Month: October 2004

Posted on

Cap’n Deadprogrammer And The Hunt for the Giant Robot

On the day when Kottke posted his crappy cellphone snap of the giant robot in Times Square I dragged my co-workers to go see it. The robot must have flown away since the morning leaving behind only stupid Naked Cowboy and his admirers. Because I know that the tighty-whity wearing scourge of Times Square sometimes subsists solely on soy nuts and coffee, it was probably a good idea to keep my distance.

Or was Kottke’s photo a hoax? I guess it could be done with a toy robot – the photo is grainy enough. Everybody seems to be just reposting it with or without credits. A giant square probably lousy with camera carrying bloggers – and no other pictures at all? What gives?

Posted on

Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells Jingle All Ma Bells

Manhole tents are used to provide protection from rain and falling pedestrians, as well as to keep all the delicious asbestos inside.

Upon seeing this tent the first thing that came to my mind was – hey, shouldn’t it say Verizon? I guess it would be too expensive to rebrand all the manhole tents.

I also remembered the old radio jingle “We’re All Connected, New York Telephone”. I wonder if anyone created an mp3 of it. I think later New York telephone became NYNEX (can’t make a jingle out of that, can you?), then Bell Atlantic and then Verizon. And with Verizon, instead of a melodic jingle we got the stupid dork saying “can you hear me?” in commercials.

I was very amazed when the unholy union of NYNEX, Bell Atlantic and GTE (you can read all about crazy little Bell matings here) they decided that all of their brands with years of history (apparently history of bad customer service) were not worth crap and decided to come up with a new name.

Yes, it looks like maybe one of them Voice Over IP companies will create a good jingle. It’s not that hard – Sirius Satellite Radio has an awesome jingle (unfortunately I can’t find an example online).

Posted on

Cloak and Chef’s Knife

A few days ago I saw the funniest ad while working out. It was a recruitment ad for the CIA and its tagline was “Why work for a company when you can serve the nation?” I almost fell from the treadmill.

I am pretty sure that they wanted to do “Why work for a company when you can work for The Company“, but then decided that not everyone would understand the humor. Intelligence community slang always cracks me up. They could do an ad spot with a dude looking for a place to send his resume and getting the response “No Such Agency”.

I wonder if chefs call their school “The Company”. I own a book called The Professional Chef’s Knife Kit published by that CIA. I also know a guy that owns an official CIA chef’s knife (which is very cool), but I can’t find one online – searches for CIA and knife return very wrong results.

Posted on

Does Your Digital Camera Have Enough Bling?

I was researching subminiature digital cameras when I stumbled on a webpage of a company that makes an affordable diamond studded digital camera.

That’s right. MINOX DD1 Diamond has 8 synthetic diamonds.

Mechanical watch manufacturers used to proudly advertise how many synthetic “jewels” were used in the watch mechanism. Then radio manufacturers used to brag about the number of transistors (sometimes even adding unnecessary transistors to the circuit). Now it is all about megahertz, megabytes and megapixels. Don’t you think it’s time to go back to jewels?

Posted on

I Need 150 mg of Trimethylxanthine IV Push Stat!

Recently I visited New York offices of a certain Redmond based corporation. The corporation in question always has free snacks and soft drinks in its numerous kitchens (the home campus having an especially fancy selection at that).

Their office coffee machine fascinated me even more than “Colombian Supremo” vs “Colombien La Vereda” K-Cups and content of “Milds” in Mother-Parkers’ packets. (As a side note I’d like to add this rumor that Tim Horton’s coffee made by Mother Parkers is so addictive that some people think it contains cocaine).

Anyway, the Redmondsoft coffee machine is made by Flavia and uses packets that look like miniature iv bags:

I asked to keep one as a souvenir – they were out of coffee and this is actually a hot chocolate packet. The coffee packets were probably all injected by employees. They also had tea packets which were smaller in size.