I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't place that call. You have no cell.

…H.A.L. 9000?

It does to me. Motorola’s much-anticipated new Android phone, creatively named Droid, was (sort of) officially announced this week, and will be released Nov. 6th. It’s getting some rave early reviews, but apparently not rave enough that I should switch back to the hell-hole of customer service that is Verizon and drop my perfectly acceptable iPhone for one. This phone looks too much like something Sarah Connor should be worrying about, and not enough like an innovative product for me. Apparently Andriod 2.0 is the bee’s knees, but if you’re putting it in devices that are an all-seeing eye trimmed in black and gold, chances are, I’m not buying it. What happened to the company of the RAZR and the Star-Tac? Is this device really going to shift 50 million units, or become a cultural icon? I can’t see it having a much better fate than the Zune or the Virtual Boy. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s where they got the idea for that that screen graphic from…

The Internet was a series of knobs before it was a series of tubes

On October 29th, 1969, the first message from one computer to another was uttered: “lo”. Were they going for an abbreviation of “hello”, something along the lines of “lo and behold”? Well, not really. UCLA was trying to type “log” to send to Stanford, but their system crashed after the first two letters. I get pissed off when Hulu stalls halfway through the episode of Community I’m trying to stream, but sometimes we’ve got to count our blessings. If it weren’t for the Cold War, we might not have had this wonderful waste of time and extensive porn database that we call the Internets. Thank you to all those involved in the gestation of the net; Leonard Kleinrock, UCLA, Stamford, Ivan Sutherland, and Al Gore. We owe you everything.

Snap, crackle & LASER BEAM

Just blogged about this over on Nineteen-Eighty Six, but I thought it needed to be repeated here. According to the Daily Mail (a British pseudo-tabloid), Kellogg’s are allegedly going to start laser-etching their logo onto Corn Flakes, in order to cut down on the apparently large market for copycat flakes. Gizmodo has a breakdown as to how this is almost certainly a joke that someone mistook for news, and it wasn’t even written by the Onion!

Now that we’re back on a (slightly) more regular schedule, it’s time for this week’s review. Megafuan’s debut has finally been relegated to our archives, and up this week, the Monsters of Folk’s debut. Enjoy!

Nothing ever really changes.

I'm not very good at editing images, but you get the point...

So a lot has happened in the month or so since 3.14 last blogged about anything. The last thing we posted about was in fact the death of John Hughes, and in the last month or so we also lost the Ghost, the Lion of the Senate and his sister, the inventor of multi-tracking and the greatest guitar ever built, and the man behind 60 Minutes, to name a few. The good news is that we weren’t all snuffed out by swine flu (yet), we may one day have health care reform in the U.S., Pavement are getting back together next year, and the iPod Nano can now shoot video and listen to FM radio. So yeah, not really that much good news. If Avrin and I hadn’t been on our summertime hiatus this last month, we, like everyone else, would’ve probably blogged about all of the above. One slightly smaller thing I came across during my holiday away from the great city of Philadelphia, however, reminded of one of the reasons why I think we started this blog; to comment on the inanities of this here Internet. One of our earliest (and to date, most controversial) posts was on the networking giant Cisco Systems and how we found something a little confusing about their business model. Well, in a recent commercial put out by Cisco, the company seems to have decided that confusing everyone as much as possible will somehow be beneficial for them.

See for yourselves after the jump.

I’m pretty sure this is the first commercial I’ve ever seen (at least one not put out by Starburst) that has made me question my own sanity, that created one of those moments which would make you cry out in public, “Wait, was I the only one who just saw that?”, rather like the ethereally fleeting streaker at a late-night frat party in the middle of February. This commercial has been bothering me since I first saw it, to the point where it is now the focus of my first post back on 3.14, even though I saw it nearly a month ago. I mean, unless Cisco decided to use Heaven as its ad agency and they turned to St. John to spearhead the project, there is no logical conclusion that I can come to that makes this commercial sensible. DID GOD USE CISCO SERVERS TO CREATE HUMANITY? I DON’T UNDERSTAND!!! AND WHY THE HELL IS THERE A BORN RUFFIANS SONG IN IT?

Phew. It’s good to be back.

(Make your own here)

I can see my house's meter from here!

Chances are, if you live in Philadelphia, you’ve had to deal with PECO. They’re really the only gig in town when it comes to electricity, and even if you’ve managed to avoid having to use their services, you’ve not missed their big old building. The 39 year-old structure has been the one of the main focal points of PECO’s apparent desire to go green. Firstly, they replaced all the old lightbulbs that made up their scrolling sign atop their building with a fancy new, greener, LED display which debuted on July 4th. Then, in a really green move, they turned their roof into a field. The expressed purpose is to reduce the drainage problems from rainwater runoff that the building has. Apparently, over 1.5 million gallons of water fall onto the building each year, and the new eco-roof will absorb up to 70% of that, putting less stress on municipal facilities. The grass, seemingly greener on PECO’s side, will be open to the public in what is probably their greatest PR move to date. Even the local killjoy blog thinks it’s a good move. On top of these window-dressing moves, PECO is also implementing a new initiative that may actually help Philadelphians manage their energy consumption, with an eye to becoming more efficient consumers. The company is going to be installing new smart meters which will allow you to read your meter, regulate air temperature, and even control your appliances from your computer. Sort of similar to what Penn was trying to do on their own, PECO wants to roll this technology out as early as next year. Definitely seems like a step in the right direction.

journalistic gold

Rupert Murdoch, the master of puppets in charge of NewsCorp, announced today that all of its sites will soon start charging for their services. It’s scary how much NewsCorp controls, Fox, MySpace, NY Post, Wall St. Journal, the Dow Jones, HarperCollins, just to name a few American holdings, and how wide-reaching this announcement could be. Granted, it’s most likely directed towards their publications’ sites, like the Post, or the (London) Times, but this could change how media is disseminated on the internet. NewsCorp has already been fairly successful in making the Wall St. Journal a paysite, although it’s a niche publication in a rich market. I can’t see there being anything but a massive backlash against NewsCorp if they go ahead with making all their publications’ sites subscription-only, and even though I’m really not a fan Fox News, the Post, or most of the media outlets Murdoch owns, I think this is a necessary step. Once a massive corporation starts something, all its competitors and the smaller companies will have to do the same , or that first corporation will have problems. In most instances, this would just drive customers to the free alternatives, but this will most likely be the kick in the pants other media outlets to also start charging. It’s really the only way that the proliferation can survive. Every free blog, every news aggregator, every Google search gets its information from some company that paid a reporter and editor to produce the information. I know it sounds rather like Reganomics, but there really is a trickle-down effect with online news – without someone getting paid at some point in the process, it’s unlikely that the proliferation of information will be able to continue effectively. Considering that the majority of blog posts on this site rely on information from other sites (who in a lot of cases go their information from other sites), I would like someone to get paid to keep finding things out, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to write about on here. Granted, I’m not really sure I’m so concerned with Fox News’ continued existence, especially with this kind of ‘journalism’:

the fate of today's attacker

Earlier today, Twitter shut down in attempt to fight a direct and complex attack on its site. For many hours, opinionated people had to resort to their old ways of butting in on other people’s conversations, the passive-aggressive returned to post-its, and the rest of us had to turn on our TVs or use the rest of the internet to listen to talking heads. The BBC’s article on the attack suggested that there are at least 45 million users on Twitter’s site, but due to the proliferation of accounts on smartphones and third party software which interacts with the site, there could be many more. Twitter seems to have become the Marmite of the 21st century, in that you either love it or hate it, and obviously whomever co-ordinated this attack today must not have been a big fan. Interestingly, it seems that the site has really become the domain of the old, as only 16% of all Twitter.com visitors are under the age of 25. Again, this could be a skewed statistic, in the same way that my mom still goes to Google’s website to search for something, even though I’ve told her a fair few times that there’s a search bar at the top of her browser – kids know to use TweetDeck, their iPhones, or even text messages, whereas the old folks are just impressed they got on the computer without something going wrong. If it is the case, though, that Twitter really is just a bunch of older folks shilling their (somewhat) unsolicited opinions, I can see why someone would want to pull the plug on it – the guy probably had already spent too much time at his grandparents’ condo dinner parties and couldn’t bear to put up with any more rambling.

I want to get a vanity license plate.  Any and all suggestions are welcome.  I tried with one but it failed.  Long story…

Love,
Avrin

Now I know what you’re thinking.  What is this?  How could that thing, a middle-of-nowhere collection of rotting wood and nails be relevant to absolutely anything?  Well, let me tell you…

that may be a RadioShack.  The company is rebranding itself as “The Shack”.  Personally, I like the guy’s picture on that website.  Writing letters on your hand is about as professional as calling yourself “The Shack”.  Does that mean that my particular store on Chestnut St could be referred to generally as simply a shack?  The Technologizer has a list of reasons why this is a bad move.  I’m partial to number 3…this is just a bad name.  No one wants to be associated with a hole-in-the-wall, especially if it’s associated with ‘cutting edge technology’.

For those of you who don’t know, I worked at CompUSA for about a total of 16 months.  I’ve been on that side of the counter.  Granted I was 18 and a Customer Service rep and a cashier, but still.  I lived in a shack in the summer of 2003.  It was in the middle of the woods across from a lake.  Check it out, here. Somehow I don’t think this can be compared to an electronics store, but hey, maybe one day it will be!

I wonder if he'd have enjoyed it

There’s a fairly well-known band out there called Radiohead. They’ve released a few albums that have gone platinum, did a lot to single-handedly shift our thinking on online music sales structure, and even have a new album out there to make everyone under the age of 35 to incessantly drool over. They apparently also quite liked Harry Patch, whom you may remember from last week’s news, or the Battle of Passchendaele if you were there (if you were you are a liar or a ghost, or both). Patch was the last remaining known veteran of the Great War (or the prequel to WWII), who died last week at the age 111, and was at the aforementioned battle, where nearly one million people lost their lives. Apparently, Thom Yorke, who is no stranger to letting the internet know how he feels about people, was so moved by Patch’s story that he felt compelled to write something about it. As such, Radiohead pulled together and gave a new song to the BBC to stream for free. At first, I was surprised that Radiohead had shied down from their In Rainbows (lack of a) business model and returned to the now traditional record company way of allowing the song to be streamed for free, but then charging for a download. Then I read that all the download profits will be donated to the British Legion, the excellent UK charity that cares for veterans and war memorials. The song isn’t half bad, either, especially considering it was written and released in the span of about a fortnight. As far as I can tell, this is the most spontaneous thing that Radiohead has done over the course of their career, and while there are reports that they’ve been in the studio to record a new album (and so recording quickly wouldn’t be much of a hassle), I’m quite impressed. While it’s not quite “Ohio” in its immediacy and likely impact, I think it’s got to bode well for whatever they’re actually doing in the studio.

Seriously, this happened.

I spend a fair amount traveling to and from New York City for both business and pleasure. Because I am not a wealthy, stodgy executive, I generally try to spend as little money as possible on these travels. For years, I relied on one of the many Chinatown bus services that runs between Philly and New York. Those of you who have spent any time living in cities in the Northeast Corridor know what I’m talking about. For twenty bucks, bus lines like Fung Wah and New Century Travel will get you from your city’s Chinatown to virtually any other Chinatown on the East Coast…assuming you can effectively pantomime your destination to the hectoring, English-challenged saleswomen who distribute the tickets.

Chinatown buses are cheap, but the risks are more serious than accidentally boarding a bus for Newhaven instead of New York City. Their buses frequently fail safety inspections; they’ve been known to crash, fall apart on the highway, and even explode.

Fortunately, I now have alternatives to the altogether too-adventurous Chinatown bus experience. Megabus and Boltbus were founded in 2006 by Coach USA and in 2008 by Peter Pan and Greyhound, respectively.  Designed to compete with the Chinatown services, Boltbus and Megabus offer the same cheapo rates along with modern amenities like seat belts and functioning lavatories. More importantly, both lines offer free wireless internet and power outlets for laptops. We all know that the internet is a series of tubes, which explains how it might be piped onto trains. That bus passengers now have internet access too is not only really, really useful to people like me who do lots of online work, but pretty darn futuristic to boot. Even my father, who actually is a wealthy, stodgy executive, has abandoned his internetless Amtrak trains for Megabus.

Oh, and Boltbus just installed leatherette seats on their buses. What more could you possibly want from your slightly-shady budget transport service?