Mark Forrester - Independent digital designer and online entrepreneur

This is pretty random, but seeing today is pretty much a friday, with a long weekend ahead, why not?

All you need is:

1. A roll or box of Mentos (candy mints)
2. and a 2-litre bottle of diet soda. Either diet or regular soda will work for this experiment, but diet soda is less sticky when you’re cleaning it up!

And all you need to do is:

1. Carefully open the bottle of soda. Position the bottle on the ground so that it will not tip over.
2. Unwrap the whole roll of Mentos. The goal is to drop all of the Mentos into the bottle of soda at the same time (which is trickier than it looks). One method for doing this is to roll a piece of paper into a tube just big enough to hold the loose Mentos. You’ll want to be able to position the tube directly over the mouth of the bottle so that all of the candies drop into the bottle at the same time.
3. Don’t drop them into the bottle just yet! Warn the spectators to stand back. Okay, you’re going to drop all of the Mentos into the bottle at the same time and then get truckin’ (move out of the way… so long… bye- bye… hasta la vista!)
4. It’s just like fireworks on the 4th of July. The spectators erupt, of course, in a chorus of ooohs and ahhhs. Someone yells out, “Do it again” and you do.

Read why this happens on this great science website.

I’ve read a lot of articles on how viral marketing is the newest and quickest form of advertising on the internet today. Chuck Norris quotes, Hasselhoff photos, and now http://www.helpwinmybet.com/.

It’s absolutely amazing how quickly news can fly, and how quickly anything, literally anything, can get media attention if its whack enough! This guy has had over 2 million hits in under one month! Why you may ask? Visit his site and see.

UPDATE:  I’ve just clicked refresh after writing this article, 24 000 hits in about 5 minutes!!

I’m not usually an aggressive guy, but when I get woken up every Saturday morning to the sound of some retard sucking up leaves with his Christmas present from Aunt Sue, my blood starts to boil.

Like most people I enjoy a sleep in on Saturday morning… followed by the latest US episode of the hit series “Lost” in bed (that part is probably not so average). This week I couldn’t enjoy either.

Leafman piped up a bit later than usual this morning, but louder than ever (His leaf-sucking machine could be entered in the Guiness Book of records for the loudest, most irritating, 150 decibel sound), and must have sucked up not only every leaf, but every ant residing in his courtyard (about a 10 square metre radius). He hoovers with his leaf-sucking machine for about 1 hour, usually between 7.30 and 8.30am every Saturday morning, until he can see his reflection on the brick-paved floor.

I’ve tried screaming and cursing as loud as possible (out of my 2nd floor flat window), the leaf sucking machine is too loud though, and he can’t hear me, so I’ve decided to blog about it, in the hopes that he has an internet connection, kows what a blog is, finds my blog (out of the 22 million out there), and sees how peed off I am.

Not only have they cut the power at just about every meeting I have been to this week, but now, thanks to Eskom, there is a sewerage overflow that is running into the rivulet in Kleinwassenaar next to Lakeside (a.k.a. my mother’s home). The power outages have a drastic effect on the sewerage system, which is dependent on electric pumps.

As usual my boet and me were having a good 9 hole game of golf on Wednesday evening, and as usual i was kicking his ass.

The venue: Our local course, the Klein Wassenaar golf range (a.k.a. the field behind our house)
The caddy/ball fetcher: George (a.k.a Azland), our golden retriever

On the last hole, I chipped the ball with my sandwich club, over the tree top, perfect height, perfect distance, until the wind blew it off course, and plop into the fresh water canal (a.k.a our water hazard), running across the field, she fell.

No worries, I’ll drop a shot I thought to myself, I’ll still kick my boet’s ass. Woo ha ha. Azland, the anything-resembling-a-ball addict, darted across the field, a blur of golden hair, determined to find my ball, and disappeared into the water canal. I followed him, not so fast though. What I saw next was quite disturbing. My golden boy, knee deep in poo. Searching for my golf ball. Get out I yelled. It was too late though, he was crusty, and he stank. And he was determined to find it. After a while I think Azland was even disgusted by the smell, his valiant effort was for nothing. He retreated. It was gone.

After I hosed Azland down under the tap back at home, I rewarded him with an old cracked golf ball.

This is the final straw. Eskom you’ve taken this one step too far. This means war.