Archive: Posts from March, 2006
March 31st, 2006, 2 Comments »
The curiously named Ghost Recon: Advanced Warrior is the newest XBox 360 game in the long-running Tom Clancy franchise. In a plot point early on, the Canadian Prime Minister gets assassinated during a summit in Mexico:
In the game, the continental chiefs are in Mexico City to sign the North American Joint Security Agreement (softwood lumber didn’t make the agenda).
Things are going smoothly until Mexican rebels storm the leaders’ rendez-vous and kidnap the American and Mexican presidents, assassinate the prime minister and leave it up to the game player to save the day. The game was designed by Ubisoft, a worldwide firm with a flagship studio in Montreal that employs 1,400 people.
If you haven’t seen ads or videos from this game, it looks insanely good. The physics look unbelievably real.
2 Comments »
March 31st, 2006, 1 Comment »
The boom box is an ear worm in our culture–it comes and goes, but never truly disappears. Witness its latest incarnation–the kind of hilarious iZilla:
If you’ve been looking to step-up to a hungry man sized portable media player with incredible tech powers… this is it. First start with a whopping two terabytes of storage delivered by four 500 gig internal hard drives. Up the ante with a sweet 7″ TFT-LCD touch screen… then crush your opponents with high-speed ripping capability for CD, DVD, and vinyl. A handy iPod dock allows you to transfer songs to and from the iZilla.
And it weighs in at a mere 30 pounds. It’s got to be a little tricky to do your Saturday Night Live strut while hauling 30 pounds of electronics (maybe you need two, like Travolta and his paint cans).
UPDATE: You know, I suspected this was a hoax, but the Buy Now button fooled me. What can I say, I’m a simpleton. I also didn’t actually click the Buy Now button to see where it went.
1 Comment »
March 30th, 2006, 2 Comments »
I suspect this is about as low on the celebrity totem pole as I’d report, but I saw Carly Pope in the 7-11 at Granville and Drake. You may recall her from a decent but short-lived TV show called “Popular”. She’s done a fair bit of nondescript film work, and appeared this season on “The Collector”. She grew up in Vancouver, so she barely counts on the Spotted Celebrity Meter.
2 Comments »
March 30th, 2006, 8 Comments »
Via The Cellar Image of the Day, I discovered this nifty map that displays countries based on their proportion of world international tourist trips (click for larger version):
From the WorldMapper page about the map:
In 2003 665 million international tourist trips were made. Dividing this by the world population would mean 10.7% holidayed abroad. However some people make multiple trips, so less than a tenth of the global population make tourist trips abroad. Western Europe is the most popular destination for international tourists, the region receives 46% of world tourist trips. At the other extreme 0.1% of world tourist trips are made to Central African territories.
Western Europe is naturally going to look large because the countries are small, the population is wealthy, and it’s easy to travel among them. For someone who likes to avoid the tourists, this map shows you where to go. I’m shocked to see how small South America and India appear.
What’s that big tumour on the north coast of South America? I don’t think it’s Brazil. Venezuala, maybe?
WorldMapper has 35 other cool maps, including a number of others concerning tourism. This map showing the estimated population in the year 1 A.D. is pretty fascinating too.
8 Comments »
March 29th, 2006, 1 Comment »
Last month, I criticized Flickr (perhaps a little too harshly) for their new policy which banned photos that show bits your bathing suit would cover. I recently recognized another, more compelling reason for them to block nude photography: other, high-traffic sites hot-linking to pornographic Flickr photos.
FlickrLicio.us (currently, as I’ll explain, safe for work ZOINKS! No longer safe for work!) is a group of sites featuring risque, nude and pornographic photos that originally posted to Flickr. They’ve been around since August, 2005. As zilliions of other website owners do, FlickrLicio.us is ‘hot-linking’ the photos from Flickr.
As I understand it, what’s at issue here is not so much the content but the bandwidth costs to Flickr. Clearly FlickrLicio.us was a popular site. Back in August, the site owner indicated as much:
Average data transferred per day: 6.46 gigabytes ..and that is just my side…with not a single babe pic being hosted by myself. I can only imagine how much it is for Flickr.
And that’s not counting the photos, which would be the lion’s share of the bandwidth. To put that in a little perspective, my humble, boob-free site will move about 30 GB for the entire month of May.
I agree with Stewart Butterfield, Flickr’s CEO, who pointed out that “it’s bad for Flickr and is an abuse of a system designed to help people get their photos out onto the rest of the web, and not lock them up in Flickr”.
So, Flickr’s blocking Flickrlicio.us. It’s no longer even a little licious. I support their doing so. The site must have cost Flickr considerable dough in terms of bandwidth. I guess in the long run they should publish some maximum for outgoing bandwidth to a third-party site. I imagine this problem is exclusive to porn, but you never know. For example, there are a lot of car enthusiasts out there…
1 Comment »
March 29th, 2006, 4 Comments »
In the next few weeks, we’re moving Capulet’s site over to a new design on a Bryght site. Bryght doesn’t offer email support, so I’d like to locate an email solution that offers more than the standard SMTP from my webhost.
Boris (of Bryght) recently wrote about their beta-testing of Google’s Gmail to your domain program. This means that we can use Gmail to host (or pass on via POP) our @capulet.com email addresses. Read Boris’s account for all the upsides–it sounds like the right fit.
Boris tells me that it took them a week to get into the beta. That said, I imagine somebody at Bryght knows a guy who knows a guy inside Google. As far as I can remember (and, frankly, that’s not far) I don’t know anybody at Google. So, I’m publically pleading to be let into the beta program.
On a related note, Boris says:
Best feature? Set a few more DNS records, and every single email account can also be a Jabber account, run through Google’s talk.google.com server. Yes! Jabber world domination continues… (so add boris AT bryght.com to your Jabber buddy list).
I mention this because it recently came to my attention that all of the Jabber docs and examples use the email addresses juliet@capulet.com or romeo@montague.net. Happily, we don’t have anyone at Capulet named ‘Juliet’, or there’d be real trouble. Somebody from Jabber recently asked if we minded, and we didn’t.
4 Comments »
March 29th, 2006, 1 Comment »
You know, you get steeped in the high-tech/cutting-edge/Web 2.0 world long enough, and you forget that roughly a third of North America doesn’t use the Internet. You forget that most of North America doesn’t book cars, hotels or flights online. You forget that most of the people in your life wouldn’t know MySpace from the Space Channel, and don’t care to know.
I got to thinking about this after reading (via the Business 2.0 blog) these survey results (PDF) about advertising by small and medium-sized business:
* More small businesses (two thirds) would rather have TV advertising than any other form of advertising (including newspapers, Yellow Pages, radio, and the Internet), but less than 15 percent have bought TV ads in the last year because they assume it is too expensive.
* Yet 60 percent of those who have bought TV ads, have increased their TV ad budgets over the past two years.
* The Yellow Pages are the most vulnerable to new forms of advertising. The Yellow Pages account for a quarter of the ad budget of typical small businesses, but it is also “one of the first advertising vehicles they decrease to try new mediums.” Only daily newspaper ads would suffer more from a shift in ad dollars.
* And 69 percent believe that there are customers they want that they cannot reach through the Internet.
The Yellow Pages? That just seems laughable to me, but I guess I’m at the thin edge of the wedge. And that 69% figure is shockingly high.
This survey was commissioned by Spot Runner, a company that aims to democratize TV advertising. The results are likely to be skewed in their favour.
1 Comment »
March 29th, 2006, No Comments »
When I travel outside North America, I’m always pleasantly surprised by the new perspective that the foreign English-language media affords me. I’m referring here mostly to the BBC, but also to the International Herald Tribune and European versions of newspapers like The Wall Street Journal.
It was in the Journal (reading a fascinating article about smoking in Serbia–subscription required) that I first learned about the awesomely named Rambo Amadeus. He’s a Serbian-Montenegrin rock star of some renown. From Wikipedia:
His songs combine satirical lyrics on the nature of common people and silliness of local politics. He uses a mixture of musical styles (converging towards drum and bass in later works, but involving a lot of turbo-folk elements in earlier songs), and self-conscious ironic wit (for example, one of his aliases is “Rambo Amadeus Svjetski Mega Car” (RASMC) — “Rambo Amadeus World Mega Emperor”). His scene name itself is made from John Rambo and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Known also as a “charming king of jovial pop”, his concerts are never mere repetitions of recorded songs, but a mixture of musical improvisation and humor exploiting all aspects of human nature in a crude manner. Some fans compare his style and career path with those of Frank Zappa or Captain Beefheart.
Here’s his official site where you can here some of his music and this page hosts a video interview, assuming you speak Serbian.
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