Jeff Bridges is cashing in on his fame by releasing an album, and he started promoting the album by anchoring the first night of music at the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Fest. “Is that the dude?” was my reaction, and it must have been everyone else’s, too. He didn’t shy away from that expectation.
He asked if people liked the dude before singing some song from The Big Lebowki’s soundtrack. He looked the dude, he sounded like the dude, and he acted like the dude. It was almost as if he was the dude. Was he the dude before the movie, or was he transformed by the iconic character from which the spectacular response from popular culture left no escape.
Jeff Bridges, aka The Dude, singing at the Santa Barbara Solstice Festival.
Or was it that the audience could see nobody except the dude?
Either way, jt was a surreal experience. As usual, he is a celebrity fortunate enough to have had the backing of an amazing band, next to whom he could only shine as the dude and not a performer endowed with any special or extraordinary musical talent.
It was a good performance, nevertheless. The dude gave a good show. I still would have preferred a killer dj house set or a tight jazz band, but this is Santa Barbara, and the least common denominator persists as the dominant factor in guiding musical selection for the masses.
I play a trick the neighbor who likes to filch my wifi connection. I leave my connection open for five minutes Monday mornings. This neighbor’s computer got registered on my network the last time s/he logged on to my wifi network, and naturally it showed up on my Mac as a computer on the network. That’s when I noticed the icon that Apple uses to distinguish Windows computers on the network. It’s the blue screen of death!
Apple uses the "blue screen of death" to represent local Windows computers.
Of course, Macs are often susceptible to the spinning beach ball of death, and Windows 7 may arguably be more stable than Apple’s OS 10.6, Snow Leopard. Nevertheless, it’s funny to see these little jabs in OS X.
There has been a lot of noise made about the fact that iPhones (and, apparently, Android phones) compile lists (caches, as programmers call them) of the locations where you have visited. This has raised the ire of many people for good reason and for not. People are legitimately concerned that private data about their day-to-day routines may be used for as yet unknown purposes. What has been lost in the discussion, however, is the  fact that we choose to use countless apps that employ our geographic location to deliver added convenience or even security, and compiling such lists of geographical coordinates is necessary for many of these programs to work properly.
For example, take Apple’s Find My iPhone service, pictured below. It is free to all iPhone 4 and iPad owners. When one subscribes to it, one has the ability to log on to an Apple web site, see the exact location of the device on a Google Maps map, and issue warnings (such as “Please return my phone to the police, or I’ll tell them where to find you.”) to the screen. One can even remotely lock the device to make it inoperable, or even to wipe it out completely from this web page. Of course, if your device is stolen, having a history of where it has been since it left your possession will be very useful to you. Similarly, it is highly likely that one is implicitly authorizing the Yelp and Google apps to track one’s movements in order to deliver the personalized service we have come to regard and to covet as astonishingly cool.
Apple's Find My iPhone service allows you to locate your iOS device (iPhone, iPod, iPad) anywhere in the world.
Of course, apps that are aware of your geographical location inevitably contain bugs. Developers will, therefore, have much interest in knowing if failure of the app was the result of any factors resulting from the location. (Was it the software that failed, or a local transmitter that was handling the transaction?) Hence, given how software works, geo-caching is an inherent side effect of the conveniences we demand. Apple’s comments on the 4.3.3 iOS update released today confirms this. The latest update does not get rid of the geographical location caches that the apps demand. Rather, it makes these caches more ephemeral:
This update contains changes to the iOS crowd-sourced location database cache including:
Reduces the size of the cache
No longer backs the cache up to iTunes
Deletes the cache entirely when Location Services is turned off
Naturally, if any of the data are being used for purposes for which the end user had not provided explicit consent, then Apple and Google should pay a heavy price. Such a price would be bittersweet for me because I own both Apple stock and an iPhone 4.
It is positively unfortunate, however, that everybody is screaming bloody murder without pointing a finger at the consumers who are completely unaware of how software works, who possess no desire to learn of the pitfalls of complex software, who cannot quite fathom what it means when they tell an app on their iPhone that it’s ok for that app to use their geographical location, and who refuse to entrust the government to devise regulations that protect their interests until something like this happens. A little bit of awareness would go a very long way.
If you’re curious, yes, I just upgraded both my iPad and iPhone operating systems to iOS 4.3.3. I’m hoping that some critical fixes to the very lousy iOS 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 are in this package, too.
I happened upon this article in the Oddly Enough section of Reuters on my Reuters Newspro iPad App some time ago. Unfortuantely, the hilarious picture that was included in the iPad app is missing from the archived article. So, allow me to describe it!
It was a penis painted on one half of the draw bridge such that it became “erected” whenever the drawbridge lifted. This is the only picture I could find from this article after doing a Google image search.
Without a doubt, it took a lot of balls to erect this work of art. Those underground Russian graffiti artists deserve a lot of praise.
This episode is far more entertaining than the game, frankly. On one of my recent daily walks at work, I encountered this scene which I captured faithfully with the iPhone 4.
This bird was itching for a fight, for sure! He was battling his image for hours, it seemed.
I always had much loftier goals for this blog, but it is difficult to resist talking about a ridiculous trend that seems to be growing.
I may have been among the vanguard of credit card holders possessed with a stellar credit rating who received invitations to receive the Visa Black Card. I wrote about it, thinking that it must have been a joke. But, today I encountered an advertisement for  the Black Card at Camerapedia, and I followed the link to the official Visa Black Card web site to discover that the Black Card seems, indeed, to be a very serious product that is being propagated with the most tasteless, basest marketing. The “TV Commercial” streamed on the site is nothing short of dreadful.
In as much, my earlier conclusion that this is a card for people with more dollars than neurons may have been correct after all. Who knows? Maybe without the Visa Black Card, people in this category would never even be able to identify each other.
Coupled with other studies that show that circumcision reduces HIV transmission rates as well, this finding that circumcision reduces HPV (human papilloma virus) transmission rates begs the following question: what is the nature of the covenant between God and man?
Professional Sports is an Excellent Marketing Model for the Airlines
It is exceptionally difficult not to become furious–downright livid–with the state of the airline industry. As if the incessant prodding by Homeland Security weren’t enough, the advent of online booking began obscuring the actual price of flight tickets (How much will the taxes be? How about the booking fee?). Then, we came upon the reality that even the final price we paid for the ticket wasn’t the actual cost of the flight because airlines first started charging for meals that used to be included in the price of the ticket and then they started charging for hauling our baggage, which also used to be included in the price of the ticket. Even worse, the luggage fee is subject to change, and it varies from airline to airline. Consequently, the final cost of the flight remains a mystery until we check in our baggage.
If the trend continues, Airlines will soon charge for oxygen during the flight, but more civil alternatives that might quell the passengers’ thirst for the Airlines’ jugulars exist. Airlines can take a hint from professional sports and have sponsorship for every event that happens during the course of a flight.
Just as NFL kickoffs are typically “brought to you by the new Buick LeSabre”, the highly anticipated pushback from the gate could be “brought to you by AIG insurance: isn’t now a good time to buy some life insurance? We’re begging you!” The takeoff can be sponsored by “Red Bull: it gives you wings”, or by “Viagra: your turn to take off, baby”, or by “Cialis: nothing can stop you from joining the mile high club”. Dinner can be sponsored by McDonalds or Subway. Long smooth stretches of sky can be sponsored by Smirnoff Vodka or Jack Daniels, and heavy turbulence can be sponsored by “Valium: you need one. Don’t deny it.” The oxygen in the cabin could be sponsored by “Microsoft: without Microsoft, you’d be dead. Don’t you forget that”. Landings, those so happy endings to long flights, could be sponsored by Victoria’s secret, or Trojan condoms, and that blissful moment at which we are allowed to be again shackled by our mobile phones can be sponsored by Verizon. Or Stayfree maxipads.
Airlines can take another cue from professional car racing and put all sorts of logos on the giant fuselages of their planes. Oh, look, it’s the Home Depot plane taking off. Kids can be heard screaming “I wanna fly the Cocoa Puffs plane, please!” And, flight attendants’ uniforms will naturally be covered from head to toe with patches from a thousand different sponsors, from STP to Chilli’s.
Although the net result might be that sponsors will end up prolonging flights the way they prolong football games just to cram a few more commercials down our throats (“We’re making an extra turn in Chicago to show you the Willis Tower. It’s no longer the Sears tower, damn it!”), perhaps we might again be afforded the sanity of knowing one simple fact about our flight: how much it costs!
PS If you got other sponsorship ideas for the airlines, share them in the comments below. PNM
Some years back I received a pre-approved credit card offer that was impossible to accept and equally impossible to trash. It is an offer for a Visa Black Card, the sole benefit of which is the $495 annual fee. Virtually every “perk” included in that top line (24-hour concierge service, membership points, etc.) comes with various exclusive “metallated” (gold, platinum, etc.) credit cards that have no annual fees or have fees that are substantially lower than the $495 required by the Black Card.
Visa Black Card. The credit card for those who most likely possess fewer neurons than dollars.
Strangely enough, the Black Card vendor feels compelled to emphasize that the card is made of carbon. Of course, all the plastic composites of which credit cards are made are primarily composed of carbon, but choosing to emphasize a material, carbon, that is infinitely cheaper than the expensive metals after which others are named (gold, titanium, platinum) is a questionable choice for someone who wants to charge $495 annually for the privilege of owning a black card.
The only useful information in the offer is the fact that the availability of the card is limited to 1% of American residents. The obscenely wealthy, it seems, are not as shielded against stupidity as they would like to think.
