I really don’t understand why Internet advertising industry is so centered on clicks. Everywhere else advertisers pay to put ads on billboards, magazine pages, TV and movie screens, all unclickable. They will even pay crazy money for tiny little logos on very fast cars going in circles. Or on outfits of athletes and even golfers. Yet when it comes to web advertising – eyeballs do not matter, it’s all about clicks. For instance, Vonage gets a really sweet deal – I never click on their ads, but every ad is a reminder to me that Verizon is ripping me off and I should really think about an IP telephony solution. When I will finally see that they have done something about providing a 911 service that is as reliable as a regular phone company’s maybe I’ll finally succumb. Or maybe their ads will do their dirty deed, I won’t have much problems finding them – their company name is also their web address.
The King of the Datacenter
Exhibit A : an extremely cool mural on the wall of a Google data center by one of their supposedly 35K a year system administrators:
Exhibit B :
Amdahl LVS (codename Elvis) storage unit with a very striking door design by (correct me if I am wrong) IDEO Frog Design.
See my other posts about Amdahl : “The Legend Of How Much Crap Michael Can Buy on Ebay” and “FUD You“.
“If You Paid Attention, You’d be Worried Too” or Finit Finis Finish Omnious Omnium Shmomnious
The very special 47-50th Street/Rockefeller Center station has some very strange advertisements posted in the decrepit old clock boxes. You know, the ones overhead, the ones to which nobody pays attention too because the clocks are usually way off?
For some reason I thought that the ads that I’ve seen for a long time were cigarette ads. But recently I looked at them a little bit more carefully and realized that something was odd. The ads show a sunset over the forest and a flock of birds in the air. The caption says “Omnium Finis Imminet”. Huh. Hello conspiracy theories.
Well, my crappy knowledge of Latin tells me that “omnium” means “all”, “finis” means “end” and “imminet” since it sounds just like “imminent” means “is coming”.
Apparently graffiti with this nice apocalyptic message has been popping up in other places. On the other hand, this is not graffiti, is it? At the very best this is a well executed hack.
Come Monday (well, if the end of the world is not going to happen before then) I am totally giving a call to Gannett Transit (formerly New York Subways Advertising Co) at (212) 297-6400 to figure out what’s up with this.
Update.
I called Gannett Transit just to be kicked to voicemail, but it looks like the ad is legit. I’ve seen a whole bunch in West 4th Station and comments are rolling in about TV spots too. As commenters pinted out this is probably a “guessing game” ad for the new War of the Worlds movie or some stupid Sci-fi Channel movie or series. Well, at least nobody seems to be paying attention to the ads. None of the people I asked were able to recall what it was about.
Well, at least it seems that my humble blog ranks high in the very sparse search results for “omnium finis imminet”, “omnium finis imminent” and the other creative ways to spell this slogan, so hopefully I’ll gain some readers along the way.
Now, if this were an ad for Darren Aronofsky’s Flicker, that would be way cool. But I am not even sure that he is filming it at all.
Another update
Wow, it looks like New York Times fact checkers are in hot water as the reporters totally pulled this out of their butts (or read on this in my blog as it was the top result on Google for a while) :
“The advertisements portray a flock of birds against an angry red sky, with a single phrase: Omnium Finis Imminet, Latin for The End of All Things Is Near. The advertisements, for Steven Spielberg’s movie version of H. G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds,” cost about $50,000. The film is to open in July.”
They did post a correction later on. Here’s the full ad from a recent Scientific American that my wife brought me today.
Note the Photoshop lens flare and the horrible font. Looks like their art director is about as competent as their marketing director. The letter “T” is probably made to look like the Orange County Choppers dagger logo to capitalize on the popularity of that show.
He heh, the show seems to have a stupid “X-Files” marries “Millennium” premise. The end of the world is approaching, and investigators are a physicist instead of Scully and a nun instead of Mulder. That’s some sexy and original stuff. Just get a bad 80s rock ballad for a theme song and all the geeks mourning Star Trek will flock to see this.
Raiding the Foodmotron
I am endlessly fascinated with vending machines, and being my old semi-autistic self like to study their contents. These days, trying to fight my way out of being overweight, the only thing I ever consume out of them is peanuts or trail mix. Still, I am amazed at how hard it is to get anything remotely healthy out of them.
I’ve seen an article once that described how to get a balanced meal out of a vending machine. All I have to say to that is – “Ha!”. So in the spirit of exploration I decided to figure out what is the single most unhealthy item you can get from them.
The placement of items in most of machines that I’ve seen at different workplaces follows the same pattern. Chips at the top, various snacks in the middle and ultrascary stuff at the bottom. The very last minirow is usually reserved for dried out rolls of lifesavers and gum.
The ultrascary items are the ones that I am interested in here. I have to admit that in the dot com years a consumed a couple of items from there. In fact I had a manager who publicly admitted his addiction to “Black Forrest Brownies” located there. I looked at the wrapper of the brownies and was absolutely scared of the fact that somebody managed to stick that much high calory crud into such a small package.
I checked the machine at work and promptly started the collection of scary vending machine food wrappers. I present to you the current champion:
The little “Eddie” character looks a little creepy, doesn’t he?
Wow, 40 grams of fat and 61 grams of carbs. Food of the gods!
I dare you to find something less healthy in your vending machine. If you do and send me a scan of the package I will send you a nice set of 3d photos of New York that I took and 3d glasses to view them.
Kajillion Words You Can’t Say On A Scrolling Cubicle Marquee
Remember my geek toy, right? It’s out of commission for a little while, even though even my boss’ boss told me that I am probably being too cautious. Well, I checked the search terms in the logs for obvious signs of profanity and didn’t find any. But of course people search for some anatomical terminology that would probably not be a good idea to have scrolling above my cubicle. Also my merry co-workers will go to great lengths to stuff searches with embarrassing stuff. And then there’s that person who keeps searching for “bunghole” (and not finding anything).
So the question is this – do you know any industrial strength open source profanity filter list that will be restrictive enough to filter out anything above and beyond George Carlin’s Famous Seven?
Close To The Machine
While we are on the topic of vending machines, I gotta mention hacking.
I remember that a trick with a coin with a little hole attached to a string worked on Soviet payphones, but I don’t remember seeing it used on soda machines. I never tried it. Mr Krabs in a Spongebob cartoon about the origin of Krusty Krab did that, sot it’s probably an international “hack”.
At UGO one bright person tried to cheat the Coke machine out of a dollar by applying a long piece of scotch tape to the bill and trying to pull it back out once the machine swallowed it. This broke our subsidized 25 cent machine resulting in an office full of pissed off people. That cost the company a few hundred dollars.
Then there was an interesting machine at iXL – one that dispenses glass bottles of Snapple. There are 5 shelves, and glass bottles fall down and somehow surviving. Somebody figured out that that particular machine checked if the bottle fell to the bottom before taking the money. If one stopped the bottle by holding a flap that swings to protect the dispensing box at the bottom, the machine was tricked into thinking that the bottle did not dispense and let the user make another selection. Everything was fine, but one not very bright individual caught one bottle with the flap and proceeded to drop a second bottle from the top shelf directly overhead. The dispensing bin was immediately filled by glass shards and Snapple.
.
Some American soda machines have a hidden menu that can be activated by pressing drink buttons in the following order : 4 2 3 1. I activated it once by accident (the dang machine was out of everything) and only now found a reference to this online. Some snack food machine can be induced to show its internal temperature, but I don’t know the key combination.
The company where I work now used to have two presidents at the same time. One liked Coca Cola and another liked Pepsi. Because of that we used to have two vending machines. Now they are both gone and we have only one machine.
And last is but not least : a weird “hack” that some of my classmates used to trick a proprietor of a soda kiosk in Odessa. They cracked a broken fluorescent lamp open and rubbed the white residue found inside on a copper 2 kopek coin. The coin became silvery and could be easily passed off as a 15 kopek coin. What’s that white residue? Deadly mercury.
Univac Lighter
I recently bought this beauty on eBay. When I arrived I was a bit disapointed to see that the hinge that makes that click-clack sound was not operating properly. I really hate the stupid eBay feedback system which makes minor complaints not worthwhile (nobody wants a negative comment in retaliation for reporting an incomplete or dishonest description, right?). Hmmm, maybe that’s the point. Uh well, still, it was a good deal for $15.
What is super cool is that it appears that zippo lighters come with a warrantee that goes something like this:
“Any Zippo metal product, when returned to our factory will be put in first class condition free of charge, for we have yet to charge a cent for the repair of a Zippo metal product, regardless of age or condition.”.
So, theoretically all I have to do is send the lighter to the factory and they will fix it. I’ll let you know how good a job the’ll do.
Jeff-O
Jeff Bezos from Greznte, Slovakia has a scary Amazon wishlist featuring “Special Forces Guerrilla Warfare Manual”, “Total Resistance”, “150 Questions For A Guerrilla”, “On Guerrilla Warfare” and “Everyman’s Talmud”. Please don’t buy him anything. He’s probably up to no good.
Jeff Bezos from Seattle, WA who works at Amazon.com, is known for his laugh and Austin Powers costume likes Aunt Lizzie’s Zero Carb Cheese Straw Bites so much that “[his] mouth is watering as [he writes] this”. I bought a box of them too, and Jeff did not lie. They are pretty damn good. I wonder, if I’ll buy him something from his wishlist, will he send me a “thank you” email? Then again, he must have a better discount than I do…
Also sometimes he time-travels.
Oh, eBay, thy Name Is Obsession.
Oooooh. Shiny. Look at all the old snapshot albums that people sell on eBay. Take your pick: 1930s sailor’s (the seller who added “GAY INT” is probably reserved a special kind of placement in hell), Civil War, Victorian, WWII, 1920s Texas. The list goes on.
Scans from these would make an awesome photo blog. One could harness the photos in those albums to put together an amazing collection. Probably 10 grand invested today would turn into one hundred 5-10 years from now. Too bad I don’t have disposable income.
Die Kunst Der Rant : Shopping Cart Issue.
I don’t care what you call it – a shopping cart, a shopping bag or a shopping sack, but the following retarded things are going to cost you some sales:
1) Expire the shopping cart. There’s nothing that makes me want to complete my order than coming back in the morning and finding out that 20 items that I picked the night before are gone and my shopping cart is reset. Even better, store the cart id in a memory only cookie so that the cart will be reset even sooner.
2) Before checkout ask – “do you have a coupon”? Hey, the fact that there is a possibility that a coupon exists makes you feel that you are getting the _best_ possible price! Nobody is going to use that popular search engine dealy to try to find that coupon, and then to search for a better price on an item. No siree Bob.
3) Save money on copyrighter’s and photographer’s fees. A one line explanation and a tiny pixilated picture is enough. Even if the photographer gave you a big image file, that stuff will only confuse the customer. Product dimensions are irrelevant. I mean, what moron cant’s figure out the dimensions of a product from a tiny image with white background?
4) Don’t link the product in the shopping cart to the page with the description and photo of the product. A 10 pixel by 10 pixel image and a cryptic description is good enough. Who can forget what he added to the cart earlier?
Arrrrgh.