Churbuck.com

DecoDen is currently a popular trend amongst young Japanese women. They enjoy decorating their phones lavishly with bright objects like beads, and enjoy having a truly one-of-a-kind portable phone. Deco comes from the word “Decorative” and Den is an abbreviation of “Keitai Denwa” which means portable phone in Japanese.Here is where a PC like the IdeaPad S10-2 comes in. Check out what happened when we told our decorator “you can do whatever you like.” It’s a sight to behold.

via Yamato Thinking » Blog Archive » Ultra DecoPad.

Thanks to CNET and Technically Incorrect. Just too much weirdness to do anything but admire.

College roommate and professor of pre-columbian archaeology at the University of Kansas, John Hoopes, writes me on Facebook about the mounting online lunacy of the end-of-the-world movement that is based on some Aztec Mayan calendar saying 2012 is when it all goes down.

Professor Hoopes sent me a link to a profile of a new age end of world visionary named Pinchbeck — the new Timothy Leary — who in a Rolling Stone article was described as preparing for a forthcoming drug trip thusly:

Pinchbeck wore Depends and a blindfold, and kept a plastic vomit bucket by his head.

Classic! Reminds me of a college drinking game called “The 100″ — where the aim was to drink four cases of Budweiser (and four singles) between 6 pm on Friday and 6 pm on Sunday. This looks easy on paper, but is nearly impossible as it requres two beers per hour (assuming zero sleep). Whatever, I was never in the same league as Pinchbeck, though I did know some guys who donned hockey helmets before opening a bottle of surgical ether in their room in the event of unconsciousness and head injuries.

Update: It is midnight Thursday to midnight Sunday according to drinkwap.com. I recall it was 48 hours, not 72.

Good luck John with dispelling the end of world stuff. We’re all counting on you.

via 2 Yellowstone workers fired after peeing into geyser | CapeCodOnline.com.

“Two seasonal Yellowstone National Park concession workers have been fired after a live webcam caught them urinating into the Old Faithful geyser.”

It’s not like anybody drinks out of the thing …..

http://piggythefluvirus.blogspot.com/

There is an interesting article in the New Yorker about the phenomenon of students and type-A personalities using — without “need” — attention deficit drugs such as Adderal and Ritalin to improve their study skills and concentration. It’s a chilling look at the future of neurological therapies for gaining a performance edge, a glimpse at a Gattaca-style world where we’ll start mental doping to stay competitive.

Quoting Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, the writer, Margaret Talbot, writes:

As he notes in a 2007 paper, “Many sectors of society have winner-take-all conditions in which small advantages produce disproportionate rewards.” At school and at work, the usefulness of being “smarter,” needing less sleep, and learning more quickly are all “abundantly clear.” In the near future, he predicts, some neurologists will refashion themselves as “quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” The demand is certainly there: from an aging population that won’t put up with memory loss; from overwrought parents bent on giving their children every possible edge; from anxious employees in an efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture, where work never really ends.

Basically this is a case of people taking speed to focus. Add in the benefit of losing some weight in the process, and one can see why this is a trend that won’t go away.

It reminds me of the Bruce Sterling short story where a hacker takes his girlfriend’s study drugs so he can win an online game. Anyway, it is a thought-provoking piece that is sure to drive demand for bogus ADHD medication prescriptions, not warn people away.

Randall Stross writes today in the Sunday New York Times about the fine line between camp and hell when it comes to corporate video.

In it he calls attention to the wonderful internal video made by some Microsoft researchers for a product technology called Songsmith — apparently a “song generator” that one sings into and which then infers from the lyrics what the electro-synth soundtrack should be.  It is indeed awesome in its awfulness. Watch the first 30 seconds, get the idea, and skip to the video at the end of this post for its real contribution to society.

The payoff on Stross’ story is the pointer to what some clever souls have done with the Songsmith technology, feeding into it well known head bangers such as Metallica, and my personal favorite, Van Halen. This has made my day, almost as much as the discovery earlier this week of what the acronyms SIaS and FIaT mean in conjunction with Yankee’s owner, George Steinbrenner.

Lenovo’s “Customer of the Year” — Constantine von Hoffman (for threatening to tell people we delivered a ThinkPad to him ahead of schedule) — has posted his annual list of the top marketing boners, blunders, bloopers, etc.. I strongly recommend a full visit, my favorite is Vista toilet paper and Lolita brand beds.

1 Ford features “Space Oddity” — a song about astronaut suicide — in new car campaign.

2 Framingham State College uses the word blah 137 times in a 312-word fundraising letter.

3 Disney (multiple entries): Bans kids from DisneyWorld restaurant; Changes “It’s A Small World” to “A Salute to All Nations, But Mostly America”; and Sells “High School Musical” panties for tween girls with the phrase “Dive In” on them.

4 Woolworths (UK) launches Lolita brand of beds for young girl

See the rest below ….

Top 10 Marketing Blunders of 2008 « Collateral Damage.

Interesting front page story in the NYT this Sunday morning about President-elect Obama likely having to surrender his Blackberry and email privileges for the duration of his term due to security concerns and public information laws. At first I was reading the piece, saying “Boneheads. Email good. Luddites in government, bad.” Then the security concerns were cited and I suddenly thought it is maybe not such a good idea to have the Commander In Chief on the RIM network sending emoticons to the National Security Advisor: “Dude. Chechnya! WTF? Call me! (Go Sox)”

Still, for an administration that is releasing weekly “fireside chats” on YouTube, that is seeking a National CTO, and which delivered on the promise of technology first opened up by Joe Trippi and the Howard Dean campaign,  it seems utterly ass-hatted to take away email. But, unless a secure alternative can be developed, the president-to-be may be in the same boat the president-that-was found himself eight years ago when he sadly signed off of his AOL mail account and told his friends it was nice knowing them electronically.

Speaking of Project Mayhem:

“The phrase “PAPERI STREET SOAP COMPANY,” with each A encircled was painted in black across the walls of a bank, clothing store, real estate office and other businesses, according to a report by Officer John Alexander”

CapeCodTimes.com – Signs of anarchy in Osterville.

Mis-spelled graffiti leads police to fruitless Google search for meaning of random tagging. Drop the “i” from “Paperi” and you have the name of Fight Club’s Tyler Durden’s human fat (liposuction trash) soap company: “Paper Street Soap Company.”

Why can’t project codenames be more awesome? Corporate and organizational code names — the granddaddy would be the Manhattan Project — are usually generated to cloak some secret project under an innocent sounding name to throw off spies.

There is a codename generator: http://www.codenamegenerator.com but none of the examples are very funny. I mean, there’s a certain genius who came up with “Shock and Awe”, or, my personal favorite from “Fight Club” — Project Mayhem.

Projects I would like to work on:

• Project Bohica
• Project Meconium
• Deathstar

Keep in mind during a “name the conference room” contest at a former employer, I lobbied hard for a theme related to cannibalism: The Donner Party Room, The Essex Whaleboat Room, Andes Soccer Teamroom, etc.. I lost.

Next time the person next to you in a meeting commits some loud stomach rumbling — you know that gurgling, growling noise that almost sounds like a fart, but because it’s internal it doesn’t carry the noxious impact and therefore is okay, but deserving of a comment anyway — say to them:

“Hey, nice borborygmus.”

That’s pronounced “bore-bore-rig-mus” and is pretty onomatopoetic to my ear.

Brianne in the comments of an earlier post suggests I watch out for open flames.

She refers, of course, to this high point in my social life. When I set myself on fire in front of the Queen of Sweden. I had all but forgotten but still bear the scars.

Nestor, who I met at the Wall and at the USA House, and who is a digital dude, had this on his agency bio.

It was too good not to share. Meet “Speak: The Hungarian Rapper”

Institute for Justice: First Amendment Cases: Texas Computer Repair
Thanks to Fester for this WTF weirdness. Texas wants computer repair technicians to be licensed Private Investigators. Somehow the hardboiled world of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett doesn’t jibe in my mind with a guy in a shortsleeved shirt swapping power supplies on a beige desktop.

Then again, there are always the news stories about the people who get fired when they send their PC in for a repair and get nailed for having dirty pictures stored on the drive.

“Under the new law enacted in 2007, Texas has put computer repair shops on notice that they had better watch their backs any time they work on a computer. If a computer repair technician without a government-issued private investigator’s license takes any actions that the government deems to be an “investigation,” they may be subject to criminal penalties of up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine, as well as civil penalties of up to $10,000. The definition of “investigation” is very broad and encompasses many common computer repair tasks”

Word of the day is regurgitalith. Fossilized vomit. Seems to work well in a sentence in association with “PowerPoint.”

“Boy Chuck really pulled out the stops with that 143-slide regurgitalith in the KPI meeting this morning.”

From Gawker: “If you’re in the market for a good story-time read, I recommend My Beautiful Mommy, a heartwarming tale of personal growth and breast augmentation by plastic surgeon Michael Salzhauer. The book is aimed at helping kids understand that even mommies can be insecure. See, even adults love instant gratification; but for them, face lifts work better than candy …”

From Boing-Boing: It’s Just a Plant.

Thanks to Uncle Fester for the pointers and laughs.

Yahoo to roll out a new ad system. Ok.

Yahoo to run Google ads. Weird.

Yahoo to get into bed with AOL to stave off Microsoft. Weirder.

Microsoft to get into bed with News Corp. to really gang up on Yahoo. Weirder still.

It’s all wrong. I went to the Microsoft digital upfront last week in New York and the emphasis was on shows. Not technology. Not context. Not apps in the clouds. But shows. Celebrity gossip, funny home improvement, stressed out moms, and college music festivals. Great stuff for the right brand — but it’s like the early days of Microsoft when Microsoft seemed to be taking the content-is-king thing seriously. Yahoo — remember Lloyd Braun? — also used to be into shows. So I guess there’s synergy going there.

I guess.

Dan Lyons Fake Steve Jobs liveblogs — make that twitters — from Macworld. Pretty funny stream of consciousness.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A Routine Traffic Stop Can Change Everything in an Instant.

From McSweeney’s:

“I turned on siren and increased speed in the left lane and came abreast of vehicle, noticing a large numeral “5″ painted on the side. Driver was Caucasian male in his mid-20s, wearing racing helmet and leaning forward over steering wheel. I eventually pulled slightly in front of his vehicle and forced it to the side of the road. As I approached the open window, driver began speaking very rapidly and incoherently about a volcano and a mountain crack that was closing. Upon request, he produced license identifying himself as SPEED RACER”.

Guess what the officer found in the trunk?