If she wasn’t in front of a fan, she might spontaneously combust. #furball #catsofinstagram

2:29 pm  •  12 July 2016  •  3 notes

wilwheaton:

(via TrollX)

3:30 pm  •  24 December 2015  •  4,579 notes

just-shower-thoughts:

100% of people who bought Wu-Tang’s “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin” album have been jailed.

8:42 am  •  24 December 2015  •  1,232 notes

(via kickassmemes1)

8:35 pm  •  30 November 2015  •  774 notes

(Source: weloveshortvideos.com, via kickassmemes1)

8:23 pm  •  30 November 2015  •  389,474 notes

Gratuitously jacked from elsewhere, but so true. 

5:32 pm  •  27 November 2015

lifeatyahoo:

By Sarah Taylor, Manager Customer Experience Operations

Yahoo’s mission is to be an indispensable guide to digital information, yours and the world’s. We’re proud to make the world come to Western New York.

The Yahoo office in Lockport, NY was as part of the ‘We Make Buffalo’ movement showcased last week at the 43North Week Entrepreneurial Celebration.

The video is being shared through the social media campaign #WeMakeBuffalo

I was proud to represent Yahoo in the video and it’s just another way that Yahoo is being highlighted as a vital part of the diverse business resurgence in the Buffalo Niagara region. Western New York has been a great home for our Lockport teams since 2009 and we look forward to continuing to serve the community and our 1 billion users globally.

(via lifeatyahoo)

1:45 pm  •  9 November 2015  •  8 notes

Since I started to talk openly about my experiences and struggles, I’ve slowly become used to the reactions that people tend to have. Almost everyone that has heard me speak about it, even if they don’t know me all that well, has been almost stunned to hear me describe what was going on between my ears, and almost in disbelief that they never had a sniff of it.  

I was talking to a friend of mine last week that I’ve known for a few years now. Not a super close friend, but a good dude. He’s been generally aware of some of what I’ve been working through this year, but we hadn’t really talked much in a couple months. As we were chatting, he said he could tell that outwardly, I seemed a lot different now compared to the first part of the year, which is always good to hear. He also asked me what FELT different. It was actually a difficult question to answer.

Even though I spend a LOT of time these days paying attention to myself, my thoughts, and my feelings, it tends to be a short term view. There are certain things that I pay consistent attention to, things that I know from my history can take me places I don’t want to be, but most everything else is shorter term stuff as life happens, which is really a much better place to be. Really reflecting on the longer term view just isn’t something I had done in a while, and I’m glad he asked me the question to get me thinking about it. ( It’s something I plan to do more often now. )

I’ve spent a lot of time considering the answer, and will do my best to try and explain how I view it.

Many things that happen to you in life leave a little something behind. Sometimes you know it’s there, and just don’t know how to clean that up. Sometimes, you don’t even know anything was left at all. For me, I had been carrying around a lot of stuff for a lot of years, and most of it I never knew was there. My approach at life was very direct. Work hard, fight through, and you’ll be fine.

For a lot of years, that worked just fine. Things continued to pile up, things I could see, and things I could not. When things got tough, I ‘manned up’, I worked harder, and I kept moving. I didn’t need help, I could HANDLE it. As time went on, that just didn’t work anymore. It was like having a car in the mud. Eventually, standing on the gas doesn’t move you forward anymore, it just digs you in deeper. For too long, I just stood on the gas. I worked harder and harder, and didn’t move an inch.

I had to recognize that I was stuck. I had to acknowledge that I couldn’t do it by myself anymore. I had to ask for help. I needed help to get pulled out of the mud. I needed help to unload all the crap I had been carrying around. I needed help to see the stuff I had been carrying that I never even noticed before. I learned how to see it, and learned how to get rid of it. It was a mighty purge, and only then could I really start to move forward again.

Now that the load has been lightened, it doesn’t take nearly as much effort to move ahead anymore. I can work as hard as I need to do get where I want, I don’t HAVE to stand on the gas all the time anymore. It’s not effortless ; life isn’t that easy. But it’s a LOT less work. I know that if I need to go to the well, it’s there.

I often say to people in tech that your job becomes your career when you start to know what you don’t know. I think this fits here too. I know now how to handle so many more things properly so they don’t pile up. More importantly, I know how to recognize now what I DON’T know how to handle properly, and go get help to figure out how. It seems odd to say it today, but asking for help doesn’t make you weak. It shows your strength. It’s something that I hope everyone can take away from hearing about my experiences, because too often it IS viewed as weakness. 

So, the best way to summarize what’s changed? I feel lighter. I feel more free. I wake up looking forward to the day ahead again. I am embracing life instead of fearing what may come next. Whatever will come will come. I’ll be ready for it when it does. 

That’s what’s different.

8:36 am  •  2 November 2015  •  1 note

yahoo:

By P.P.S. Narayan, VP of Engineering

On Sunday, October 25, Yahoo delivered the first-ever, global live stream of a regular season NFL game to football fans around the world, for free, across devices. Our goal was to distribute the game over the Internet and provide a broadcast-quality experience. Leveraging our focus on consumer products, we worked to identify features and experiences that would be unique for users enjoying a live stream for the first time. In other words, we wanted to make you feel like you were watching on TV, but make the experience even better.

For us, success was twofold: provide the best quality viewing experience and deliver that quality at global scale. We achieved over 15M unique viewers in 185 countries across the world, and we’d like to talk about some of the key technology innovations that got us there.

On the technical side, the HD video signal was shipped from London to our encoders in Dallas and Sunnyvale, where it was converted into Internet video. The streams were transcoded (compression that enables efficient network transmission) into 9 bitrates ranging from 6Mbps to 300kbps. We also provided a framerate of 60 frames per second (fps), in addition to 30fps, thus allowing for smooth video playback suited for a sport like NFL football. Having a max bitrate of 6Mbps with 60fps gave a “wow” factor to the viewing experience, and was a first for NFL and sports audiences.

One special Yahoo addition to the programming was an overlaid audio commentary from our Yahoo Studio in Sunnyvale. It was as if you were watching the game alongside our Yahoo Sports experts on your couch. This unique Yahoo take gave NFL viewers a whole new way to experience the game.

We focused on a few key areas:

Quality Viewing Experience

Our goal was to deliver a premium streaming quality that would bring users a best-in-class viewing experience, similar to TV – one that was extremely smooth and uninterrupted. This meant partnering with multiple CDNs to get the video bits as close to the viewer as possible, optimizing bandwidth usage, and making the video player resilient to problems on the Internet or the user’s network.

Broad Audience Reach

We wanted to make sure that our global audience could watch this stream anywhere in the world, on any device, so we delivered it on laptops and desktops, on phones and tablets; and finally, we wanted to reach the ardent fans on the big screen TVs, game consoles and other connected devices. Our destination page, which provided a full screen experience of the game on web and mobile web, was built on node.js and React, and extensively optimized for page load and startup latency. In addition, we decided to launch the NFL experience on our key mobile apps: Yahoo, Tumblr, Yahoo Sports and Yahoo Sports Fantasy.

Global Scale

Yahoo operates multiple data centers across the US and the world for service reliability and capacity. We also have dozens of smaller point-of-presence (POPs) located close to all major population centers to provide a low latency connection to Yahoo’s infrastructure. Our data centers and POPs are connected together via a high redundancy private backbone network. For the NFL game, we upgraded our network and POPs to handle the extra load. We also worked with the CDN vendors to setup new peering points to efficiently route traffic to their networks.

During an NFL game, which typically lasts just under four hours, there is a very small margin of error for detecting and fixing streaming issues. Real-time metrics as well as detailed data from our backend systems provide a high fidelity understanding of the stream quality that viewers are experiencing. Yahoo is a world leader in data, analytics and real-time data processing. So, we extensively used our data infrastructure, including Hadoop, to provide industry leading operational metrics during the game.

The Take-Away

Pioneering the delivery of a smooth 60fps live video experience to millions of users around the world was a significant undertaking. Huge thanks to the team for executing against our vision – it was a coordinated effort across Yahoo.

While much of our technology and infrastructure was already set up to handle the scale and load – one of the reasons the NFL chose us – in preparation for the main event, we designed a new destination page and enhanced our mobile applications. We also enhanced the control and recovery mechanisms, as well as expanded our infrastructure to handle the huge traffic of the game. We worked hard to ensure that the experience was available on every Internet connected device. We tuned our video players to deliver the optimal video stream, taking into account device, connectivity, location and ISP. Behind everything was our massive analytical system that would measure and aggregate all aspects of quality and engagement. We conducted comprehensive tests with our partners so that game day would be successful. In the end, the game exceeded our high expectations, setting a bar for quality and scale for live Internet broadcasts to come. We’re thrilled and proud of the experience we delivered, and further, the reception and accolades from our community of users has been gratifying.  

Looking to the future, we expect live sporting events to be routinely streamed over the Internet to massive global audiences. People will expect these broadcasts to be flawless, with better than HD quality. October 25, 2015 was a significant step towards this vision. Yahoo, as a leading technology company and a top destination for sports, is proud of our role in setting a new standard for sports programming. We look forward to making other global scale broadcasts like the NFL game happen in the future.

You can learn about all the technical details behind the livestream on our Yahoo Engineering blog.

2:17 pm  •  29 October 2015  •  34 notes

I don’t pimp out work stuff very much, but this is a little different. So many teams at Yahoo have put in a ton of hours to make this event the best it can be. We’re all going to be working really early on Sunday, and all the way through the game to make sure it goes off without a hitch. 

For me, as a Bills fan and native WNYer, I can’t be more proud to have had the opportunity to work on this and see it through to the end. 

I think I can speak for all Yahoos, as well as myself, when I say that we all hope you enjoy the stream, and thank you for watching.   

7:54 am  •  23 October 2015  •  2 notes