There is Something Very Wrong With This

Seriously? What happened to respecting our Commander-in-Chief. OMG.

Self-Deprecating Advertising? Really?

Advertising sure has come a long way since I went to school. Recently, my husband and I were snickering ourselves silly when we saw a television ad in which the announcer actually said "Call 333-3333* and We'll Pick Up the Phone." In 2002, TrendSpotter reported an upswing in Self-Deprecating Advertising. A water bottle company issues an undesigned, plain bottle with only the words "Another Bloody Bottle of Water." A handbag designer gets a lot of buzz when they portray their product as barf bags.
But, I wonder if Microsoft Windows Phone 7 $500 million dollar advertising blitz really knows the message their sending. PC World interprets the point of the ad as the phone that will "save us from our phones" and will get users "in and out and back to life."









Sure, their marketers might have you believe that there's a "HUGE" problem with self-involved Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone users who have dropped out of life. But will these users actually consider buying a phone who's advertising message is "Hey, the Windows Phone 7 is so boring you won't be distracted?"
I mean, Really?


*not the actual phone number

Enhance your blog with Zemanta

Image via WikipediaI've been kind of busy lately, but an article by TechCrunch, a news feed I follow on Google Buzz, prompted me to write.
In Find Photos For Your Blog In Three Easy Steps, TechCrunch reported a new startup to help bloggers find art for their columns. The site is called Wylio. What it does is search for photos across the web to add photos to your blog.  Lets face it, the world of blogging would be so much more drab if there weren't some kind of graphic to break up the text. My interest was piqued so I checked it out and have to admit that it looks promising. And then I remembered I already had Zemanta installed. Zemanta does what Wylio does and more. The drawback with Wylio is you have to go to its site and enter a specific keyword, then copy the result and paste it into your blog. Zemanta, however, works right beside you as you are typing your blog. As you type it will suggest meta-data, media, related articles, etc.
Zemanta is an extension for browsers (it supports Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer). It also has plugins for Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. In other words, its got you covered.
I must confess that I had forgotten all about Zemanta's benefits--having turned off what I had deemed unnecessary add-ons a while back to speed up my surfing when things were getting too slow for comfort. But I went a little crazy and turned off practically everything.  After reading the article, I turned Zemanta back on to take another look. I fell in love with it all over again.
Being an artist, I like to create my own artwork, but sometimes I just don't feel like firing up Freehand (or Illustrator, or Photoshop). Sometime's I just want to write. So, I don't always use the photo feature. The photo on the right was pulled up by Zemanta. The art was among 400 pictures that Zemanta found that coordinated with some keyword in this blog entry. It also found around 24 related articles, from RSS links ranging in dates from 1 day ago to 1 year ago.  (Only one was 1 year ago. Most links were within the last 3 months.) Another benefit of Zemanta is that you can take it or leave it. You don't have to use any of their suggestions, but its always handy to have while you are writing.
If you're a blogger, check it out. It might be just what you're looking for.

Guido the Geek Performs Hit on Twitter?

Image via WikipediaWhen White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs admitted his Twitter account had been compromised, a host of feelings popped up for me. Having had one of my websites hacked a while back, I thought well if a site as huge as Twitter could have left its guard down what had happened to me wasn't that bad. It could happen to anyone. The thought of such "huge" people as Gibbs and Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown's wife Sarah getting hacked goes to show how wide spread technology crime has become. Still, don't you find the media's attempts to describe technology a bit funny? I do. In a New York Times article -- Twitter Is Hacked Tuesday Morning - NYTimes.com -- the writer states:

Other attacks, including the first worm to strike the iPhone, launched in November 2009, also paid tribute to Mr. Astley. In rebel-Web parlance, clicking to see Mr. Astley is known as being “rickrolled.” Twitter has since disabled @matsta’s account.

I love that description "rebel-Web parlance." ROTFLMAO.
The article also suggest a mafia-like cybercrime organization, which elicits in me visions of Guido the Geek completing a hit on Twitter account holders. Is there really a "cybercrime organization?" Well, sort of. There are a few groups who's sole purpose is to steal identities. That's what the Justice Department's division of  Computer Crimes and Intellectual Property define as cybercrime organizations. If there is a Cybercrime Mob, is there also a "Godfather?"
I know its not funny to those who were infected. The matter might appear less humorous to me if I'd visited twitter that day. Yes, I have a twitter account, but rarely post any tweets simply because I can't write sentences that short. And, by the time I think of something to say, the subject is too old to comment on. I also don't read tweets off of the website. Like many, I use an app (I prefer NAMBU) to keep up with those I found interesting enough to follow. However, I can go weeks without even firing it up. But, now that I know there's a cybercrime mob, you can bet I'm going to follow @guidothegeek so I can keep up with them.

The Physics of Farm Town

Old hats of the Facebook/MySpace game called Farm Town are familiar with this but its new to me. The geek in me finds it fascinating enough to write about it.
I think about all the years' physicists like Stephen Hawking have been working on this and its right there on a silly facebook page. A Farm Town glitch knocks a hole in the space-time continuum. BELIEVE IT . . . OR NOT.
The glitch allows you to have unlimited dimensions on your farm. In one dimension you can have a crop of pineapples and on the same farm you can have another dimension of crops of tomatoes. These dimensions are not aware of each other, they don't interact in any way. There are no dualities. And, almost, no rules.

OK, stop laughing at me. In order to write this, I have to come clean and admit to being a Facebook gamer. Yikes. There's so little time to do everything I do and yet I often find myself looking at my watch thinking, 'Oh no, I've got to go harvest my (some crop here). Betty White said on her SNL debut, (Facebook) "sounds like a huge waste of time." I actually have gotten a lot out of social networking sites, but that's another column. I was introduced to Farm Town's multi-dimensional universes recently, while assisting a neighbor who'd hired me to harvest her crops. Helping out in Farm Town is beneficial to both parties. Both receive cash and crops, while saving on the valuable fuel commodity. So back to my discovery over the physics of Farm Town, my overall-clad avatar was going along, minding her own business, harvesting this person's crops when suddenly the world started disappearing. It was as though my character was being swallowed up by a black hole! Frightened, I typed, "What's going on????!!" and my neighbor explained what Farm Towners know as "Layering Farms."

Layering farms

Here's the info she sent to me:

Farm #1, completely harvested and plowed.
Open farm in 2 to 4 tabs...depending on how much you wish to layer
tab 1, plant 4 day crop if you have opened 4 tabs
tab 2, plant 3 day crop if you have opened 4 tabs
tab 3, plant 2 day crop if you have opened 4 tabs
tab 4, plant 1 day crop if you have opened 4 tabs
At this time all tabs are still open
All farms are planted
At tab 1, click refresh
when the farm reopens the crop planted on the last tab..(tab 4 - 1 day crop) will be showing. Close other tabs.
When crop is ready to harvest:
harvest crop and delete fields. Refresh, crop showing should be crop planted on tab 2. Once this crop is ready to harvest, do so and then delete fields. So on, so on... After harvesting 4 day crop, plow and begin again. This can be done with all 6 farms...therefore each farm has 4 separate days worth of crop for a total of 16 harvest in 4 days.

I've done it with more than the 4 crops - added 8, 4, 2 hr ones sometimes if I needed them.

I tried it, and even though it's a bit confusing, it worked the first time out. Something happened I should note for those who want to try it. When I did it, it said I had gone offline and asked if I wanted to reconnect. I took a guess and said no. I finished following the directions and it still worked. Now all I have to do is make sure that I harvest the "layers" (I much prefer my definition of alternate dimensions) before they whither. I can't wait to see the black hole effect again.

Never to Old to Avoid the Trekkie Redshirt Effect.

I ran across the link for this at Huffington Post. It is hilarious. But, it reminded me of a lesson I'd learned from my teen-aged son. To confess, I never considered myself a Trekkie--sure I loved the series and had seen all of them along with the movies but I wasn't hard core. I did, or so I thought, know a lot more about Star Trek than my son. But at one of the ComicCon's or other comic convention we attended, I was about to purchase a Star Trek T-shirt, when my son took it out of my hand and told me absolutely not. Puzzled, I looked up at him and he said, "Mom, the red shirt always dies." Don't laugh, but I'd never heard that before, nor had it occurred to me. I'm embarrassed to find out that its common knowledge. Apparently, redshirt is a writer's slang term for a minor character who's sole purpose is to dramatize a dangerous situation with his brutal death. It was apparently first used in Star Trek, but has become such a common technique among writers that it has a Wiki named after it, a book about it, and so on. Just goes to show me how much I don't know.

Logmein.com

This is a site I'd heard about before, but really had no need for it nor did I want others to have the ability to access my computer. Now that my parents-in-law have bit the bullet and gotten a computer, I have found out the need to be able to see their computer when they call. Being able to move the mouse is a major accomplishment for them, so to say the least they are in need of a lot assistance. The only problem right now, is I'll have to go down there and install the logmein software before I can test it out. So stay tuned.
Note: I did install it on my laptop. I had one tiny glitch. I'd forgotten to turn off norton's firewall and the first install failed. Once I'd given the permission to open a port on the network (sorry I didn't write down which one), I tried again to install and it went well.
Check out logmein.com (its free unless you want more features).