Daffy Looks Cool In Leather

My brother Dave started a vintage leather jacket blog. This jacket in particular is very very cool. I mean who couldn't use a daffy duck vintage jacket? In Dave's words

"The loud colors and threatening studs served a dual purpose; to make one visible on the bike, and like modern day punkers, to say fuck you to everyday fashion by being as noticeable and dangerous looking as possible!"

Gotta love it! Check out the rest of Dave's site for other cool jackets and historical insights.

Infinate *sourcing chains

Outsourcing, insourcing, crowdsourcing, sourcesourcing ... seems like everyone's *sourcing everything, everywhere. But today, I had a most amusing situation brought to my attention. A friend, owner of what I will call "Company D" writes and asks if I know anyone who has a depth and breadth of experience with a certain product. After a little investigation it turns out that "Company D" has sub-contracted "Company E" to deliver part of the solution they were contracted to deliver to "Company C". "Company E" is apparently falling short of their promises to "Company D", so "Company D" is looking for a "Company F" to assist "Company E" if "Company C" is going to get what they asked for on time and on budget. Naturally, "Company C" was sub-contracted by "Company B" to help them deliver a full-scale solution to "Company A", also known as "The Client".

I mull all this over a bit and figure there are a few possibilities that might fit the bill - and with it a Cloud of Dread descends. How can I be certain my recommends aren't already at the table? Like some sort of sinister international terrorist network, the various cells at work here only have limited visibility to each other. What would be the effect of recommending "Company B" to "Company D"; or, horror of horrors, what if my recommend turned out to be a division of "Company A" itself?

I now sympathize with Ouroboros.

Got Milk?

Mid-last week, a very appealing advertising campaign was brought to my attention. I was surprised by the depth of interactiveness, and pure entertainment this Flash-based 3-D game that is bringing awareness to a commonly used food; Milk!

Get a look at this piece here, and let me know what you think.

Cool starships

I've got a thing for starship design - whether from sci-fi or reality matters not, I could stare at them for hours. Inspired by Van Plexico's Ten Coolest Spaceships of TV and Movies, here's my top 10 list of starship designs:

1. My fav by far: B5's Shadow Vessel, dubbed the Battle Crab by fans.


2. Species 8472 Planet Killer bioship from Voyager


3. The Lexx, and not just because Xenia Seeberg was somewhere inside


4. Keith Thompson's Phyto-Assault Ship


5. Borg Cube from ST:TNG


6. Minbari Sharlin from B5


7. Romulan D'Deridex warbird ST:TNG, again


8. The Titan from Titan AE


9. Darth Vader's T.I.E. Fighter


10. The Millenium Falcon, 'nuff said.

For The Kid Who Has Everything: Road Kill

Oh, ok, not real roadkill - but the next best thing. Roadkill plush toys!
If nothing else, it will be fun to get a dirty look from grandma as little bobby or little suzie open up their special gift box.

(found via ananova)

This makes me ill

For so many reasons....

Gaming the viral system post on Tech Crunch.

I always knew this stuff went on and also knew many of the techniques this guy is talking about, but how viral spammers sleep at night is beyond me. And whle I don't trust the validity of any of the over 350 comments, just reading some of the justifications makes me ill.

It is the kind of thing that makes me want to leave advertising for the fifth time.

Is there a clever use for porn? - Oh yeah baby

Its not often that you bring both of these words together -clever and porn - but today I came across a posting on Read/Write Web (www.readwriteweb.com) that illustrates just this.

The contest spammers have come up with a very clever way of circumventing CAPTCHAs - and yes ? using porn.

How? Well they have linked their robots to a web page which provides the user with a visual of a woman who progressively reveals her clothing for every CAPTCHA that they complete. The cleverness is the fact that the CAPTCHA is being fed to the site from the robots which are encountering them on foreign sites. As the users complete the CAPTCHA test - the robots are able to give the right answer and continue forward.

Get the full details at the Read/Write Blog ? www.readwriteweb.com
(yeah, clever)...

Provincial Referendum

There's been a lot of hype over the referendum question being posed in today's election. Should we stick with the current First-Past-The-Post system? Should we migrate to the proposed Mixed-Member Proportional way of doing things? Both sides have been arguing long and strong for many months now, and there's great passion for both sides of the issue. All this vehemence and hurrah, however, has overshadowed a fact that should be far more conspicuous and is perhaps far more important: this is Ontario's first provincial referendum in 83 years. 83 years??!!

It was October of 1924, and Ontario was facing a big decision: Wet or Dry? Would folks favour the continuance of the Ontario Temperance Act, or should beer and spirituous liquor be sold "in sealed packages under government control"? We all know how that one went.

And since then, apparently, local history has been oh-so uneventful. Nothing worth bringing to the voters and tax-payers for consideration, nothing our sad little perspectives should be allowed to direct, and certainly nothing worth soliciting a decision on.

So my suggestion for our next referendum question: "Should a referendum question be posed each and every time voters are asked to come to the polls?" I know which way I'd vote, and I suspect I'm not alone.

Some Perspectives

Two very awesome looks at internet culture, via collegehumor and Meth Minute.

What Book Are You?

You're One Hundred Years of Solitude!

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Lonely and struggling, you've been around for a very long time.
Conflict has filled most of your life and torn apart nearly everyone you know. Yet there
is something majestic and even epic about your presence in the world. You love life all
the more for having seen its decimation. After all, it takes a village.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Good Profiles Gone Bad

Online profiles suck. Sure, filling them out is a tedious chore, and often an impediment to the actual task you're trying to pursue, but that's not what I'm talking about. I mean the structure and functionality of them suck.

Over the course of my career, I've implemented roughly a bizillion of them - all sorts, all shapes, all styles. But there's one thing they have all had in common: they've been designed by the wrong people. The average online form is the byproduct of a business process, and normally attributable to the whims and aspirations of marketers, sales people, business owners, or at best, knowledge workers and information architects. Many of these people show great intelligence and insight in marrying business or functional requirements to the overall design of the form, to be sure - what's lacking is insight into the requirements of the users themselves.

Your name is a great example. If you've always had the same name, and always will, most online profiles work out just fine. But what if your culture encourages periodic changes in name to mark significant milestones in your life? Spiritual, ethnic, and marital transitions often provoke a change in name, yet online profiles rarely offer any way to effectively manage this transition. The best you can reasonably hope for is that your name is editable, but I've yet to see an online profile, even in our exploding world of web-2.0-social-networking-bliss-hotness, that allows you to indicate time as a property of your name. A million people searching in vain for a maiden name that can only be expressed as if it were a middle name - the horror.

Same basic rant applies to gender definitions and our transgender friends. You can be a boy, or a girl, but not a boy who was a girl, or a girl who was a boy. And don't even get me started about hermaphrodites.

Here's another rage worthy dilemma - how often is your login name and email address the same thing. If we lived in a world where email addresses were some abstract identifier that was merely a portal into the rich tapestry of your electronic communication then things would be pretty sweet. But in a world where people get hired, fired, sell off domains, and neglect to log into webmail during that 2 month camping trip on the shores of Lake Kariba, folks, you're screwed.

My point in all this? The wrong people are designing these forms. Where are the genealogists, biographers, psychologists, social scientists, and librarians whose insights and fields of expertise could be so valuable in determining the structure and function our users need to manage their expressed identities? If I ever see one, I'll be sure to let you know.

Jason's post on the increased cost of public phones was the impetus for this, so here's to you mr JRB.......

Last weekend I took James and Evan (my sons) to the OSC to see the Titanic exhibition, which by the way was extremely well done, the kids enjoyed it immensely. That however is not specifically what brings me to this writing.
The cost was seventy dollars plus some eight dollars to park, not cheap but, money well spent to give the boys a first hand insight into history. Here's what drives me nuts. In this city right now, there is a serious problem with poverty, guns and kids blowing each other away and a bunch of dumb ass morons trying to figure out how to solve the problem.

Here's one idea, make the OSC, the museum and the art gallery free for all kids under 12. Maybe, just maybe a trip to one of these places might end up changing one of these kids for the better. What hope does a single mother of 5 kids with no money have of introducing her kids to anything beyond what?s going on in the street, when it would cost her $200 to take her kids here. The OSC was full of people with money, people who could afford to be there, whose kids weren?t on the precipice of violence. Wrong and wrong....open up these institutions to the people who can least afford it and you may just change a few lives. It's a small step, but it's a step any society which claims to be tolerant and just, must make.

Sometimes we are just a society of talk and committee?s, we have a lot to learn and a long way to go.

Goatse crashes the debate

This marks a seminal moment in history folks! Legendary web meme "Goatse" made a surprise appearance on YouTube and CNN last night during the live democratic candidate's debate, bringing together the very best and very worst aspects of the internet for 1/24 of a second. Apparently both Obama and Hillary winced at the image, though it's not clear if they recognised the famous photo or not. Either way, the looks on their faces must have been priceless!

UPDATE: This has (sadly) turned out to be a hoax.

Bell Canada ... with the Angry Making

Delayed by a problem on a subway at Yonge station, I was prompted for the first time in ages to find myself a pay phone. Prior to my wife's recent pregnancy, I was a dedicated pay phone user; and used to pontificate ad nauseam how pay phones were going the way of the dodo at a very rapid rate. Several months of cell phone usage later, I was really unprepared for how bad things had gotten.

First off, finding a pay phone, even in a hub of public transportation like Bloor/Yonge, proved a surprising challenge. Long gone are the days where the station was equipped with a litter of them scattered across the platforms. After a few minutes of walking I finally located a solitary, lonely, abused, and no-doubt bacteria-ridden device jammed between two support pillars, like an image out of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

I slipped a quarter in, and dialed. A spectral, digital voice informed me that I had a credit of 25 cents, and needed to insert 25 cents. When I was a kid, my mother would make me carry a quarter in the outside pocket of my KangaROOS so that "Just in case, you always have a way to call home". Decades later, that practice still had value. So imagine my shock to learn that as of about a month ago, pay phones now cost 50 cents per call. And if you use a loonie, no change for you!

Am I the only one shocked to the point of revolution over this horrific turn of events? Pay phones are NOT a luxury item, they are an essential service. They service the poor, the newly arrived, the lost, and the unfortunate. They are a life-line for all of us in our moments of need. Needing a map of locations and a pocketful of change to use one degrades, nay destroys, the simplicity and reliability of this essential tool. And I, for one, am outraged.

C Isn't For Cookie? That Aint Good Enough For Me!

My childhood feels like it is being crushed like a chocolate chip cookie that?s been at the bottom of the bag with this one.

Without me even knowing it, Sesame Street has gone all PC on me and changed Cookie Monster's signature song from "C is for Cookie" and replaced it with "Cookie is a sometimes food".

COOKIE IS A SOMETIMES FOOD?

Cookie isn't a sometimes food. Cookie is an every day food. Cookies and milk. Cookies and ice cream. Eat your broccoli and maybe I'll give you a cookie.

What's next? Are they going to call him the Cabbage monster or something healthier?

First, they ban peanut butter in the classroom and now C doesn't stand for cookie anymore.

It's not right I tell you.

It's just not right.

For old times sake, sing it cookie, sing it.