Category Archives: Technology

Microsoft’s New Ads Are Dumb

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(Ben posted this video first)

They’re directly trying to combat the negative perception of Microsoft, fighting fire with fire against Apple’s switch ads, but they seem to misunderstand a few things.

1. Apple’s ads are short. Very short. The Microsoft ad goes on for two full minutes of weird non sequiturs, including stuff about wearing shoes in the shower.

2. The premise isn’t very funny. Here it is: two extraordinarily wealthy men buy shoes at a suburban mall. They talk about dumb things. Jerry Seinfeld mugs. Not funny.

3. Bill Gates is a zombie. He sucks the energy right out of it.

4. Jerry is funny when he plays straight, not monkey. He’s playing monkey, not straight.

5. Apple’s ads are iconic. Two guys stand in a white infinity. PC guy is the monkey, Apple guy is the straight.

6. Apple’s ads are clear. The two guys talk about how much better Macs are, and then they cut to a picture of a Mac. The Microsoft ads don’t mention Microsoft until the very end, and even then it’s some muddled dialogue about magic beans or something.

7. Apple’s ads are hip. It helps that Apple’s products are hip, too. Microsoft isn’t hip. Microsoft desperately wants to be hip, which is why it made this ad in the first place. That’s horribly misguided, because Microsoft’s stuff isn’t ever going to be hip. It’s so self-aware in its unhipness that the ad seems to think that this alone will propel it right back to being hip. But it doesn’t. It just looks lame.

8. Jerry Seinfeld was very popular in the 1990s. I don’t think he’s very popular now.

As is typical for Microsoft, they’re trying to appeal to people with a huge, committee-created, board-certified Marketing Initiative endeavor that supports a limp, unexciting, unhip, uninteresting product in a way that comes off as an old guy who buys New Balance sneakers and gets a tribal tattoo so the women he hits on won’t realize how old and flaccid he actually is.

Things You Should Use

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“Things,” as I use it, refers to technological tools. Most of them have a social component, which is why I want you to use them, too. They’re not very useful without other folks to play with.

Facebook. I’ve been harping about this for a long time, but nobody really listens. That’s ok. All social networking sites are toilets, but if you have to take a dump you might as well enjoy it. I won’t bore you with another detailed treatise on the virtues of Facebook over MySpace, but I will implore you to make an account and join me!

Twitter. You all know what a blog is, right? Well, Twitter is like a blog and an instant messenger in one. Some are calling it a microblog, because no post can be longer than 160 characters.

Why such a seemingly arbitrary limit? Because that’s the maximum number of characters for most text messages! It’s made to operate inside the parameters of your current text message usage – you post a Twitter and it is broadcast to all of your “followers.” Likewise, if one of the people you follow posts a Twitter, you can choose to have it delivered to your phone. iPhone users will find it even easier, with a little program called Twitterific.

You should join this, too, and join me and my sister and a bunch of her friends in our never-ending conversation! I’m jamesforeman. Follow me!

Google Reader. If you already have a Google Account, then you already have access to one of the most useful apps I’ve ever used. Do you know what RSS is? You see it all over the place on the web, but you might not know what it is. Well, RSS is a means of delivering content, just like the web is. You get a feed reader and “subscribe” to RSS feeds using that feed reader. Most feed readers are separate applications you run on your computer, but the best one is built right into Google.

RSS feeds are like newspaper subscriptions, except for reading blogs and other sites that are updated frequently. With one click, you can share interesting articles with the world at large or email them to your friends.

You can read about it more here.

Independence Day Miscellanea!

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Hellboy 2 looks amazing; The Hobbit is in good hands. Watch the HB2 trailer here.

James Bond’s next movie likewise looks entertaining.

The GI Joe movie, in contrast, looks stupid.

Big companies have no excuse when a little bit of research would have saved them a lawsuit from the kings of New Wave awesomeness.

Harpo Marx speaks!

Star Trek comes into slightly sharper focus, and you can read one fat man’s impressions of it here.

Do you ever wish you had a handy calendar of Jewish holidays to sync with your own electronic one?

Weave is a Mozilla project that allows you to sync up your bookmarks and browser history among multiple computers – you can join up here.

Where’s George? shows a dollar bill that went way far – the best part about this site is the volumeof stories you can create about the motions of currency.

I almost wish I had Vista, so I could stream Netflix to my Xbox.

Richard Belzer, a very funny comic and TV’s Detective Munch, once sued Hulk Hogan for rendering him unconscious on national television – you can watch the overly long video, with wrestling-fan commentary included, on YouTube.

I want to buy more RAM, but this place seems kind of shady. Thoughts?

While Windows bloats even more with every version, OS X is set for a radical slimming. You can read about it at AppleInsider and with more details here, but you should just start with this diagram. Whether you like them or not (for whatever reasons you have), they’re going places.

Miscellanea: Fluids, Dogs and Balloon Fetishes

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Corey Watches the Cat

photograph by my mom and posted on her blog.


“You know who would have done a great job covering such a stately Beltway funeral? Tim Russert.”

Ouch. The Onion stings!

My Next 2 T-Shirts

This is apparently going to be the Summer of Too Many Cotton Shirts, as I’m on the verge of ordering these two (thanks, Will!):

Dog Update From Mom

If one were to write a movie script about the dogs in my parents’ house, Grizzly would be the slow, dim-witted one while Corey would be the quick, smart, evil one. He’s the nice dog, she’s the mean dog. He just wants to be loved, she just wants to make trouble. But she’s still a dog, and she still protects her family and lies around a lot.

My mother illustrates Corey’s nature in a series of blog posts (and photographs) that you can see here, here and here.

Why is This Guy Famous?

I had never heard of this Spencer chap until I saw him on Letterman, and I’m still not entirely sure why anybody cares about him. i don’t like it when morons like Spencer prance their styled little bodies onto the chair next to him and start trying to banter. They’re not funny, despite what their insipid little clubkid friends always tell them.

Dave ably cuts him down to size in this video.

Stay Off My Side, Bill

Bill Maher has a new documentary coming out. It’s about religion. He’s an atheist, but he’s also a misogynist and a mean-spirited, holier-than-everybody snob. Bill and I agree at least on the first thing, so I find him slightly less intolerable when he’s talking about that particular subject. Even so, I don’t like the idea of watching his horribly stretched face and lizard-slick hair make fun of people in this movie. He’s easier to understand if you realize that he does not accept the idea that anything worthwhile exists between the east and west seaboard.

You can see him in all his gross douchebaggery in the trailer for his movie here.

Applicationize Your Websites

I first heard about this program on Lifehacker.com, but then it seemed like I was hearing about it everywhere. I figured I should try it, so I did. This functionality is going to be a part of the next version of Safari (Apple’s web browser), supposedly. But we have it now, with a program called Fluid.

In order to access a website, you have to open your web browser and navigate to the page you want. This is great for sites that you glance at or whatever, but that’s no longer convenient – there are a few sites that are meant to stay open all the time, like Facebook and Gmail. The interaction between your operating system and your website all has to go through a central arbiter, the web browser. Fluid breaks those sites out of that middleman and lets you and your operating system access them as separate entities.

You point this little application, Fluid, to the site you want to applicationize – Gmail, for instance. Lo and behold, you can alt-tab to it at your leisure. You can see it at work, in my little workspace.

The Japanese people continue to vex me:

Rock Guitar Band Hero!

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This is getting ridiculous.

How many of these plastic drum kits am I going to have to buy? Rock Band‘s kit takes up enough space as it is, and now I’m going to have to add another one?

What you see above is for the next iteration of Guitar Hero, the first three versions of which did not include drums. Guitar Hero was created by a developer called Harmonix. It was intended as an entertaining pseudosimulation of playing guitar in a rock band. What made Guitar Hero so popular was its social aspect – it got people to play the game together.

Harmonix split from its publisher and started making its own game called Rock Band. It was a more advanced version of Guitar Hero – it combined all of the neat stuff about the original game and added drums and vocals. It’s so-so to play alone, but it’s a blast to play with a group. They also released new songs for around $2 each.

That turned out to be a really good idea, because they’re making tons of money on it, which is why Guitar Hero’s next version is adding the drum kit you see above, which is an upgrade from Rock Band’s drum kit – this new one has cymbals. Not only that, but they’re pushing it gently toward being an actual simulation rather than a pseudosimulation – you will be able to create real music with your fake instruments.

The Big Plastic Toy Instrument Arms Race continues. Rock Band’s developers haven’t shown anybody what they’re working on for Rock Band 2, which is supposed to come out around the same time. We don’t know what they’re going to add to their game, but we know it’ll probably have everything that the new Guitar Hero has, plus some other things.

I’m still holding out hope for a flute controller. You can use it with Wii Fit, so it knows if you’re standing on one foot.

Don’t hate! Stack ATTACK.

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So I upgraded to Leopard, and immediately began using the new feature called stacks. You drag a folder onto the dock and it shows you a little preview of all of the files within. By adding one of these icons to the stack, you can label the sorts of files you have within each stack without having to remember what’s where.

That feature has radically changed how I keep my stuff organized. I used to be one of those people who stuck everything on the desktop and sorted it out only when I ran out of room for more stuff. But with these stacks, I can really keep my junk organized, and much better than I do in real life.

My Stacks

Firefox puts files directly into a Downloads folder, so that’s the first one. Then, my current writing. The @ stack slowly gathers with links for my next Miscellanea post (and is way better than cluttering up my browser’s bookmarks), and the photos and the videos stacks are pretty self-explanatory. You can drag files right into those things, and drag stuff right out of them.

Lots of people hate stacks, but I think they’re pretty awesome.

Ok. You can stop pretending to care now. I get it.

February’s First Monday Miscellanea

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First: Rejoice!

I remember when Dave didn’t care what anybody thought. Now that’s all he cares about.

Thank God that Bobby Dee has finally picked which Presidential candidate he supports. I was wondering about that. Now I’ll sleep better.

M. Night’s next movie is supposed to be pretty brutal. The synopsis is basically what you see in the trailer: people randomly start committing suicide. Unbreakable remains one of my favorite movies ever, so I can’t hope for a repeat of that genius. Well, I can hope.

MTV Movies Blog unearths from the internet’s stony tomb what might be the most awesome picture yet.

According to imdb.com, Tori Amos was once considered for the female lead in Groundhog Day. Believe it at your own risk.

Also, FAIL.

Rocking Out, Continued

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My living room has become a Rock Band staging area. No longer do people sit luxuriously on my hand-me-down furniture and enjoy enlightening conversation about poop and penises. No, instead we pretend to play rock songs on pretend instruments.

The dishes moulder in the sink. The garbage rots. The floor gathers scatterings of dead leaves kicked in from the cold outside. Cast-aside clothing gathers in piles on the bedroom floor.

The first level of Rock Band is the squarely at the karaoke level. It’s fun to play along with songs that you recognize. Set the game on Easy mode, tell your friends the basics of the strum bar or the kick pedal, and off you go. You can do that all night. The game has sixty something songs for you to play, and you can download more for about $2 each. There’s a microphone:

a drumset:

and, sigh, a guitar (there’s so much I want to say about this picture, but there isn’t enough space to hold it):

But once your skill gets high enough, you start to explore other ways of playing the game.

This post has taken me all day to write because I keep taking breaks to play Rock Band. I eventually just left the house and came to a coffee shop so I could actually concentrate on doing, you know, stuff.

Anyway, the second phase of the game is the skill phase, where playing on Easy all the time is no longer a challenge – once you’ve heard Orange Crush a hundred times, it stops being about recreating the song and more about playing the song better.

Lucky you, because there are four difficulty levels. You go from Easy to Medium, and then to Hard and finally to Expert. The learning curve from difficulty to difficulty can be steep, but the difficulties of the songs themselves are much more gradual. For instance, In Bloom is always going to easier than Enter Sandman, no matter what difficulty you actually play.

But that doesn’t particularly help when you’re playing the drums on Medium and you get to a song like Green Grass and High Tides, which is about an hour long, switches rhythms a hundred times and is basically impossible to play on the drums.

Anyway, it’s maybe the most fun game I’ve played in a long time, made even more fun by playing it with my awesome friends.

If you haven’t tried it, come on over. We’ll make room on the couch for you.

Girls and Halo 3

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There aren’t a lot of girls participating in the massive social clusterfuck of online gaming called XBOX Live. Even as recently as World of Warcraft’s first few years, you couldn’t be sure that a person who claimed to be a girl actually was a girl, and most of the time it didn’t much matter anyway – a Night Elf jumping around in the Goldshire inn while you tried to get to the basement and talk to some dwarf or whatever was just another Night Elf jumping around in the Goldshire inn.

Despite the promise of online gaming, there isn’t much socializing that doesn’t consist of “LOLZ U SUX.”

Voice chat changed all that. I witnessed it firsthand while playing Halo 2 with my then-SO who is, just so we’re clear, a girl.

There is a certain kind of weird equilibrium in online shooting games, like the men’s clubs of previous generations. The masculine social hierarchy in shooting games was established a decade ago, and it hasn’t deviated. Girls don’t enter into it because girls just haven’t been very active in the community.

But when the Boys hear a Girl, the great, masculine machine of online social norms shudders to a stop and nobody really knows how to deal with it. While playing with my ex, I noted that there are basically three reactions:

1) Mommy! The boy in question begins apologizing for anything he might have said that perhaps could have offended her, immediately sends a friend request and starts following her around on all of her matches.

2) You’re just a kid! The boy is so entrenched in the men’s club that he cannot perceive that a woman would ever be interested, let alone participate. He accuses the girl of being a little boy, because the assiness of online voice communication can often garble a woman’s naturally higher voice into sounding a lot like a prepubescent boy’s naturally high voice.

3) I’m in love! The boy has no idea how to handle women in his real life, so he ham-handedly tries to handle her virtually. This is most noticeable in the most trash-talkingest players, who instantly shift their chest-beating into soft, limp, embarrassing attempts at flirtation.

The fourth reaction is one that I rarely see, which is to treat the girl exactly as you would treat any other player. If that means you’re a doucebag, then be a douchebag. Don’t fall into line as another of her gallant defenders – she doesn’t need you to protect her.

She’s there to have fun and kill other players with guns, which I admit is a little redundant.