(Blog)


First off, I’d like to welcome WAL*MART—er, Walmart—to 2005! It seems the neighborhood-munching behemoth’s nearly two decade old logo wasn’t friendly enough to represent the company in this brave new world. Second, I wonder how long it took to develop this logo. Ten minutes? Fifteen? It probably took a year of focus groups consisting of old people who think lowercase proper nouns are cutting edge.

Business Week had the details on this change last month, and Brand New had a more snarky take—e.g. I enjoyed it thoroughly.

At least Walmart kept the capital; the same can’t be said for AT&T’s 2005 logo change. Hey, Walmart is working on being more environmentally conscious. All they have to do now is stop mistreating their employees, and destroying small-town America, and they just might back up their friendly new logo. In the exact same way that AT&T stopped being evil the moment they changed their logo. Oh, wait, never mind.

Apparently, the Associated Press, in a noble effort to appear as much as an obsolete legacy media dinosaur as possible, has rules barring bloggers from citing more than four words out of an AP article without paying them fees for their “journalism”. Details at this Boing Boing blog post, I mean, journalistic article.

This got me thinking: What would AP headlines look like were everything past the first four words chopped off? I checked out recent AP headlines and here are a few perfectly legal fair use citations from the AP, under their stringent rules:

“Bali bomber warns of”
“Hundreds of same-sex couples”
“Cuban TV shows new”
“Celtics rout Lakers 131-92”
“Clinton asks top donors”
“Mississippi River breaks through”
“Bush to urge Congress”
“Probe: Pentagon lawyers sought”

These spartan headlines are almost more eye-catching than the five-or-more word headlines available at the AP’s site. Perhaps I’m on to something. I could perhaps even put together a little web service that does this automatically, but I can’t be bothered, because in the end, who cares about the AP anyway?

Adapted from school a project write-up from last semester — When you add several ingredients together, the result will either become nothing more than a hodgepodge of dissimilar ingredients, or something new and equal to much more than the sum of its parts. The latter case is a transformation. It’s the difference between the tacked-on motion-sensor in the PlayStation 3 controller and the motion-sensitive functions of the Nintendo Wii. Or the difference between sites developed from the ground up to foster social networking and sites which added this functionality as another bullet point in their list of features. It might be difficult to tell when a media transformation has occurred, but it’s pretty easy to tell when one has not.

Several months ago, the project team I became a part of set out to create something out of little more than a marketing phrase, a few ideas stemming from it, and a combination of several media. the “product” became called NavShield. We set out to take the head up display (HUD) technology already available in some vehicles—the Corvette has had this feature for nearly a decade—combine it with several current and upcoming vehicle technologies, and refine it into something new. We started out by thinking about how “cool” it would be to project pretty Apple-esque icons onto the HUD on your windshield. I came up with ideas by driving and having “if only I had this feature” moments. The “thinking process” of the system would be something like this:

The group’s first tendency was to come up with as many ideas for icons as possible, and clutter the windshield with pretty icons. Just as your first tendency upon first using Mac OS X’s Dashboard or Yahoo! Widgets or Windows Vista’s Sidebar would be to search for and add any widget that perks your fancy until your desktop becomes a mess. While no harm can be done by having too many of these widgets on your computer, having too many on your windshield would be a disaster. That’s why I came up with this process above to connect and filter the data that comes in, and only display the end result.

After showing our project in its current form at the Showcase of Undergraduate Research Excellence event at UCF, the single most frequent piece of feedback we received was the following question: “What about driver distraction?” I recall that driver distraction was an issue when BMW’s iDrive debuted because many core functions’ hardware buttons were replaced with computer-like menus and sub-menus displayed on-screen. The trend is toward displaying more information on the navigation screen, and I felt that were it backed with psychological research, the NavShield project could solve this issue.

While conducting psychology experiments pertaining to driver distraction, and then usability tests on the interface are well outside scope of this one-semester project, it’s definitely the next step. In the meantime, I decided on some measures to limit driver distraction:

The dashboard screens available in many of today’s automobiles cram as much information as viable, and it seems apparent that this information is added mostly to one-up the competition in terms of feature sets. It’s not uncommon for systems which previously gathered and displayed only navigation information now connect with and display everything from your media player’s music list to your phone’s contact list. At present, the only product on the market putting this information together in a package that feels transformational and not simply tacked-on is Microsoft’s Sync. The Dash navigation system also works similarly to what I have outlined for NavShield; for example, it combines GPS information with traffic data pulled from over the internet. Therefore, I would use these two products are the benchmarks for NavShield were the project taken further.

While I’m not so deluded to say that my project team’s semester project has already reached the level of becoming a piece of transformational media, I do feel that it’s on the right track. The idea of grabbing a lot of information from many sources, intelligently putting them together, filtering them based on user preferences, and displaying only the most relevant information is key, and I feel it means the difference between transforming disparate media into a cohesive whole versus a bullet list of features. Furthermore, even if we were to ignore the application, the idea of collecting, connecting, filtering, and displaying information has applications in any field. It’s something key to the attention data and data portability movements and something that will change the way we behave as much as social networking has.

While I’m satisfied with the cheap wood laminate flooring that I inherited when I bought my home, I’ve been waiting for the time when I’ve got the extra change needed to get some real hardwood floors installed. And as a tree-hugger, the first thing that came to mind was, naturally, bamboo.

Bamboo, unlike trees, can be harvested like any other crop, and grows back remarkably fast, but how “green” is it, really? Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one thinking about this. In short, since bamboo is a renewable resource, it’s definitely better than your average hardwood flooring, but the industry behind it isn’t. Apparently, bamboo is so hot right now that whole forests are being razed to make room for more bamboo crops.

That’s right. In order to make a legion of first-world “eco-conscious” Prius-drivers more satisfied with themselves, workers in the third-world are destroying swaths of our natural forests. It’s the dark side of “green”. What’s worse, much of this bamboo comes from China, so for those of us who buy Fair Trade coffee and look for locally-sourced materials in our products, know that some Chinese kid is suffering through borderline enslavement so that you can feel good about your renewable bamboo flooring.

Oh, and all those chemicals used in other materials? They’re used with bamboo as well. It’s not like changing one material will change all materials. Fortunately, as with any product, there are good and bad companies out there. Apparently, Teragren is one of the better ones. And there are no less than thirteen dealers in my area, so I’ll have to get a quote. But to be honest, after just this cursory search, I’m already kind of turned off of the whole notion, and I’m almost afraid to look into any other green products, because I suspect the entire thing is a house of cards built on lies and there’s no such thing as “green”, besides dollars.

Mobile Me? Windows Me? Familiar? So, at this year’s WWDC, the Apple folks announced that .Mac is being replaced with a new service called Mobile Me. They’re still charging $99 a year for 20 GB storage, push e-mail, and and over-the-air syncing between iPhone and Mac or (gasp) Windows PCs…you know, mostly the stuff that Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones do for free.

Anyway, some people seem to love calling Windows Vista the next Windows Me (read: an in-between-versions OS that was mostly forgotten), and Apple likes accusing Windows Vista of copying OS X. So, why on Earth did Apple choose a logo that sickeningly resembles the Windows Me logo?

Oh, also, I found it pretty interesting to see an OS X computer and a Vista computer happily side by side in Apple’s photos for the Mobile Me service.

Mobile Me at WWDC 2008

I was just reading about the latest demo of Google’s Android mobile operating system. The Android Community site got an exclusive live preview of the latest version, and posted plenty of pictures and video, most importantly, this:

In a nut-shell, this system is already looking like it can do whatever the snazzy iPhone can dish out, with two key differences: it’s free, and it’s open. Where the Apple software, even with the new App Store and iPhone SDK, is crippled by being under Apple’s lock and key, Google Android will let developers do whatever they want, on their own terms.

If we stop circulating the penny (as discussed in this news story) we can expect merchants to round-up their prices. Yes, proponents claim otherwise, but history does not agree.

After the European Union, in its quest to crush all Europeans into identical gray boxes, replaced all the lovely individual currencies with one single Euro currency, it was commonplace for merchants in Euro area countries to round-up their prices across the board to retain “attractive” numbers such as .99 in their prices. Although it had only a minor effect across the board, this caused a decrease in consumer spending that put a slight damper on economic growth related to the introduction of the new currency.

Mark my words, despite claims, prices will increase slightly across the board, causing slight price inflation that will hit the “working class” average Joe. For example, if a product currently costs 2.91, expect it to go up to 2.95, not 2.90. So, don’t be like the EU, America. Let us keep our pennies.

Everyone knows Microsoft as the purveyor of operating systems and video game consoles, but it’s interesting to hear something about Microsoft working behind the curtain. The company is apparently close to deploying a communications system designed to better connect parties by allowing them to choose precisely when and how they are contacted. (more…)

Wayne Huizenga founded Blockbuster Video, whose first store opened its doors on October 19, 1985, and sold it to Viacom in 1994. That’s where the beginning of the end started for Blockbuster. Through its mismanagement and eventual decoupling, Viacom managed to run Hollywood’s once-darling Blockbuster into the ground in one decade. (more…)