Great Ad

This full-page ad ran in the last issue of The Hollywood Reporter.
Brilliant.

Special Forces Wings

Yeah, but can you take them through a Wendy's "Drive Thru"?

Link to DailyMail UK.

Symmetry Thesis

"You can't chop down a symmetry"
-- Jane Siberry

...but more to the point, here's a great post on the subject of Symmetry Theory on the MarginalRevolution blog.

A Colbert Commencement

Delivered at Knox College, June 3, 2006:

"And when you enter the workforce, you will find competition from those crossing our all-too-poorest borders. Now I know you’re all going to say, “Stephen, Stephen, immigrants built America.” Yes, but here’s the thing—it’s built now. I think it was finished in the mid-70s sometime. At this point it’s a touch-up and repair job. But thankfully Congress is acting and soon English will be the official language of America. Because if we surrender the national anthem to Spansih, the next thing you know, they’ll be translating the Bible. God wrote it in English for a reason! So it could be taught in our public schools.

So we must build walls. A wall obviously across the entire southern border. That’s the answer. That may not be enough—maybe a moat in front of it, or a fire-pit. Maybe a flaming moat, filled with fire-proof crocodiles. And we should probably wall off the northern border as well. Keep those Canadians with their socialized medicine and their skunky beer out. And because immigrants can swim, we’ll probably want to wall off the coasts as well. And while we’re at it, we need to put up a dome, in case they have catapults. And we’ll punch some holes in it so we can breathe. Breathe free. It’s time for illegal immigrants to go—right after they finish building those walls. Yes, yes, I agree with me.

There are so many challenges facing this next generation, and as they said earlier, you are up for these challenges. And I agree, except that I don’t think you are. I don’t know if you’re tough enough to handle this. You are the most cuddled generation in history. I belong to the last generation that did not have to be in a car seat. You had to be in car seats. I did not have to wear a helmet when I rode my bike. You do. You have to wear helmets when you go swimming, right? In case you bump your head against the side of the pool. Oh, by the way, I should have said, my speech today may contain some peanut products..."

Link to ful text via OfByAndFor.org

Fuzzy Zoeller's Hole in One

This is truly amazing.

CBC Podcasts

It's about time.

The Boss hooks up with AOL Music

by Staci Kramer (www.paidContent.org)

"Maybe it’s just the longtime Bruce fan in me but this actually broke through a growing fatigue with announcements of broadband “firsts” … AOL Music is posting a new exclusive video the morning after each concert in Bruce Springsteen’s just-started five-week North American tour with the Seeger Sessions Band.
Video from the first four concerts is up now; the package — “18 Nights Of Bruce” — includes pix, set lists, commentary from fan site Backstreets.com, IM and email links, and, of course, a link to AOL Tickets.
This may be the only way I get to experience the Seeger Sessions tour as it happens (it isn’t coming to St. Louis) so I hope the balkiness I experienced loading the video in Firefox and two versions of IE was a momentary glitch.
– AOL’s effort has scale but it isn’t the first video broadband venue for the new album. The inaugural concert performance for Springsteen and the band streamed live on MSN Video as part of its New Orleans Jazz Fest coverage and is still up, along with the other video from the event."

I just watched "Oh, Mary don't you weep" from the Seger sessions tour. It's like "folk on steroids". Pretty cool.

Stolen Election?

What those dope smoking, VW van driving, bearded, beatnik hippies at Rolling Stone Magazine (in this case Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) are just figuring out now is... it's not the voting that matters... it's the counting.

Link to Rolling Stone article via MeFi.

DRM and the Consumer

This post got me to thinking that as Big Media conglomerates scramble to lock down "their" content with new formats and distribution methodologies / technologies, and they make it harder or more difficult for us to consume it, there's a huge opportunity for "not so hot", crappy or even God-awful consumer generated content to be "seen", "consumed" and enjoyed by "we the people"... this does not bode well for them.

From DigitalMediaThoughts:
"Having grown tired of one war, we're on the eve of another, complete with alliances, secret codes, and laser beams. No, not Iran -- it's the fight over the next generation of DVD devices. The real battle isn't between Sony (SNE) and Microsoft (MSFT) and their chosen formats, it's between the manufacturers and us -- the consumers, the ones who ultimately pay for it all. And the battle is over Digital Rights Management (DRM), because in addition to increased storage, these new disks are packed full of copy-protection functions, some of which impair our ability to use the content we pay for, the way we like and are legally entitled to."

Link to Business Week article via DigitalMediaThoughts blog... and this is kinda what I'm talkin' about.

"Howdy Pardner"

OK, this thing ranks right up there with Pizza in the morning, Maxxum Magazine and Sports... you know, stuff women love...

Link to Gizmodo.

"Solid Potato Salad"

Summertime is here and so are the Ross sisters.
You gotta watch this right to the end... amazing!


Solid Potato Salad - The Ross Sisters - video powered by Metacafe

Visualizing Stock Market Data

Here's a pretty cool site with an innovative way of compressing hard-to-read information of the morning papers stock section into a simple snapshot.

Link via Edward Tufte's blog.

What Celebrity Do I Look Like?

I'm not sure which is a bigger time waster... reading People magazine cover to cover or spending a bit of time at this site.

I expect my results would fall somewhere between George Clooney and Gollum.

Link via Gizmodo.

Skype is on a roll...

Skype has announced free Skypeout calls within North America to Canadian and U.S. landlines and cell phones. Amazing.

Link to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed.

Karl Rove indicted?

Things are finally heating up for Karl.

For those of you that have the time (and the bandwidth) there's a great PBS Frontline episode on the man here.

Personal Submarines

One of these rigs would be nice to have for sneaking up on your friends... but with the kind of friends I have I'd definitely want it outfitted with both long and short range Polaris nuclear missles.

Link to Gizmodo.

"The Friendly Skies" indeed.

Here's an amazing animation of a day in the life of Air Traffic density over the United States of America (with a caveat on scale... the skies really aren't this "crowded" but visualization of the density patterns and temporal flow is way cool).

Link to animation file via Edward Tufte's blog (note: it may take a minute or two for the file to load in your browser).

Dark Side of the Moon turns "1500"

1500 weeks on the Billboard Charts that is... which makes "Dark Side of the Moon" the longest selling album of all time.

I'm eternally grateful to a young Becky Beggs for giving me a copy of the 12" vinyl when I as in Grade 10 :-)

Link to Billboard via digg.

Apple vs. Apple

Cupertino emerges victorious over McCartney, Starr, Ono and the estate of Harrison as a British judge rules in favor of Apple Computer.

Link to Reuter's via Engadget

Cool NASA video

Here's a great NASA video of the of the Cassini-Huygens Titan probe landing.
It's a synthesis of video and telemetry data and way cool too! (via BoingBoing).

Neil's protest album debuts on the Net

Way to go Neil...

Link to Yahoo! News piece.
Link to Neil's Garage (www.neilyoung.com)

UPDATE: Link to a review of the new album by rock critic Ken Tucker.

iPod "Domino Effect" TV Ad

Cool TV ad for what looks like an Apple dealer.

Link

TV in Japan

"Domo arigato" to Xeni at BoingBoing for the pointer to this great blog featuring whacky crap on TV in Japan. Very cool!

Link.

Map Visualizations

Worldmapper is a set of maps that distort the size of countries to make them proportional to those countries' child populations, predicted population in 2500, immigrants, net incoming tourism, passenger cars, dairy exports, and more.
Very cool.

Link via Nat at O'Reilly Radar.

Oh Canada! videos

Everything I know about the Caribou I learned from "Hinterland Who's Who".

Links via MeFi.

Clean Vrooooommm!

The Vespa goes Hybrid!
Wonder if it'll sound the same?

Link to Gizmodo.

Apple Boot Camp

I've been giving this lots of thought to this since Apple launched this free software that let's you boot WindowsXP on their Intel based MacBookPro. At $2,500+ the MacBookPro is at the high end of the notebook market but tha fact you can run both OS'es (and probably Linux and Windows Vista too) makes this rig a "double-plus-good" no-brainer, totally awesome rig.

Some more thoughts on Boot Camp via digg.

EnvisionToronto

A pretty cool GoogleMaps / local photo mashup.

Link via MetaFilter

Cabs and GPS

"CabSpotting traces San Francisco's taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible."

Link via MetaFilter.

Expo '67: "Man and His World"

I'm not exactly sure where the feminists were in 1967 to protest the theme of the this world Expo in Montreal but I attended with my parents and my dear Aunt Norni (Elanor) and had a total blast. Here are some links to some wonderful scanned images of Expo '67 courtesy of the folks at MetaFilter.

Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots on Steriods

This video clip from a Japanese competition is strangely fascinating... at least for geeks like me.

Link via digg.

Liberal Leadership

Interesting coverage of the Liberal Party of Canada leadership race -- on the MetaFilter blog. Link.

BellSouth plays Snidely Whiplash

BellSouth is set to shut down New Orlean's city wide WiFi because they claim it's illegal competition for the services they offer. Link.

Peer-to-Peer-to-Lawyers

First you get the power, then you get the money, then you get the lawsuit...
Streamcast Networks sues Kaaza/Skype under RICO statutes :-)

Link via Om Malik.

Apple iPhone

OK, so someone in Australia says it's "all but confirmed" but any way you slice it - this thing better be an insanely great device. Dual Core iBooks and a wide screen video iPod on April 1st would be nice too :-)

Link to Gizmodo.

Apocalypse Pooh!

I imagine Disney lawyers will be issuing iFilm with a take down notice faster than people ran to catch the last chopper out of Saigon... until then check out this 9 minute mashup from 1987!

Link to iFilm via BoingBoing.

What kinda Wireless?

It's good to know that when I bolt out of bed in the morning to engage in work I truly love I'm barking up the right tree -- at least according to #4 on Paul Kerodsky's "Ten Emerging Technolgies That Will Make a Difference" list.

Tufte on Photography

One of my design heros, Edward Tufte, on aesthetic controls for photographers.

Link to ask E.T.

South by Southwest

Here are some great archived keynote and confernece discussions (Podcasts, MP3, Video) from last weeks "South By Southwest" Interactive conference held annually in Austin Texas. Good stuff for geeks, entrepreneurs, creatives and anyone who's curious about emerging trends.

Links to audio.
Links to video.

South Park & Tom

So Comedy Central buckles-in on a 2nd airing of a South Park episode about scientology. Tom Cruise presses for a ban on the episode and gets it. Now it's likely waaaaay more people will search, download, view and talk about it due to the controversy. Matt & Trey are smart guys and probably knew that demand for a banned episode would shoot into the stratosphere.

Here's a great post by Bob Lefsetz in which he uses this story to illustrate the changes now underway in media -- big, small, old and new. Good stuff.

Link to LefsetzLetter.

UPDATE: Yeah, well what the hell do I know... 3 hours after writing the post above I found the South Park scientology episode posted on YouTube in one of my RSS feeds.

"Pimp Your Ride" -- D.C. Lobbyist Style

A great story on indicted Washington D.C. lobbyist Jack Abramoff's 2002 BMW 745i... apparently it had everything but fur dice hanging from the rear view mirror.

Link to the NYTimes vis SmartMobs.

Some Assembly Required

Here's a really cool time lapse video of the 12 month assembly process for the new Airbus A380 - compressed into 7 minutes.

Link to video (via digg).

Ask a Ninja

This... is really funny.

Link.

The Perfect Mug

Barney Gumble would love one of these.

Cubeland

A great article from Fortune on the history of the office cubicle.

Link.

SNL Portman Rap

This is a few days old but Princess Amidala busting a move is worth a look ;-)

Link to SNL Digital Short.

Cool Keyspan iPod Remote

This looks pretty cool for browsing / playing iPod content remotely... I wish the Logitech Harmony line of remotes had this kind of capability.

Link to Keyspan Press Release.

A Net Saturated World?

If I was an incumbent telco or wireless carrier I'd be kinda worried about this...

Currently there is a kind of "illusion" that you need phone company.
Just like when Edison was in the business of providing light, people figured out pretty quickly that what they really wanted was electricity. What people are figuring out now is that they want CONNECTIVITY.

Over time it's likely to become increasingly hard for incumbent telcos to support their existing business models. I think an argument can be made that the main purpose of their "new" network offerings (3G, EVDO, etc.) is to support their current business model and billing infrastructure. If their "Port Blocking" or throttling of bits associated with VoIP services like Skype and Vonage isn't evidence enough that they're freaked out, their terms of service which tightly control what customers can actually do over their new network connections oughta be... is this a value-added consumer experience?

Link to SmartMobs.

UPDATE: Mark Evans has some interesting, related info here.

Business Week on Net Neutrality

"THE SQUEEZE. Recently, executives at some telephone companies have indicated that their business model for providing broadband service will include not only charging customers for an Internet connection but also assessing a fee on Web sites to enable their customers to reach them more quickly."

"Essentially, what these executives are proposing is the creation of a two-lane Internet where larger, more established Web sites with financial resources that pay for fast-lane access will be able to squeeze out smaller, emerging Web sites."

Link via SmartMobs.

South-Park-ified

Me as a South Park character (although I doubt the Nuns at St. Dominic's Elementary School would approve).

Link to South-Park-maker.

Toronto to become a WiFi Hotspot

The Toronto Star reports that Ontario Hydro is planning to make the entire city a WiFi Hotspot... I bet Ted Rogers doesn't think that's a cool as I do.

Link to the Toronto Star and the CBC chimes in here.