Out-of-place DVD ads

Over the weekend, Deb and I purchased Stargate: Atlantis season 2 on DVD. I was surprised to find three ads for other DVDs on the first disc. Granted, advertising is nothing new, and I've seen ads on other purchased DVDs before, too. The interesting thing in this case is the content. What marketing "genius" at Columbia Tristar thought that fans of a science-fiction show would be interested in Dawson's Creek and Bewitched? I can't imagine.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Perhaps they were picked at random.
PPS - Or perhaps they were released at the same time as these discs.

Super-spleen

I've read this week that the spleen has been identified as a repository of monocytes - immune cells responsible for repairing damaged tissue (assuming that my very limited and brief understanding of the article is accurate). I deduce from this that part of Wolverine's mutant abilities is a hyperactive spleen.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - He may have more than one.
PPS - Wouldn't it be frustrating to attempt surgery on someone who heals that quickly?

Friday Zombie Blogging - Brain cupcakes

These brain cupcakes are topped with a chocolate brain. Delicious, I presume.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't know what was used for the "blood".
PPS - I assume it's edible.

Corporate college

As the sense of entitlement grows and as employers find it harder to sift through the mountain of job applications, it is conceivable that some might start their own colleges to recruit and train people to their own standards right out of high school. Granted, this would require some very large company and a booming economy to justify the expense, but it's not all that different from hiring apprentices in the trades. Also, since the company controls the college, they can decide how many students to take in for any given year, and need not overstaff themselves just because more people want in.

The benefits to students would be knowing that they will go straight out of college and into a job at this company. In reality, though, the applicants to such a college would need to be as strictly examined as job applicants or students going to other colleges. The only place I can imagine this consistently working is the armed forces, and they picked up on the idea long ago.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The last time I ran to the end of my savings I considered joining the army.
PPS - I got a job almost immediately after that.

Microsoft's imaginary infringing trademarks

I dreamed something last night that is untrue, but it still made me mad when I woke up. I was looking at some marketing material for Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7, and saw that they had new components in the file system. They had named these new components "Fireworx" and "Firebrand" (presumably relating to display and watermarking). The only motivation I could think of for choosing these names was to create some confusion with the Mozilla Firefox name, undermining their growing market share and making it easier for people to just stick with Internet Explorer.

It made me mad because I could only presume the motivation behind the names, but I was pretty sure that was it and I could do nothing about it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I also had a horrible feeling that it would work.
PPS - I imagine a trademark like that would be hard to fight.

Four-plug power outlets

I think it will become more common to see power outlets with four plugs in them. Our power needs are frequently served by power boards to provide multiple outlets, and it only makes sense that these would start to be incorporated into the design of newer houses. Perhaps at first it would just be areas like the kitchen and lounge room where the most devices are plugged in, but I see no reason not to extend the same allowances to bedrooms and other places too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'd like to have a few four-plug outlets installed at home.
PPS - And battery backup built-in would be nice, too.

One Hundred Push Ups

Last week I decided to start on this one hundred push ups program. The idea is to work up to the stage of completing one hundred consecutive push ups, over the course of six weeks. So far, the results are good, though I only seem to manage the minimum on the fifth set each time, and my arms can get rather sore the day after. Hopefully the program will pay off with an impressive personal fitness statistic and equally-impressive biceps.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I haven't been to karate training in a while, so this is my only strength workout.
PPS - Now if only I had a similar flat stomach program.

Bartering

I don't like bartering for goods, not because it feels cheap on my part, but because it speaks of default greed on their part. If they have room to negotiate on price, then they're asking for more money than is fair, before I even arrived. Either you're running a ripoff business or you have no room to negotiate on price. The guy coming to fix Dad's ceiling after the storm lowered his price four thousand dollars in one hit, because the insurance company asked him to. Four thousand without blinking an eye. To me, that says "do not do business with this man at any price".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That's just my opinion.
PPS - And the roof guy is an unusual example, I think.

Windows vs Linux

It is probably true that the less familiar you are with computers, the easier it will be to change operating systems. If you don't know Windows from Linux anyway, what difference to your learning will it make if you sit down in front of Linux first? To be totally honest, Linux is not as user-friendly as Windows, and that's a downside if Linux ever wants to achieve desktop dominance. Where Microsoft can spend lots of money on user interface testing and design, with a UI architect to keep it consistent and clean, Linux is hacked together by a bunch of disorganised geeks, who don't have central leadership and don't do user-centric design by default. In that environment, is it any wonder that users trend towards Windows?

As stated in this article most people don't care about operating systems. They don't spend time thinking about them that much, and they don't find them interesting. They care about connectivity (ie internet and networking), being able to find their files and applications (typically, a web browser, MS Office and games). If finding files is just as easy in Windows as in Linux, but networking in Windows is easier for Grandma and MS Office and their games only run in Windows, then Windows will win, hands down.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Though a large part of it has to do with the Microsoft marketing machine, too.
PPS - And all their marketing has to do is focus on ways their product is better.

Off to Roma

Today Deb and I are headed out West to Roma, so this and the next couple of posts have been composed in haste and in advance. Unfortunately it wasn't until the last minute that I thought of this, so I apologise if the quality has suffered as a result.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'll try and take some decent photos while we're away.
PPS - Hopefully there will be something worth posting when we return.

Shower storage

If you're a standard-issue male like me, chances are good that you have soap and shampoo in your shower arsenal. Typical females, I observe, may have shampoo, conditioner, body wash, face cleanser, leg razor and any number of other things to store there. So my question is this: why does every shower come only with one tiny soap dish instead of a whole shelf for storage? It seems to be widely accepted that we need to purchase an add-on organiser to store all our stuff, even though everyone always needs to do it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If the world made sense, showers would come with a shelf as standard.
PPS - But nobody ever said our world made sense.

The rock-star life cliche

I sometimes wonder whether rock and movie superstars worry that their lives are a cliche. Living large and expensive lives with overstated mansions and big, shiny, custom-made cars, no matter the personal spin you put on it, has pretty much all been done before. It's expected, and the security is necessary, but that doesn't change the fact that none of this is new. I'm not sure what could be done to make it different enough to be truly unique, though.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Given half the chance, I'd probably live that way too.
PPS - With a personal touch of custom-built computers everywhere.

Conveying secrets to console game players

I was wondering the other day how to relate secret information to different players in a game when they're all playing on the same TV. You can't put it on screen, because other players will be able to see it. You can't get around that by encoding it in a secret code known only to the player, either, because they don't have time to look it up.

Then I thought that you could put a separate headphone port in each controller, giving a private sound channel for each player. It satisfies all the requirements of secrecy, but it does require at least additions to the console hardware. And if we're talking about the Nintendo Wii here, the game would have to forego requiring any vigorous control motions or else headphones could be dislodged.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I guess you could make the headphones wireless too.
PPS - Which means more batteries. Everything has a down side.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Department of Zombie Disposal

Apparently someone has seen fit to decorate their car as a fake "official" vehicle for the imaginary "Department of Zombie Disposal".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I expect you'd be disappointed if you called on them.
PPS - It would take more than one car to handle most zombie outbreaks.

Keeping technology from being scary

We should not have scary technology in our world. I recently had a mock interview that was supposed to be video-recorded for review. My interviewer was a chronic technophobe who managed to hit the right button but not for long enough on the camera, thus producing no recording at all. She confided that technology scares her, from her phone all the way up to the Cthulu-monster we call Internet. And in a way I sympathise, because technology should enable our lives, not uproot them and make them scary.

And yet a lot of technology is confusing and potentially scary. Powerful machines should only be difficult to operate in dangerous ways, but that is not always the case. I think the problem is that the minds that design our devices are not necessarily oriented towards user-friendliness. At best, with one tech-oriented person designing something, you get something another techy can use.

This is why, in software, we have user interface specialists, whose job is not just to understand what the customer expects, but what they actually need and how to make it clear.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I may one day be one of those guys.
PPS - It's one of the things I enjoy doing in my work.

Wiki critical mass

There's a point in social media best termed "critical mass". Before that certain, yet unknowable, number of users, "nobody" is using the service because they think nobody else is. After the critical mass point, "everyone" uses the service, because "everyone else" is doing so. This is as important for Facebook as it is for Wikipedia.

Some of my forebears at my former employer had tried setting up a wiki for the sharing of knowledge. It was not entirely smooth. Some people misunderstood the purpose and requested that certain people be given only read access, or that they have a separate wiki for their project. Mostly people didn't bother trying to read anything there because too few people were writing anything. To get it off the ground, we needed a lot more people devoting attention to this effort as part of their work day. The point is that it's tough to get started, but once it's done, it is well worth the effort.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Encouraging early contributors means finding them before they have contributed.
PPS - I have no idea how to do that.

How to spend time when there's nothing to do?

Is it possible to do something that is simultaneously fun, free and easy? I am finding myself less able to occupy my time since I lost my job, I don't have money to splash around and there is often little energy to work with. TV is never any good, Deb and I get sick of DVDs and if we play games we're not together. We long ago exhausted the entertainment possibilities of our existing board games and the internet can only occupy so much time before I start feeling lazy and antisocial. So what's a guy supposed to suggest for the evening's activities?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - A good amount of our time is spent trying to figure out what to do.
PPS - And rejecting most ideas because they are too boring, expensive or difficult.

P!NK

Deb and I were fortunate last night to see P!NK perform live at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre. We brought along our camera, but the battery died before we were able to take a single shot, so unfortunately there are no photos to accompany this post. It was a brilliant show, though, with a stage set up like a Funhouse, including slides and crazy mirrors, and several high-flying stunts, too. P!NK herself sang "Sober" while performing several trapeze-swinging manoeuvres up as high as the lighting rigs.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - After the show we were able to check out her stretch pink Humvee outside.
PPS - Rock stars have all the fun.

Friday Zombie Blogging - Resident Evil t-shirt

I saw this article about a Resident Evil t-shirt with a zombie face printed on the inside in just the right spot. When you pull it up and over your head, your own face is replaced by the zombie one. It's really quite clever.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm guessing this is aimed mostly at males.
PPS - Then again, all girls would need to use it is a second shirt underneath.

Three wishes to change your view of the world?

If you had three wishes, but could only use them to change your perception of the world, what would you wish for? Personally, I've always wondered what it would be like to see ultraviolet and infrared, so I'd wish to see a bit beyond the human-visible EM spectrum. I also think it would be cool to sense magnetic fields. As for a third wish, I'm stumped.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That is, unless super reflexes counts as a perception difference.
PPS - I'm pretty sure it doesn't.