wrong? According to Rockstar, quite a bit.

Responding to a series of fan questions, Rockstar said that each of the characters are meant to be living out their own lives, so popping into one might put you in the middle of a family scuffle with Michael, or find Franklin flirting. Their locations won't always be plainly obvious, and Rockstar says it's "not always easy" to track them down. If you do find one of your fellow heroes, you can hang out with them, and even smack them around, but you can't kill them.

"They all have remarkable powers of recovery and good health insurance," the blog states. "The game is based on playing all sides of these three characters' interwoven stories rather than having generic, interchangeable leads, so permanently killing a major character in that way wouldn't make sense. If a player is determined enough though, they may well find a way to badly injure one of the characters and switching to that character would just put you in the hospital to continue where you left off."

So basically, it sounds like each of the characters become Wolverine when you're not in direct control of them. Disappointing as it may be to budding psychopaths, that move does maintain Rockstar's ability to tell a story without completely breaking it.

It was only a matter of time before Yelp visualized its 39 million reviews into something awesome.

This week they launched the "Yelp Wordmap," a heatmap showing the density of various words used in Yelp reviews in 14 popular cities.

Now you can find out the best areas in your city for cocktails, PBR, a romantic night out, or bacon.

But the biggest gem in Yelp's data dump is its hipsterness heatmap.

From Austin to New York to DC to Paris, check out where irony germinates and where mustachioed musicians wander.

Austin

Boston

Chicago

London

Los Angeles

New York

Paris

Philadelphia

Portland

San Diego

San Francisco

Seattle

Toronto

Washington, DC

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This Lego version of NeoTokyo was created by a team of six builders led by Carter Baldwin. Their model, which was on display at Brickworld, was based on mentions of the city in cyberpunk books like Akira and Neuromancer.

Even more amazing than the unique setting is the minute level of detail that they captured. There are random wires and laundry hanging around along with Japanese signs that are illuminated by bits of electroluminescent wire. They’ve even added in cyberpunk minifigs on the crowded city streets. The model will next be on display at BrickFair if you’re hoping for a closer look.

See more pictures after the break…

(Fred Scharmen via Lego Gizmodo)

Android's growth is now coming from cheap, no-name smartphone makers, according Needham analyst Charlie Wolf. 

Samsung's share of the Android market has stalled around 40%, while the ultra-low-cost Android phones are taking share quickly. 

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Innovative directing duo Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth of Wriggles & Robins (previously) just released this great new music video for the band Travis. The team shot at below freezing temperatures and filmed projected animations that could only be seen when the four band members would breath through the cold air. Although subtle, there are some amazing sequences that really make this worth watching all the way through. You might remember Wriggles & Robins’s life drawing video from a few months ago.

Some are happy about it, and some are really, really not, and probably secretly British…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now go get some spray paint and a little Uncle Sam top hat and SEE IF YOU FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOURSELF.

The post 16 Animals Who Are More Patriotic Than You appeared first on POPHANGOVER.