Month: December 2005

Or die tryin’

In a epilogue to this post: the American Brandstand 2005 report is proud to announce the top 10 brands mentioned in hiphop. The top three are, from boldest to least, are Mercedes, Nike, and Cadillac. The one brand rappers don’t seem to mind knockoffs of? The AK-47 at #10 with a bullet.

Biggest corporate shill? 50 Cent, of course.

But maybe I’m being judgemental. After all, named-ropping is as old as time. Hell, Mozambique put an AK-47 on their national flag. I also just watched “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” with my sister, and there’s Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, where Tiffany’s, Cartier and Howard Winston are mentioned in a matter of moments.

Good ol’ Norma Jean even refers to her diamonds as “ice”. I’d drink Cristal to that. Happy New Year.

Vodka twistees to the rescue

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

LARGE_VODKA_TWISTEE_SHOT_STRAWBERRY_VANILLA.jpg

Like virtually every year, the cousins descended to the annual family quasi-Christmas dinner (It’s not always on Xmas Eve, we have Gregorian calendar difficulties, what can I say). However, this time it was at my cousin’s new 4 bedroom home. Very Emily Post; she and her husband played the consummate hostess and host, complete with smoked salmon, lichee cocktails and Vodka Twistee shots. The milky part was good, the strawberry needed some work but the vodka part was alright.

Then there was the coup de gras: a stuffed turkey cooked in a stainless steel oven that probably had more computer processing power than this computer.

The food was excellent, and the new house looked pretty nice (yes, even the neat trick they did with the temporary blinds!).

After dinner, we sat down to yet another family tradition: poker. In the past, I used to be the first man out. This year, I beat out almost a dozen folks to emerge with the second place prize: a magarita and daquiri mixing kit.

The more things stay the same, the more things change,

Animal Crossing as stealth edutainment

I got Silverlotus Animal Crossing: Wild World* for her new Nintendo DS. While it’s a whimsical game accessible to both your young’uns and your pretty spouse, I suspect that many of the gameplay decisions were made very deliberately and with purpose. It’s not just a happy-sappy Barney land: when Lucy the Cat quizzed Silverlotus’s avatar on her personality and found her to be “sweet and noble”, she immediately warned her to be wary of those who may take advantage of her disposition. And what kid’s game you know that features mortgages and museums? Fat-Cats2.jpg

Things that AC:WW is attempting to teach your kids:

  • *Money management*. You start off the game with a house and a mortgage, which you pay off with a variety of odd jobs. If you pay off your debt, you can obtain a second mortgage to perform home renovations, and the cycle starts anew. You can place your savings in the town bank, and your account accrues interest.
  • *Economic development*. Spend money at the general store, and the store will renovate itself into a succession of larger stores with a wider variety of merchandise and services. The store also implements a membership discount plan, with your discount growing along with the store itself.
  • *Social interaction*. The NPCs range in temperament from friendly to rambunctious to curt. To advance your social status, you must converse and write letters to everyone. If you make friends, they will send letters and gifts in kind. If not, they may ostracize you or even leave town.
  • *Biology and philanthropy*. Blathers the curator will give a brief summary of each fossil, fish or insect you donate to the museum. More encyclopedic facts on each artifact are available in your menu screens.
  • *Indemnification*. Sooner or later, you are presented with the option to purchase an insurance policy. Insurance guarantees you compensation if you are stung by bees while bug hunting, or if you have purchased counterfeit artwork from the flea market.
  • *Proper care of computer hardware*. If you shut your Nintendo DS off without saving your game, the next time you load the game your character will be berated by a mole named Mr. Resetti. If you continue to prematurely abort the game, Mr. Resetti will become more and more flustered and make you perform mnemonic-like activities before you can resume play.

*The game is pretty interesting. Everything happens in real time. There is no urgent objective except to live in this small, idyllic town and interact with the wacky anthromorphic townsfolk.

Brief history of the world, briefly

For Christmas Eve, I’ve decided to dig into Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I’ve already passed the 400 page mark. It has a light, irreverent tone where he manages to summarize the major sciences from cell theory to M theory, all its major players, and the kind of arcane trivia that Douglas Adams and Michael Palin thrived on.

And how! Who thought the field of science could be so juicy, or scientists such drama queens? Like the fact Einstein had a son out of wedlock, and discreetly set him off for adoption. Or that the majority of the world’s dinosaur fossils have been catalogued by two men whose rivalry and hatred for each other sometimes culminated with each other’s digging teams pelting rocks at each other.

Bryson manages to explain everything clearly and the book just flows like water, all the while fascinating but sobering. Life is both fleeting and rugged, our puny planet is both fragile and lethal. And the universe is very, very big, and yet we do not yet fully comprehend our own oceans.

Do the shuffle!

If you ever wondered how terrible legislation like the DMCA comes to be, all you need to hear is this excerpt of an interview between a Fox anchorman and the US president regarding his iPod music player:

Bush: All of these. I put it on shuffle. Dwight Yoakam. I’ve got the Shuffle, the, what is it called? The little.

Hume: Shuffle.

Bush: It looks like.

Hume: The Shuffle. That is the name of one of the models.

Bush: Yes, the Shuffle.

Hume: Called the Shuffle.

Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.

No truer, clearer words have been spoken about the Apple iPod since a speechless Seal blurted out, “This is the first of one of these things that makes me feel, Wow, OK!” in a 2001 promo video.

Shortly after:

Hume: So you don’t know what you’re going to going to get.

Bush: No.

Hume: But you know —

Bush: And if you don’t like it, you have got your little advance button. It’s pretty high-tech stuff.

I wonder if Apple has a patent on this “advance button”.

Extreme Makeover: Subway Edition

museum.jpg It was with some surprise that Toronto’s transit system made it in Metro Arts’s top 40 prettiest subways, although frankly I don’t think we hold a candle to Moscow or Athens or even Portland.

On that note, it’s reported that the TTC is considering jazzing up three of their subway stations for the tourists, starting with Museum, and tentatively Osgoode and St. Patrick. As you can see, Museum gets faux mummies – which doesn’t look bad on paper, although it’s quite the departure from your typical abstract, low-key tile artwork the TTC is famous for. Opinions are mixed, with avid fans of the Vitrolite tiling disapproving the proposed renovations.

For the record, I don’t really mind the proposals, although I’m a traditionalist when it comes to St. Patrick’s: it’s gotta stay green.

But why Museum, and why not the cramped and dark confines of Union? Or Yorkdale, whose greenhouse roof leaks every time it rains? I figure it’s because the downtown University-Spadina line needs to attract more riders. In addition, this may mean less vandalism: Museum supposedly has the least crime of all the subway stops. How long are you willing to bet until someone sticks their Bubble-licious in King Tut’s eye?

Belated wedding gift

plates%20001.jpg My former Mac roommate and old pal came by the other week with a couple of hand-made gifts because he missed the wedding. Apparently he was busy exploring the Great Barrier Reef and petting kangaroos and doing similar useless activities like that at the time.

The left clay dish is painted with a silver-coloured lotus (for Silverlotus), and for me, a dish emblazoned with the symbol to the best computer game of all time.

As thanks, we gave him four litres of this vile-tasting flavoured water doped with potassium acelsulfame which he actually quite liked.

Firefox fights on

“Everytime I load Firefox on a new computer I think to myself: “Hah, I’m giving it to the man. Sticking him in the back. I’m gonna show him who’s boss.”

Then I remember: I am the man.”

– Robert Scoble, Microsoft evangelist and #1 blogging employee

Firefox 1.5 was released recently, and it pulled in 2 million downloads on its birthday. Even ex-Microserf and Internet Explorer program manager Scott Berkin caved. How is it that other grizzled open source products, including its big brother Mozilla Application Suite, languishes outside of the limelight? It’s just a web browser, after all.

I think it’s the incredible detail placed in developing a clean, intuitive interface design. The masterstrokes are subtle, but everywhere: notice how all the “Clear Data” buttons in the revised Privacy Options panel are all on the bottom right corner, so one can rapidly go through the settings?

And with good reason: Firefox faces an uphill battle. One Forrester analyst quips, “Getting Grandma to switch over from Internet Explorer, which is already installed on her computer, to this open-source thing on the Internet that she needs to find and download, will be hard.” Boing Boing also theorizes most of IE’s marketshare probably stems from homogeneous adoption by corporate IT departments.

But there is one other thing the Mozilla Corporation does so well compared to other FLOSS: marketing chutzpah. I wish FF all the best.

One casualty of progress, however, is my old version of ForecastFox, which was not compatible with Firefox 1.5. I held onto it because of its crappy and accidentally hilarious weather graphics. Just look below for the reason why our household now calls thunderstorms, “It’s raining witchhats!”

forecastfox_witchhat.png