Strange Internet Extra
Posted by: Airion in The Strange Internet on June 20th, 2009
After posting the videos below, my friend showed me this ultra-cute video of a furry, big-eyed creature that likes to be tickled. I just had to share it. I wish I could tickle him too. He looks so happy.
The Strange Internet: Ronald, Daniel, and Pikachu
Posted by: Airion in The Strange Internet on June 19th, 2009
Here’s this weeks roundup of Internet oddities. We’ll start with freaky McDonald’s commercials that you’ve probably never seen.
Hide your children! 1960s Ronald McDonald is (amazingly) creepier than the modern version:
Even stranger is Japan’s modern, female-model version of Ronald. How they thought this would sell more burgers is beyond me. I know that sex sells, but sheesh. Isn’t McDonald’s suppose to be family-friendly? I guess things are really different in Japan.
…and how about her sexy male counterpart:
For a company whose success is based on “wholesomeness,” they seem to have a very lax definition of that word in advertising.
Switching gears, we ran across a trailer for a terrible movie called Daniel the Wizard.
It’s like Willy Wonka decided to dress in drag and become a pop singer.
You don’t need to understand German to see how bad this film is. Watch it until the end and you get to see him sing in English.
Apparently the movie is about a killer who targets one of the runner ups in the German Idols singing competition. After watching this trailer, I felt like helping the killer murder this guy. If you’re a fan of Saturday Night Live, there’s an episode with Rob Lowe where he played a goth called The Beholder who makes terrible movies. There’s a clip where he’s doing a deadly ceremony at the park, but it’s a bright, sunny afternoon and you can see kids playing frisbee in the background. I swear, the park scene in the Daniel trailer was lifted right out of Goth Talk.
Rounding out the creepiness catagory, we have phone messages left by Dimitri the Stud. Don’t ever leave messages like this for a girl unless you think she likes serial killers:
I’m sure you’re scratching your head at this point, so here’s a cute video to cleanse your mind. It looks just like Pikachu, but it’s real.
Presenting the Pygmy Jeroba:
WiFi Everywhere
Posted by: Lee in Observations on April 22nd, 2009
Years ago Airion had a laptop. It was heavy, the battery lasted 11 minutes, and the lid eventually busted off leaving it an almost useless husk. After hooking it up to a monitor, it was basically a thin PC with a mandatory laptop keyboard.
The thing was one of the earliest laptops to have on-board wi-fi. Not that it mattered much because outside of our place it was impossible to find a reliable signal (even in Silicon Valley). The reason for this was simple: when wi-fi was first widely used and available, people broadcasted their connection without security in place. This meant that if your Internet connection ever failed you could drive around your neighborhood, laptop open on the passenger seat, and “steal” wi-fi from some nitwit who didn’t know the meaning of “WEP” (or, if you were really lucky there was such a connection available that reached your home. Ah, convenience). By the time Airion got her laptop, we had entered an era where routers came with security pre-enabled, and the general public had gotten wiser about such things. Now, despite the fact that wi-fi is more broadly used than it was a few years back, it’s nearly impossible to find an unsecured connection.
Fast-forward to today. I picked up a small laptop recently and I’m very happy with it. It’s an HP Mini. It weighs 4 lbs. with the battery in, it’s only slightly larger than a DVD case, it’s fast for my purposes (Internet, email, and word processing), and at less than $400 the price was right.
Anyway, getting back to the main point, it seems that things have come full-circle. I was amazed to find that wi-fi is available everywhere again. The only difference is that now it’s legal. What I’m talking about is free wide-area wi-fi. I’ve got a router at home that I can use, but if I leave my house I can still be connected. My home city of San Carlos has spent God knows how much money implementing a free wi-fi broadcast for its residents. The school which I attend is outfitted with a similar system. Of course, working for a major tech firm, my work also has campus-wide wi-fi. Virtually everywhere I go is bathed in this wonderful radiation.
Organize Your Procrastination
Posted by: Lee in The Strange Internet on April 7th, 2009
For a while now, I’ve been using Google Reader. It’s a great way to organize the websites you visit on a regular basis. It creates a single web page where you can go to view all of the pages you regularly surf. It’s not the only aggregate of it’s kind on the web, but it’s certainly the best one I’ve used.
It works using RSS subscription format. Almost every modern page on the Internet has an RSS feed available (including XplodedView, see the very bottom of this page). Usually you can find this symbol on any page you want to subscribe to:
Once you’ve located that, you can right-click on it and copy the link, then paste it into the “add a subscription” bar of Google Reader. Alternately, you can also just put the main URL of the page you’re subscribing to into the “add a subscription” area, but some pages have multiple feeds and you might want to subscribe to a specific one (for example, New York Times.com has separate feeds for entertainment, US affairs, world news, front page news, etc…). Anyway, that’s it. Once you’ve added something, Reader will now track the site and update you with new additions. It makes a lot of sense if you visit a lot of different sites. You only have to go to a single page to view the content from many sites.
You can further organize things from there by categorizing your feeds into folders. For example, I have folders for blogs, news, video feeds, and comics that I follow. Reader also has a nifty “favorites” system where you can click a star by any entry to bookmark it. It’s useful for long articles you want to go back to or simply things you want to keep around to share or re-read later.
Re: Red Ring: Success
Say what you want about BestBuy. I’ll give you the fact that their sales staff are usually annoying and product-ignorant, but their returns department is on the ball. I went in with my broken Xbox in a shopping bag (also without a receipt or proof of extended warranty) and came out less than 20 minutes later with a brand new system. They even let me keep my original hard-drive because it’s got all my downloaded games and saves on it. Zero hassle.
The best part though, is the fact that when I bought my original Xbox, it was more expensive than it is now. There’s been a price drop of a bit less than $100. Instead of simply exchanging my system, they treated it like a return and a new purchase– giving me the difference of $86.90. So the result was getting a new Xbox AND a fist-full of cash to boot. It was like getting paid to get an upgrade. Score!
——————
Red Ring
It finally happened. My Xbox bit the dust. I bought the thing during the 360’s first run– the first generation. Despite this, I knew what I was getting into. I knew that they were prone to heat issues and that it might not last. That’s why when I bought it, I broke one of my cardinal rules of electronics purchases: Thou Shalt Never Purchase the Extended Warranty. They’re almost always a ripoff for several reasons:
- Many products have at least a year warranty from the manufacturer. If something is going to break from poor design or manufacture, it’s my experience that it’ll usually happen during this first year.
- A few have longer (5 or 10 year) warranties that cover normal wear and tear
- I’ve never bought a TV or other electronic gizmo and had it “just stop working”, when something breaks it’s usually my fault– and thus not covered by the warranty
The Xbox was an exception though. Yes, it had a manufacturer’s warranty that covered it for the first year, but I’m very careful with my electronics and I knew it would probably survive past that. And it did. It’s been more than a year and a half since I picked it up, so my extended warranty covers until the middle of the summer.
Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being a chump for buying the extended warranty this whole year and a half. I regretted it all the way up until last night when my Xbox started acting funny, then started freezing, then wouldn’t turn on, then showed the red ring (a.k.a. “The Red Ring of Death”) pictured above.
Microsoft has since fixed the ring of death problem in the newer systems, so when I go to return it today, hopefully I get a brand new sealed box machine.
I’ll post an update later that details the (hopefully smooth) experience.
The Last Starfighter
Who doesn’t enjoy a good treasure hunt? I love to rummage through stuff hoping to find that hidden rarity, so when I saw the sign for the local library sale, how could I possibly resist going?
I discovered a rare, book section hidden in the corner. I found an autographed copy of an Edward Gorey book which was extremely tempting, but they wanted $75 for it. There was also an ancient, medical anatomy book with fold-out, color inserts of the brain and the body innards, but I it was also crazy expensive. It was time to go to the 50 cents bin which covered LPs, CDs and videos. It was my lucky day, there was a 2 for 1 sale.
I immediately spied The Last Starfighter soundtrack on CD. There was no inner sleeve, but the CD looked salvageable (a few scrapes and dings, but that’s about it). I noticed that it was made in 1984, so someone must have been enjoying it for the last 20+ years. I figured for 25 cents it was worth the risk to see if it would play.
When I got home, I looked up the track listing on Amazon. At this point, my jaw dropped. There were three copies for sale and here were the prices:
$99.98
$130.99
$161.14
Good lord! As I did more research, I learned that this soundtrack is an extremely rare collectible. I was also shocked to find that The Last Starfighter had something in common with the movie Xanadu: they were both turned into musical-comedy stage productions.
The Last Starfighter: A New Musical premiered off broadway in 2004 with new music and lyrics (not that the first one had lyrics). I listened to some excerpts and it brought to mind Planet of the Apes: The Musical from The Simpsons. If you’re looking for a good laugh (or just looking to reminisce), here are some links to tickle your ribs:
The Last Starfighter: The Musical (song excerpts on Amazon)
————————
A Little Internet Entropy
Posted by: Lee in TV, The Strange Internet on March 15th, 2009
Interested in collecting some strange, useless, and sometimes wonderful information on completely random topics?
I just discovered Wikipedia’s random article link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
You can click the random link on the left-hand side of the page, or you can hit alt-ctrl-x to load up something unexpected. It’s surprising how fun some of these things can be to read.
Here are just a few examples:
Swedish darts champion from the 1980s
A very detailed explanation of mono-transitive verbs
Way too much information on the Jagdgeschwader 77: a German fighter plane
—————-
Traction @ Home
Posted by: Lee in Observations on March 10th, 2009
hot
MmmmMmmm Good!
Posted by: Airion in Observations on March 5th, 2009
Or, shall I say, HmmmHmmm I don’t think so….
I ran across this sign for a restaurant while strolling down the street. I’m not quite sure where to start with analyzing this, but I’ll begin with the obvious. Suckling a booby beast’s teet doesn’t compel me to want to eat, much less enter this restaurant. To make matters worse (if this is an actual depiction of this restaurant’s dining experience), I imagine a burly, naked check-in guy in the lobby who encourages you to strip and takes your attire. (You’re allowed to keep your purse or wallet for holding your clothes-check ticket though). Then you’re stuck standing with 5-10 other naked people while waiting for a “dining space.”
When it’s ready, the burly guy tosses you a fork and escorts you to a pile of hay that’s been been dyed crimson (possibly to obscure blood droppings or cut down on cleaning time). The booby beast is ushered in and you’re allowed to go at it in any way you wish. OH Gosh! I can’t continue the nightmare of this image.
Let me elaborate on how I ran across this sign. My friend Steve and I were looking for a coffee shop to calm his nerves. He was emitting anger all over the place and was sweating bullets (if this were a cartoon, the bullets would have words written on them like surly, rage, fury and wrath). He wanted to get some coffee to “calm his nerves.” I’m not a coffee drinker, but I thought that coffee wasn’t calming. Surely, I wasn’t about to argue the point with a man who looked like he had been pushed to the edge that day, so I decided to let him lead the way.
Steve recalled a great coffee shop in Noe Valley. While tromping up Noe Street trying to find it, I saw this sign that made us stop in our tracks. It’s painted on a couple of windows for this very upscale restaurant. The other thing I noticed was that booby beast seems to be enjoying what’s happening to her.
We never found the coffee shop (it may have gone out of business because of the current economy), but this prompted me to think about how a restaurant like this would “save money” with the booby beast concept. It could get on the “green business” bandwagon. They don’t waste water cleaning plates. You’re not allowed to kill the booby beast (hence the lack of knives) so they can reuse the beast for many meals and over the course of several years. There are no required uniforms which cuts down on dry-cleaning bills. I could go on and on.
All I know is that I’m never eating there.