Entries for April 2003
Visa is now offering a Titanium credit card. We can only imagine the marketing meeting that led to this:
Head of marketing: “Alright, we need a new credit card. Something for 99th percentile of the wage-earning population.”
Marketing flunky #1: “Isn’t that what the Gold card is for?”
Head of marketing: “Gold isn’t exclusive enough these days. We need a metal with more cachet.”
Marketing flunky #2: “We’ve got Platin…”
Head of marketing: “Platinum’s no good either. Too many Platinum-level products these days. They’ve cheapened the whole thing. Anyone can get a Platinum anything.”
Marketing flunky #1: “How about Diamond?”
Head of marketing: “Good, good. But not a metal and De Beers would sue our ass.”
Lawyer: (nods)
Marketing kiss-ass: “Plus, Diamond has that whole carbon connotation. We don’t want people associating their premium credit card with pencil lead.”
Marketing flunky #2: “Lead? I thought we were talking about carbon?”
Everyone: (blink)
Marketing flunky #1: “You said premium just now. How about that?”
Head of marketing: “That was just an expression. God, think harder.”
Flunkies: “Ummmm…”
Head of marketing: “OK, does *anyone* here know *anything* about science? What’s better than platinum?”
Designer: “My computer is made of titanium. It’s pretty solid. And the screen is huge. Have you seen that commercial with Mini Me and…”
Everyone: “Titanium! Of course! That’s the answer!”
Designer: “That word’s gonna look great on a brushed metal background.”
Head of marketing: “It sure wil…wait, who let him in here?”
Sometime in the recent past, well-regarded design firm Cooper redesigned their web site and logo. I like the new site, but there’s something odd about the logo. It comes off as uneven somehow. The “c” seems out of place next to the smooth “o”s and “p”, and the way the bar in the “e” leads right into the upward curve of the “r” makes the whole thing look like it’s about to takeoff.
My viewing frequency of Iron Chef has
waned since moving to NYC, mainly because I’ve seen many, if not most, of
the shows. Plus, there’s only so many times you can watch Chen cook shark
fin. To fill the void, I’ve been watching Monster Garage and Junkyard Wars,
both of which are like Iron Chef with power tools & ratchets.
I’m especially keen on Junkyard Wars because it reminds me of working in the
garage with my dad as a kid. Fixing cars mostly, but also pretty much
anything that needed fixing. Dad’s garage worked a lot like the show; he had
a vague idea about what he wanted to accomplish, I was there to help with
the scavenging, and there was a garage full of junk with which to complete
the task. Unlike the show, we were only competing with ourselves and several
trips to the nearest hardware store for supplies were usually necessary.
I was a regular Rube Goldberg in my scavenging duties. My dad would tell me
that we needed to put this doowacky together with this other conifter, and I
would scoot off to all corners of the garage, returning with six different
widgets and a plan for utilizing them all in an intricate process to
accomplish the goal. I would own at Junkyard Wars.
My favorite story about Dad’s garage happened when I was in high school. I
mentioned to my dad that my friend Ken was having some car trouble. My dad
suggested he bring the car over and Ken showed up some days later with his
blue Ford Tempo. After listening to the engine & transmission and
peering under the hood, he decided the problem lay with the
bendix. Disappearing into the garage, he emerged a few minutes later
carrying said bendix, not something usually found in your typical garage. “I
knew I had a Ford bendix in there somewhere,” he said. A couple hours of
labor later, and damned if the weird noise and transmission problems weren’t
completely fixed. He probably even had a few bendixes leftover in that
garage somewhere for use on some future ailing Ford.
ALL Micheal Jackson For Those That Mispell Michael. Where’s the page for all those that misspell mispell?
The Difference Dictionary. supplement to a novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
I didn’t think much of this article (as it features some muddled analysis by Jakob Nielsen), but the title — “How the web makes ‘desk-chair generals’ of us all” — put me in mind of something I read in Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet about war and technology.
The Crimean War was the first conflict in which the telegraph was utilized, both by the armies in the field and by reporters sending news of the conflict back home. Instead of taking weeks for news from the front to reach home, it happened in a matter of hours. Two things happened (stop me if this sounds familiar):
For the first time, French and British governments could communicate directly with commanders on a distant battlefield. This was further bad news for [British commander in chief] General Simpson, who was so exasperated by trivial inquiries from his incompetent superiors in London that he is said to have complained that “the confounded telegraph has ruined everything.”
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The telegraph was to cause further complications when it was used to send reports to London from the front revealing the chaotic nature of the campaign. The war was very badly organized, and although public sentiment in Britain was in favor of military action, there was widespread exasperation at the government’s mismanagement, spelled out in dispatches from the front line by the Times’s reporter William Howard Russell.
With today’s technology (Internet, sat phones, etc.), the intertwingled feedback loop between the front and the public and the government is so short and tightly coupled that the loop has almost vanished entirely. I don’t think that makes us all desk-chair generals, but it sure feels like it sometimes.
I love the last bit of this piece by Mark Cooper that I’m quoting it extensively:
The responsibilities of the peace movement are far too weighty to be squandered in sputtering and ultimately politically irrelevant feel-good acts of blocking traffic or ripping down fences at military bases. As war breaks out, the peace movement must engage even more deeply, not marginalize itself. It must exert what influence it can muster to limit and constrain the exercise of American military power and to do all possible to prevent this conflict from becoming a prelude to endless war. But even more immediately, it’s the peace movement that must actually hold the Bush administration to its promises of liberating Iraq. The peace movement should take an active role in debating and trying to shape the post-Saddam outcome by fighting, first of all, for a thorough roll-up of the Ba’ath regime, for indictment and prosecution of Hussein and his gang, for the fullest democracy possible, respect for the Shiahs and Kurds, for a postwar government that respects human rights. That formula includes an authentic U.S. and international commitment to fund reconstruction and development. And let’s not forget the Bush-Blair promise to finally get serious about the Palestinians.
At the time of the O.J. trial, I wrote that resentful white Westside Yuppies would have actually been disappointed if Simpson had been convicted, as that would rob them of their self-righteous indignation. Let’s do a reality check. If you’re in the peace movement and your secret hope is that an arrogant George W. Bush will get his comeuppance in Iraq, that the war will go awry and that it will sink into a bloody I-told-you-so quagmire, then you better have a long, soul-searching meeting with yourself. This is not Vietnam, where the U.S. intervened to support a tinpot dictatorship against an indigenous revolution. This time the U.S. is intervening — perhaps for all the wrong reasons — against a dictatorial regime a dozen times worse than that of Nguyen Thieu’s. As American tanks roll into southern Iraq, we should hope that they will, in fact, be met with rice and roses and then go right on to Baghdad to finish off Saddam. To the Iraqi people who must now cower under our bombs and missiles and pray to God to be spared, we owe them at least that perk — and much, much more.
via glfstrm
“Blogshares is a fantasy stock market for weblogs.” The idea is that people can buy stock in different weblogs which are valued by inbound links. It seems that a few folks have put some of their hard-earned fake money down on this old grey bright yellow-green mare and are taking a beating:
Oh and I got burned on kottke.org. I bought 5 shares of it for like $14.50, it shot up to almost $15, and now it’s down to like $2.10. What’s up with that Jason??
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I lost seventy-five, eighty bucks on Kottke sometime today; I knew the P/E was too high! I knew I shoulda sold! So I did what any good, self-deprecating investor would do; I bought a few more shares.
Come on guys, do some research! I’m a horrible buy right now. Quote from last Monday’s post about my new job: “Postings may be light (and email replies will be really light) as I get adjusted to the new routine.” No postings = fewer inbound links. Plus, there’s a war on and I don’t talk much about the war. No war = fewer inbound links. Result: my own mini .com bust.
This is the most un-Nick-like thing I’ve ever seen Nick do. and Mark, you passed up the opportunity to coin the word “blogul” (say BLOW-gul)?
Washington Post Wins Three Pulitzers. Is it journalism or marketing when your headline trumpets the awards your newspaper won?
Dan Gillmor on how the permanent war on terrorism means permanent suspension of civil liberties:
Liberties ebbed and flowed in America’s past. Leaders curbed liberties, with the public’s often ignorant endorsement, in times of crisis. But the rights tended to come back when the crises ended.
The fabled pendulum of liberty may not swing back this time. Why?
For one thing, the damage that one evil or deranged person or group can cause has grown. Even if America somehow persuades all Islamic radicals that we are a good and just society, there will still be some evil and deranged people who will try to wreck things and lives in spectacular ways. In other words, the “war on terrorism” can’t possibly end.
In thinking about this issue and what the U.S. gov’t is doing here (whether it’s deliberate or not), and I keep coming back to George Orwell. This is straight out of 1984. War is peace. If you want a stable country, you limit civil liberties. No freedom, no sudden movements, no free thinking, no chance of things getting out of control. How do you do that? Wage war full time. Too busy fighting to worry about freedom. The few control the many through their own fear and patriotism. Brilliant and scary.
The NY Times has a short interview with Joanne Tucker, an ex-BBC reporter who is now a managing editor at al-Jazeera (English version), an Arabic news channel:
Q. What is it like to have your daily routine interrupted by a courier who walks in and says, “Package from a Mr. bin Laden”?
A. There was definitely a buzz. It was totally exciting that this newsroom in the middle of Doha, Qatar, that was a complete unknown in 1999 was catapulted into this. Bin Laden was saying pretty radical, clash-of-the-civilizations type things that were no different in intellectual thrust than Bush’s comments about a crusade. We felt it was history in the making. I was there in April when we received a very professionally edited videotape — it was of one of the hijackers giving his farewell-to-the-world speech. It was visual proof that one of the people on the planes was a hijacker. The pressure — the pleas not to air it — was amazing. “This will be bad for Arabs. It’s probably fabricated,” they said. But the channel withstood the pressure.
I love that al-Jazeera exists and is able to broadcast its news and biased perspective all over the world, just like CNN, BBC, the NY Times, or Indymedia do with their biased perspectives. Ideally, all of these news sources would try to be unbiased as they could — or at least be more open about their bias — but the option of seeing things from all these different perspectives is better than not. The idea that hacking al-Jazeera’s web site is pro-US or pro-democracy is ridiculous and childish. If we’re going to let Fox News spew U.S. propaganda, we should let al-Jazeera go with the Arabic propaganda. The U.S. should be for freedom of the press everywhere in the world, not just within our borders.
And don’t even get me started on Akamai’s decision to discontinue services to al-Jazeera or the NYSE barring al-Jazeera’s journalists from the trading floor. Pathetic.
Thin ice. fun story, but he gives the protester *way* too much credit
Daylight Saving Time, yo. apparently, it’s saving, not savings
M: Unsurprisingly, she loves cotton candy as well.
Ja: And pixie sticks?
Ju: No, pixie sticks are too sour.
The current issue of Digital Journalist has lots of material on the war in Iraq:
We have been fortunate to have direct access to photographers in Iraq, who are embeded with soldiers, on their own, aboard navy vessels, etc. This month we highlight their work and have published their personal experiences. Furthermore, we have coordinated with seven of the best photo agencies and media outlets such as the New York Times, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Corbis, and Getty Images to bring their best war photographs to our audience.
There are excellent photo galleries from Agence France Press, AP, Corbis, Getty, Newsweek, The New York Times, and Reuters.
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