Ratsofrass

I got to wondering about those Shamwow things they advertise on TV. You can watch the ad online in case you never watch TV, or you can take my word that it’s a rag that’s supposed to have some amazing absorbing properties. Do they actually work something like advertised? So I go do a little Google search and come up with infomercialratings.com, with consumer reviews of the said Shamwow product.

WARNING - I am about to do something I despise on the internet - post images of text. I’m just a data whore tonight.
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So I was browsing Digg thinking again how lame most of the submissions are when I run across this:

He Took a Polaroid Every Day, Until the Day He Died

This is a brilliant post about a brilliant find on the internet: A guy who took a Polaroid every day, shooting something in his life. The blog entry explains it way better than I ever could.

Take a look at all the pictures, here.

Some I like:

That’s all I dare do right now. The site is slowing to a crawl in it’s popularity.

It’s raw, kinda unpolished, but it’s beta; wasn’t really ready for public viewing. As of today it’s hugely mainstream. I see the Digg article is well over 7000 diggs, at this rate it’s going to be one of the most popular articles of the year. Reading some of the project blog pages this thing is getting media attention of all sorts.

I’m trying to put a finger on why this touches a nerve with so many people. I found myself going through the pictures going “let’s see what he was doing in ‘88 when I was in university” or checking on random sets every few years to see how his style changed.

It’s his end though that gets ‘ya. He’s got cancer and having to deal with death at the doorstep. He gets engaged, and married two days later. Only 20 days later we see his last picture.

I have to say, it is interesting to see the story that thousands of photos can tell versus thousands of words.

Okay, it is a rare day that a new tech toy comes out and I go “I want one, now”. It is a rare thing because most of these things do not satisfy my criteria of:
-It must do something I want to do, or it does something I want to do, easier than what I currently have do something.
-It must not cost an arm and a leg.

So, something that I want to do is watch videos I have downloaded from the internet on my TV. I don’t mind watching some streamed stuff on my PC, but my TV viewing area is designed for watching TV, unlike my computer area. Now I have an easier solution:
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Highly recommended reading:

When Pigs Fly: The Death of Oink, the Birth of Dissent, and a Brief History of Record Industry Suicide.

I am not a huge music fan. I used to buy the occasional CD, occasional becoming even less so due to my frustration with a)Finding any music I liked b)Price of said music found. A good part of my old music collection is stuff that I recorded on radio or copied off of friends because I wasn’t going to pay for collections that were steaming piles of crap wrapped around one good song. It didn’t help that the only way I was going to find out about the crap was to buy the album, because I don’t listen to the radio - they are not going to play most of what I buy anyways. The last two CD’s I bought were from artists who directly burned their own stuff and collected all the profit as a result. Previous CD’s were from MP3.com - which was an early victim of the music industry’s heavy handed tactics to maintain control. (more…)

A while back when web pages were new, you had bandwidth hogs - people who designed web pages that were too large for their own good. One of the “tricks” used was to use an image to display text, when plain old text would be so much smaller, searchable, and clickable.

Well, now with video online, you have people displaying text, in videos - when they could just post on their blog, or make a Powerpointless presentation. What’s scary is that some of these things actually see the light of day on Digg or MySpace (ok, nothing surprises me on MySpace).

It seems that the fixation on the latest trend in technology is about the only thing that isn’t changing in consumer level technology. On top of it, I can’t even “read” these videos at a reasonable pace, since they are set at a speed for average grade 7 reading levels.

What really sucks is I feel like the old man on the porch yelling at the kids about how we didn’t do things that way in my day, but hey, in this case, I’d have to say it’s the same stupidity, new technology, and I never did do things that way in my day, so there.

I’ve been using Gmail for a bit, as a secondary account. Now, Gmail is now available to anyone and their dog. The engineers have made a video, telling you why you might want to use Gmail:
Why Use Gmail? video

Why do I think you might want to use Gmail, outside of what the video suggests?

1) Accessible. Yes, I know, any self-respecting geek has an email account they can get at anywhere, but this is for the rest of you that haven’t clued in that it might be a good thing to have an email account you can access anywhere you have internet.
2)Big. 2.822 GB of storage and increasing. With 5MB video attachments becoming ever more common, you need this kind of space these days.

3)Nested messaging. Yeah, I know the video covers this, but it can’t be over emphasized - grouping messages by thread makes it so much easier to follow a conversation - works more like newsgroups. What I’m not sure about is how well this works when you have multiple people being added/dropped to a thread as a conversation goes on - happens in a work situation when you are trying to move a process forward that requires input from different people as things move forward.

Someday, I’m going to get Trevor to show me how to easily embed Youtube videos into this blog. It’s easy, right?????

Darwin Awards - anyone who has had internet access for the last ten years must surely know about them. In the last month I have received two emails regarding this year’s Darwin Awards. One was a link to the Darwin Awards site’s 2006 awards winners.

The other seem to be part bogus email, and part truth, as the “winner” in this email was actually the 1995 winner, now proved to be an urban legend that fooled even the Darwin people.

I got thinking about how many times I have received bogus Darwin award winner emails over the years and further more was thinking ‘why do people create these things in the first place?’ I can only come to the conclusion that there are quite a few pathological liars out there who just have to email all their friends with the cool stuff they are finding out on the internet. I’ve experienced only one of these liars and the stories they come up with can on the surface sound quite plausible - but once you dig into them a bit, they fall apart - sound familiar?

The problems start when these pathological liars send emails out to their naive friends - who might be naive about internet lore in general, and/or be naive in general and just buy everything their pathological friend tells them. The naive friend will likely have other naive friends, who have even less of a chance of knowing the reliably of the previous source. And they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on…

… causing those of us who have been on the ‘net a long time to periodically get these bogus or semi-bogus emails, from those that we love but whose computer we must often support.

So what I end up doing is heading over to the real Darwin Award site, and checking out any email I get claiming to be “This Years Darwin Awards”, then going and informing said naive friend about the bogus nature of the email they sent me. I do this because I hate mis-information, especially its rapid spread through emails from trusted friends.

I think at some point, proven pathological liars are just going to have to be denied publishing privileges by any means on the internet. Either that or Darwin Awards are going to have to stop so I can just fire back an instant “This is bogus…” email without having to check into the veracity of the email I have just been sent. But that would be selfish of me. I can’t explain why Darwin Awards seem to be a more frequent target of “bogusification”. Perhaps pathological liars feel the need to one up the stupidity level told in the real stories?

On the other hand, Darwin Awards do present some useful use other than their obvious entertainment value. I can instantly peg someone’s “‘net cluefullness” by what kind of Darwin Awards email they send me. Something along the lines of “This year’s Darwin Awards are up {link to real Darwin Awards site}” tells me that they are cluefull and on top of it, assume I am cluefull. The ones who send me emails with some pasted text in them: definitely less cluefull. Not necessarily stupid, just not as experienced in what kind of crap floats around in the toilet bowl of email these days. I definitely use the BS filter on future emails from these people, because even if they thought it was worth sending, it could still be just another form of chain letter, scam, or well, BS.

I suppose I should answer my original question; good idea or tool of Satan.
I guess it’s good, overall, at least I get some useful information out of these emails, even if the email itself is crud.

Easiest install ever. Done in 90 seconds. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you how long it took, but it felt short. I’m sitting there running FF2.0, thinking “that’s it? I’m done?!” No reboot. No long download. Okay, I did close my apps like recommended, but that’s it. My bookmarks all look the same. Firefox didn’t try to pester me to change my homepage. My plug in (Flashblock) is still there. Bears repeating: Easiest install ever.
First impressions: I can use RSS feeds in the browser tried it - works. I don’t know what to do with RSS feeds yet, but they work. Spell checker for writing blog posts works - underlines misspells and suggests corrections on right click, has add to dictionary. Nice.

New skin - the look is fine, one minor tweak they made the search bar on the right a bit bigger - maybe  there was a way to change that on 1, but it’s bigger now at any rate.
Firefox was easy. Now I need to figure out what to do with RSS.

Further to my last post, I actually found something interesting being done by a Canadian broadcaster CTV. Now, for the last two years, they have been releasing the previous season of DVD’s for a show around the time new episodes are airing over broadcast. Not a bad idea, you get into a show that’s in it’s nth season, and you can get caught up, without gaps, right to the current episode. I’m guessing this is the model for a lot of shows out there right now, from what little I know of other programming. It’s a good thing - it always sucked to get drawn into a show and not know how it started.

Well, now CTV is doing something new* out there (*new to me). You can go and watch shows from the current season, online. Even the current weeks episode, one day after it’s broadcast. I just used this service over the last two nights to catch up on the one new fiction show I still watch on TV, Corner Gas. This is a wonderful thing. I can now watch when I want to watch, and not remember to watch, which I’m out of the habit of doing these days anyways. On top if it, commercials are blissfully absent, barring a few CTV plugs for other shows. We’re talking 90% fewer commercials here people. I don’t expect this (almost) commercial free bliss to last though. Suck them in and jack up the price, y’know.

Now, as far as the actual interface goes, it’s definitely a “1.0″ deal. It’s a flash plugin that needs some TLC. For one, it doesn’t work under Firefox 1.5 right now. It does work under IE 6. {Bleach} I’d give you a link, but you can’t link to it directly. Goto  www.ctv.ca and you’ll see “CTV Broadband Network” on the front page if you want to try this out. It has problems with popup blocking, even though you clicked to open the popup window in the first place. You can go back and forth in the video, sometimes.  You can play/pause, assuming you can actually bring up the play/pause. For that matter, play/pause isn’t linked to the standard play/pause most keyboards have or, the space bar, you have to use the interface, which sucks when you’re full screen and you don’t have an interface to work with. You need to just know that ‘Esc’ gets you back to a window, mouse click won’t work. The full screen is nice quality though - I’d say VCD level. I will give them high marks for providing a scene selector, similar to what you’d see on a DVD. If you missed the last half of a show, you can click right to the 3 of 4 acts and go. Here’s hoping they deem ondemand worth putting the effort into a 2.0 version.

One thing of note: CTV doesn’t have all it’s programs on here right now. It looks like there trying to hit the younger appeal stuff, so you can watch “Canadian Idol”, “Corner Gas”, “Degrassi:…”, “Instant Star”, and “Whistler”. I really hope they expand the lineup over time to cover all their shows, particulary Robson Arms, which is the first program in a long time I’ve seen that I would say deserves a wider audience.

It’s good to see that somebody out there gets it - on demand is the future of media - I look forward in a few years to scrapping my cable connection in favor of sitting down when I want to watch my “TV”.

TV as we know it from basic cable and air broadcast is dying. About time.

I have been watching some episodes of Tiki Bar and Diggnation. One led me to the other, in a weird warped way. But that’s not my point. My point is, the last two new things I have been watching have both NOT been on broadcast TV. In fact, I’m to the point where “old style” TV pisses me off enough that I only watch it when I’m trying to stay off the computer and a DVD won’t cut it, or there is something I really want to watch. Scratch that, there is nothing I *really* want to watch. I don’t pay attention to the previews. There are way, way too many commercials, there is too much “reality” TV - you’ve heard these complaints before.

The difference now is I have alternatives. I can just be patient and buy my TV on DVD. I can watch clips on YouTube. I can watch “Podcasts”, which I’m still trying to figure out what they’re all about. If I’m really stuck I can just “borrow” a copy of an episode off the internet that I missed on TV, which I’m having to do more and more often because I’m just totally out of the habit of scheduling my life around TV, even as far as taping goes.

Oh, it helps too that stuff on the web doesn’t have the evil emp-, er, CRTC/FCC watching their backs, so you get some cool shit. Take Diggnation. Two guys on a coutch, talking about the latest popular stories on their parent website, digg.com. Oh, and they drink beer while doing this, with an informal review of said beer during the show. There is even a website showing all the beers they have drank on their show. They’re not always sober, and they’re not always on topic, PC or PG13. But they do come up with some funny shit, just sitting there shooting the shit. Never would make it in any form that preserves the entertainment value if ported to regular TV.

I’m hoping for more of this kind of stuff, some low budget program typing things, something different. Cuz I ain’t seeing it on TV.