Medal of Honor given to a hero

Here’s an amazing video describing how Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Arthur Petry earned the Medal of Honor.

“It was almost instinct — off training,” Petry said of his response to the situation. “It was probably going to kill all three of us. I had time to visually see the hand grenade. And I figure it’s got about a four-and-half second fuse, depending on how long it has been in the elements and the weather and everything and how long the pin has been pulled. I figure if you have time to see it you have time to kick it, throw it, just get it out there.”

That’s when Petry picked up the grenade and threw it away from him and his buddies. As it turns out, he did have the time to save all three of their lives — but not time to save his hand.

The grenade exploded as he threw it — destroying his throwing arm.

 

Via Gizmodo / Army

Jott It!

Yesterday I wrote a post that went into how great Jott was in combination with Xpenser. Today, I will tell you why Jott is one of those “gotta have it” tools on the web and the best part about this is, that it’s all free!

Jott™ is a revolutionary new service that automatically converts your voice into e-mail and text messages—anytime, anywhere, with any cell phone. Jott™ makes you more productive and efficient by capturing your ideas, notes to self, tasks, and more without using your keypad.

I’ve found Jott to be extremely helpful in a couple different situations:

  • It’s much easier to Jott someone a response instead of texting when you’re in the middle of driving / riding / running around.
  • You are out and about and need to remind yourself of something for later.
  • It’s great to track expenses with Xpenser using Jott!
  • You can use it to blog a post!!
  • You can use it with Twitter, Jaiku, Blogs, Zillow, Yahoo Groups, 30 Boxes, Remember the milk, Tumblr, and the list goes on and on! Look here!

If you are like me, it takes me way too long to text someone a response or have conversations using texting on a cell phone, Jott makes it easy, and that I can appreciate!

Did I already mention that it’s FREE?
Check out Jott for your everyday use!

Songza – Search engine for Music

Songza is a fantastic service that I discovered only yesterday. Not sure how I missed this one, but if you aren’t quite satisfied with the new rules placed on Pandora or Last.fm, then you will really like this!

Songza is the brainchild of 23-year-old Aza Raskin — the president of Chicago-based software company Humanized, Inc., and the son of Apple Macintosh founder Jef Raskin. Over the course of a month, he and Humanized’s Web/Systems Architect Scott Robbin worked weekends to bring the idea to life. The site launched on November 8, 2007 and instantly generated significant buzz around the world. Hundreds of bloggers and news writers have praised its elegant user interface, beautiful design, and all-around utility.

Like all good ideas, both the concept and design came to Aza while he was in the shower.

Songza - Music Search Engine
Songza lets you search your favorite artists or songs and gives you the ability to actually listen to it right there (imagine that!). For each individual tune, it let’s you share, watch the YouTube video, rate it, and add to playlist along with a few other options. The playlist is saved for when you stop by the website at another time.. no registration required!

I just tried to embed the player on this post, but it totally distorted my page. Maybe they’ll fix that soon? It’s still in beta, so keep that in mind! Overall, I think this is a great service and I’m extremely happy that I can now search for a favorite song and listen on demand.

Songza - Let’s take a look at the playlist

Check out Songza!

Google Android Videos

Google’s new mobile platform, Android, may revolutionize the way we use phones tomorrow. Here are a couple of videos demonstrating how Android works.

Cool apps that surprise and delight mobile users, built by developers like you, will be a huge part of the Android vision. To support you in your efforts, Google has launched the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million in awards — no strings attached — for great mobile apps built on the Android platform.

Read more about Android

MSDOS 5 – Microsoft

Let’s talk about the nerd era.. better yet, let’s watch it.

From YouTube:

Found this in the back room of my old job. It was titled “YO MS Raps!” MS-DOS 5.0 was the first version available in a retail package. Looks like MS spent a few $$$ to produce the effects in this video to promote it.

Gmail Collaborative Video – Final Cut

About a month ago Google put out a video on YouTube asking for the public’s help to send them some videos of creative ways Gmail travels around the world. After a huge amount of submissions, they got a final cut released.

They put a map (using Google Maps API) up on the blog showing where all the submissions came from, pretty amazing!

Read the full story on the Gmail collaborative video