TET.Life (The Extraordinary Tourist Life)

I t seems like everybody has seen Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer movie by now except me. I don't suffer from FOMO and didn't go to see Margo Robbie's Barbie movie either - which was a thing if you recall the whole 'Barbenheimer' experience of both movies releasing at the same time. The idea of watching a three hour movie about anything just doesn't appeal to me anymore. Even on Netflix, where I finally watched Oppenheimer in two hour and a half sittings, it took me this long to finally commit time to it. That said, I am actually interested in the Oppenheimer story, and always planned to watch this movie eventually on streaming. Fortunately this movie does reward you with an engaging story that never seems to drag, despite its length. The movie follows Oppenheimer's story from his early days through to just after his success with creating the first atomic bomb and the repercussions of how he felt about that achievement. From what I've heard the broa...

The new, all electric, Atlas Robot. B oston Dynamics recently announced the retirement of their famous Atlas humanoid robot . The very next day they introduced us to the all new Atlas with a short, somewhat creepy video that seems to be saying to all those other companies working on electric, humanoid robots, "Hold my beer!"  Watch their video below. The All New Atlas As you can see the new Atlas is all electric, with no hydraulic assisted movement. While it certainly can walk like a human, right from the get go, we see that the new Atlas has degrees of limb motion that would even cause our best human contortionists to tap out on even trying. There in, we see why Boston Dynamics is a leader in humanoid robots (and robots in general). They're not just thinking about a robot that mimics what a human can do, they're thinking ahead and building in the kind of movement only a robot can do. It's a fascinating, if somewhat jarring, synergy the first time you see it but ...

One day I'm going to write my own remarkable guide to happiness and this will be the cover image (but don't hold me to that). I 'm a big fan of Bill Bailey's comedy stand up, as well as his acting (mainly in the TV series Black Books that I mostly know him from). Generally he is laugh out loud funny. As such I was probably expecting similar, laugh out loud humor from his book, Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to Happiness , but what I got, while still humorous, was more of an introspection on Bill's life and moments he feels represent happiness for him. Which is fine, I guess, but to call the book a guide (and a remarkable one at that) is something of a stretch. Not that I was expecting an actual guide book on happiness, but the book is more of a collection of thoughts, retelling of moments, and Bailey's own drawings (additional images by Joe Magee), centered around the theme of happiness. It's more of a things that make Bill happy kind of a read. Bill s...

TET and Mary Roach's Book, Gulp . I 'm the kind of person who only reads one physical book at a time. For context I consider a 'book' to be anything over 100 pages of mostly text. Basically your typical work of fiction novel or factual biography. It's not that I can't read more than one book at a time, I just choose not to because I don't set a lot of time aside for reading. Maybe 30 minutes a day when I'm on a good run with a really engaging text. Little did I know that Mary Roach's Gulp: Travels Around the Gut *, a book of 317 pages (minus the Acknowledgments and Bibliography) would become a bottle neck for my reading for the next three and a half years. As such, I'm calling it the worst book I have ever read. Despite how long it took me to read, it is not a bad book in the slightest, and is in fact, quite light, somewhat entertaining, reading for a book that explores the science, and the resilience of the human digestive system.  I'm no st...

TET: Front Side Ollie to Tail Stall on a Curb. I t's been just over a year since I made my last YouTube Skateboard, update video and then didn't post anything further to the channel until now. Back then I had been off my skateboard for nearly two years because both my feet were sore from the impact of skating (just from flat ground ollies). Thankfully the time off my board did allow for my feet to recover and I've been skating on softer wheels ever since (95a - none of this 100a+ that was killing my feet). In the last year I've mostly skated my driveway, purposely not filming because I just wanted to get back to skateboarding for fun, and to unwind from being at my desk all day. Once you start filming anything for content you're adding a layer of pressure and expectation that you're going to do something worthy of sharing. If you compare the clips from my latest video (below - filmed Good Friday 2024), particularly comparing the two sections where I'm skati...