27 Nov 2006
Spotted this thing cruisin’ through the streets of Newtown a week or so back. I want one. For those who can’t see great, it’s a vehicle with two big mumma antennas hooked up to a guy with a laptop sitting inside (yes, hooked up to the guy, the laptop is just so he can play CS… what do you think I meant?), whilst the sign on the back reads “CAUTION: Slow moving vehicle, Radio coverage testing”.
In other words, All Your WEP/WPA Are Belong To Us. Classy.
Later: When writing this post I spelt “Antenna” as “Umbrella”. Apologies for any other gaping mistakes — clearly, I’m not quite with it.
27 Nov 2006
It was a great success on Friday night, praise God. We had a couple of kids who don’t usually come to TACKLES come along, and they all loved it … and we (the leaders, that is) all loved it! Haha. I’ve got a couple of photos but won’t post them here… sigh. Pretty sure we’re cleared to use them but… whatever.
Anyway, here’s a massive (it’s like 3x2m/10×6.5′) painting they all did over the course of the evening:
Awesome, huh?
27 Nov 2006
If I were to stop reading them altogether, I’d have saved myself a lot of trouble. Cumulatively, by opening them, I’ve sentenced myself to about seventy years of ill luck in love, life, and so forth. Mind you, the prescribed punishments for not forwarding the inanity tend on the side of inanity themselves: perhaps all I have really sentenced myself to is boredom — it’s hardly ill luck if nothing happens at all.
Still, the fires of bulletins, fuelled teen angst, sweep onwards (over the barren plane?) …
Please tell me why these things (SocNets) are at all compelling?
25 Nov 2006
FEVA’s “Promoting the Word through Image and Text” conference (they will break my link fairly quickly, methinks, but it’s good whilst it lasts) was today, and it rocked.
Sessions about architecture to creative strategies to the theology of “promotion” (which we don’t call marketing for fear of stirring the controversy pot) to a rather helpful copyright session (albeit one raising more questions than it answered), as well as great food, a comfortable venue, and generally excellent organisation, etc.
Go along next year.
And, now that positive recommendation is cemented firmly without mention of the web…
I did, however, take great exception to the web strategy speaker, who I am tempted to pour out all manner of vitriolic utterances against but will attempt to refrain. He essentially said that footer keyword-stuffing was fine, as was spamming meta tags (though, thankfully, he acknowledged search engines pay “less attention” to them these days — I would put that closer to “insignificant attention and not worth the markup bloat they so often are”). Everything he had to say about content for the web could be surmised in the keyword, “keywords”, paying no attention to the different copy-writing demands of web media and the flow-on effects of organic keyword enhancement. Further, he managed to suggest online games for youth and prize competitions as legitimate marketing tactics, which, to me, seems brain-dead — perhaps I should just say “an unproductive use of time”. The entire presentation appeared to have been repurposed from a very basic web 1001 presentation to small businesses, without much (or any) regard for audience feedback.
For example, he asked questions at the beginning to get an indication of where the audience was at in terms of web presence (I would say well over 90% had a website, with probably half of that being maintained in some capacity — yes, our website is getting touched up soon… heh, in all my free time) and then proceeded to completely ignore that (although he did act very surprised at the number of hands that went up) and tell everyone about how to get online in the first place. Complete with the worst in Powerpoint presentation technique.
Definitely not a highlight of the day!
Anyway, that aside, I went home feeling pretty motivated to GetStuffDoneâ„¢ and started on the three gazillion changes pending for the Matthias site… then gave up when Budd called saying Borat was on. I’ve generally had a great evening, though — a few hours with a glass of red wine and a sense of accomplishment as content takes shape, then a conversation about using Google Maps to plot some 2,100 retail outlets effectively (no consensus as to how to achieve this yet, because that’s 2,100 points to be rendered client-side as an overlay, which would probably crash some browsers, if not make them run hideously slowly — but the brain is churning over), then watching that crazy movie. Yeah, you’ve got to laugh at it, but… gosh. Really hope they went back and explained it was satire to some of those people, if not apologising outright. Having said that, I think he’s reached the limits of the persona; it really got a bit repetitive and predictable (but still evoking laughter for shock value) in parts. I still laughed loudly.
Anyway. More to come soon.
23 Nov 2006
Get ready for 24-hour living – New Scientist
Thinking Brave New World and being reminded of Abbreviated Human, especially by this quote at the end:
Stanley believes that drugs like modafinil and CX717 will tempt people to overdose on wakefulness at the expense of sleep. “Being awake is seen to be attractive,” he says. “It’s not cool to be asleep.” Foster has similar worries. “It seems like that technology will help us cope with 24/7, but is coping really living?” he asks.
It’s almost cheesy (as was AH), but interesting to observe.