Flaaaaame

1. I know I shouldn’t let this get to me, but I can’t help it. It’s like a splinter in your finger, it doesn’t hurt, but it’s annoying. Stupidity makes me angry.

2. From out good friends at Slashdot (referring to the term ABC, or American born Chinese):

There’s this thing called immigration. You’re born in China, you immigrate to the US, you apply for US citizenship and renounce your Chinese citizenship. bam American born Chinese

3. You. Are. A. Fucking. Idiot. American BORN Chinese — as in BORN IN AMERICA, you dumb fuck. It describes a person born in America of Chinese descent.

4. Mind you, the whole discussion (titled “Taking My Freedom With Me to China?“) is about some guy who is going to China but wants to find a way to break past the internet censorship (i.e. break Chinese law). The law might be stupid, it might be against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but if you’re in that country, you’d better respect their laws. Otherwise we might see you as a brief snippet on CNN as the idiot that’s going to rot in a nasty chinese jail. And you won’t get any pity from me.

Make Trade Fair

Screenshot of Oxfam commercial

1. I’m not usually one for surprises, but this one I quite enjoyed (the surprise, not the message). It’s an ad for Oxfam, part of their Make Trade Fair campaign. Nothing that out of the ordinary, apart from the fact I came across this as one of the “trailers” on the Love Actually DVD. The ad certainly made an impact, so much so that I ripped a copy and put it online.

2. (I’m not sure this is entirely legal. I’m sure Oxfam won’t mind, but maybe the people responsible for Love Actually might. Oh well. Email if you object.)

3. I’m starting to understand what all this anti-globalisation thing is all about.

Engadget gave these guys points for creativity…

1. …but really? It’s just shit.

2. I’m talking about Oakley’s new Thump sunglasses, which features a built in 256 mb MP3 player and flip up lenses, retailing for US$499! $499! That’s a normal pair of Oakleys, and a 1Gb iPod Shuffle! Engadget actually reviewed it (as in they actually put them on their heads), and concluded:

Alright, setting aside our petty prejudices about how ugly we think the Thump is, $499 is still a lot to drop on a 256MB MP3 player when can pick up a 1GB iPod shuffle or SanDisk MP3 player for around $150. And that’s not taking into account that if you do buy the Thump you’ll most likely still want to own a regular player; even though the lenses do flip up, these are sunglasses and you can’t really walk around wearing these at night or indoors without coming off like a complete tool. We’ll give Oakley some points for creativity on this one, but we won’t be happy unless the Thump 2 has twice as much memory, a cheaper price tag, and comes in the form of a pair of sunglasses we’d actually not be embarrassed to wear.

3. Word.

Ouch.

1. David Atkinson, a scientist from the University of Idaho, spent 18 years designing an experiment. It involved a space probe, an special instrument, and the winds on Saturn’s biggest moon. Now imagine waiting seven years for the probe to arrive and the experiment to begin, only to realise that someone had forgotten to turn on the measuring instrument.

“The story is actually fairly gruesome,” the University of Idaho scientist said in an e-mail from Germany, the headquarters of the European Space Agency. “It was human error — the command to turn the instrument on was forgotten.” Professor’s Saturn Experiment Forgotten, AP (from Yahoo), Thu Jan 20

2. Ouch.

3. But the best quote was to come:

“In total, the core of our team has invested something like 80 man years on this experiment, 18 of which are mine,” Atkinson wrote. “I think right now the key lesson is this — if you’re looking for a job with instant and guaranteed success, this isn’t it.”

Billy G, making computers *sexy*, baby

Bill Gates, err, reclining....
Images from Neowin.net
Yeah, you want some of this baby…?

Bill Gates, err, reclining....
I’m, dreamin’, of a Microsoft Christmas….

hehehehe :)

Uday’s (ex)Ferrari

Uday Hussein's Ferrari F550 Marenello
Images from the Car Lounge Forums

1. Uday Hussein certainly knew how to live it up. Maybe he tried to take this with him on the way out?

(more…)

The New Yorker on someone who wrote about Miyazaki

Totoro!
Picture from Nausicaa.net

1. The New Yorker has an interview with a journalist who wrote a piece about Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary animator (Nausicaa, Princess Mononoke and recently Spirited Away, amongst others). A good read, especially for those not familiar with his work.

Continuing the obscene obsession with the uber-cute

1. This week’s issue features Hello Kitty:

Cingular Nokia Hello Kitty mobile
From Enadget

A Hello Kitty mobile? How could any girl resist?

Hello Kitty Bluetooth Headset
From Engadget

A Hello Kitty Bluetooth headset? The perfect accessory…

Hello Kitty Ferrari
From Gizmodo

…and what better to be seen in than a Hello Kitty themed Ferrari Testarossa? Rowr.

(I realise the car is fake.)

How cheap is cheap enough?

1. CNet has out done itself yet again with another ill-informed op-ed piece where the author couldn’t think of anything to say, so he reverted to the family favourites. He seems to have a problem with Apple, and the fact that they have an excellent marketing department and are very well polished. He finds the the idea of syncing music to a slide show of baby photos “foreign and impersonal”. Then he thought a US$499 Mac sans monitor, keyboard and mouse to be overly expensive, and I quote:

…consumers pay for the style of Mac Mini. The $599 model comes with a 1.42GHz PowerPC processor, 256MB of memory, an 80GB drive and a DVD/CD-RW drive. A similarly configured Gateway 3250 (2.66GHz Pentium 4, 80GB drive, 256MB memory, same drive) costs $499; $100 less with a rebate.

Oh no, but there’s more:

But the Gateway also comes with some important extras–namely a keyboard, a mouse and a 17-inch screen. The Mac Mini has none of this. Cool industrial design with an artsy interface or a monitor? It depends what you’re looking for.

2. Indeed. Are you looking for a quiet, beautiful and out-of-the-box functional computer, or a badly built unreliable time sink piece of shit that is a US$399 Gateway? Would you prefer to sit next to a hurricane wrestling with the new worm/virus/spyware etc that creeps into your system (’cause at US$399 you won’t be getting a virus checker), or to sit next to something that just works? Come to think of it, that’s probably why Mr Kanellos produced such a shoddy piece of writing — he couldn’t hear himself think next to that cheap Gateway PC.

Apple Legal and the Steve Jobs Keynote Explosion

1. Well. no wonder Apple is suing Think Secret. They. Practically. Got. It. All. Right. The “predicted” details were spot on almost all of the time. Someone had a serious brain fart when they thought they could leak such detailed knowledge and get away with it. Someone’s gonna get spanked.

2. As an aside, here’s an interesting point. Remember the bit in the Keynote (you have seen the broadcast, haven’t you? :) where Jobs makes a joke about how Apple stocks were down, but there was still more of the Keynote to go? Well apparently Apple shares stayed down, according to Reuters. To quote the article:

But rumor sites had anticipated the new products, and Apple shares fell nearly 4 percent[*].

“I think that the expectations were about as high as they could get for it,” said Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.

So much for rumour sites helping Apple eh? So, Lisa DiCarlo from Forbes, how does that crow taste?

3. Anyway, back to business. The crowd seemed pretty subdued this time around. There was less applause than there were last year, or so it seemed to me. I guess the biggest hysteria came from the sexy hardware, but there wasn’t so much of that this time around. The Mac mini is totally sweet, but the iPod shuffle left me a bit cold. Firstly, it has a stupid name. Secondly, I’ve never seen Jobs have to sell so hard on the merits of a device that, by his standards only a few months ago, was not worthy of Apple’s attention. However, it is the cheapest high capacity flash based mp3 player available, and because of that it’s gonna sell. I might even buy one myself — for the odd time when I don’t have room for an iPod. From a hardware perspective it might as well be “Year of the budget Conscious”.

4. From a software perspective — fwoar! I totally dig the new GarageBand and the iLife ‘05 suite in general. Man, GarageBand! Where was this when I was in a band? 8 track simultaneous recording, live notation, pitch correction… I would pay Au$119 for that alone. Hell, I would’ve had to pay a lot more than that for other programs. And this one has four other programs that come with it. And being able to edit HD in iMovie is crazy, considering there’s not that many HD consumer cameras around (and, you guessed it, they don’t come cheap), and anyone who regularly shoots HD could probably afford to get Final Cut Pro HD. I also can’t wait until Tiger is released, with Spotlight and Automator the two features I didn’t know I needed. Kick ass.

[*] I should clarify. It fell 4pc on the day of the Keynote. Since then, Apple has posted record earnings and share prices have shot up again.