TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

Leonardo the walking drone/quadcopter robot that skateboards and slacklines. Leonardo is a small, prototype that is half quadcopter drone and half bipedal, walking robot. While the robot, called Leo for short, can both walk and fly what makes it unique is that it uses its quadcopter system for stability, even while walking. This gives it greater balance, allowing it to perform more unique capabilities like skateboarding and slacklining. Leo's name is derived from the phrase 'LEgs ONboARD drOne', and is the creation of Professor Soon-Jo Chung and his team from the Aerospace Robotics and Control Lab at Caltech , California. Their goal for Leo is to develop a kind of all terrain drone/robot that could feasibly perform both aerial and ground tasks in less than ideal conditions. Which doesn't sound quite as cool as saying we built a robot that can fly, skateboard and walk a slackline. Youtube channel Veritasium showcased Leo in their video below. Is it weird that my first t...

By ;Jerryhattric - Flickr : wizard's wishes , CC BY-SA 2.0 , Link Firstly, kudos to UK born, Ian Brackenbury, who some how managed to be paid USD$11,300 annually to be Christchurch's official Wizard for the last 23 years. Probably one of the most unconventional local  government jobs out there but it gives everyone hope that dream jobs can become a reality.  I mean, if you asked anyone pre 1998 that Christchurch City Council would employ an official Wizard for even a year, you'd probably get told you were dreaming. Interestingly enough 1998 is pre New Zealand becoming 'Middle Earth' in Peter Jackson's highly acclaimed movies based on Tolkien's books, The Lord of the Rings. Though I'm sure they did a lot to keep Ian on the payroll for so many years as a living tourist attraction of the city (yeah, if you thought he worked in the engineering department or something you were way off). The city council has decided to let their wizard go as part of 'mo...

I don't know if Paul Hogan agreed to do this just for the pay check, or he was just too busy calling in favors for all the cameos to maybe do a rewrite of the script, but Hoges almost puts Bruce Willis to shame in how phoned in his performance feels in The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee . Which is a real shame because the premise of the movie looked very appealing when I first saw the trailer (it's taken me this long to get Amazon Prime Video so I could watch the film). The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee will make you wish even more this pretend movie trailer was a real film. This movie actually makes you wish even more that Tourism Australia's Dundee - The Son of a Legend Returns Home was a real movie (better writing, better cinematography, better cameos of actors in actual roles, not just playing themselves). In The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee Paul Hogan plays a fictional version of himself very loosely based on his actual life, in the sense that he's been out of the celebrity s...