If you know me, you know that I can’t resist any opportunity to lambast Steve Scher, Senior Host of KUOW’s Weekday program here on Seattle’s NPR station.  Now, Steve Scher in the past has had some real awesome shows…again if you’ll know me you’ll know these are three of my favorites:

• “Best pho restaurants in Seattle” - this insightful hour told us that all the best pho restaurants in Seattle were located…in San Diego.  Thanks Steve!
• “Birdwatching at Marymoor Park” - Steve invited local Audubon Society members on the program to talk about great bird watching in Marymoor Park.  Conclusion: at the time of the broadcast sometime in winter, there really weren’t any great birds to be seen in Marymoor…but come Springtime….
• “Weekday Halloween Special!”  - call us and tell us about your scary costume, or what you would think would be a great scary costume.  Describe it to us.  In detail.  The show featured calls from locals such as King County Executive Ron Sims, who pretended to be the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.  Nice!  

Yes folks, that’s right.  Call in to the radio show and help them create a wiki on the air.  Excuse me for getting technical, but Wikipedia defines a wiki as:

 

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.

I am a Duran Duran poster archivist in Bellevue, Washington. As curator/owner of the world’s largest collection of Duran Duran-related posters, I have a unique perspective on one of the biggest artists ever to emerge from the 80’s.    

-Durandy

One of the most interesting aspects of my archive is the comparative study of how Duran Duran has been promoted and embraced across cultures and over decades. 

The band’s influence has been felt in nearly every creative realm –from film, art and video to fashion and music. My collection offers an unprecedented look at Duran’s legacy, showing how the band has evolved, adapted to a changing musical landscape and continues to break new ground in the present day. It is a niche that I never expected to fall into, but one that has yielded an amazing journey for me over the years. 

Milestones have included a loan to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland Ohio, two public exhibitions, and recognition from the band and fan community. Posters offer a wealth of insight and information about the bands being promoted. When viewed on an international, comprehensive scale, a music artist can be appreciated in a most revealing and rewarding context. 

My website: www.durandy.com

If you haven’t watched anything from Fred, you can try watching Fred talk about his attempt to run for class president:

Now, I don’t usually swear online (hahah), but I really have to classify this in the What The Fuck category.  I just…don’t….get it.  Are 2.5 MILLION other people also viewing this video just for the What The Fuck factor?  Judging by the comments, there are a ton of people who are either lying through their teeth, or genuinely think this kid is funny.

And i very much agree with the author of the Vidoegum post, Gabe, who says:

I think there are definitely a few things that I would totally buy after watching a Fred video, like noise-canceling headphones, or an industrial grade eye-shower, or a gun with one bullet in it.

I’m trying to think back to childhood…I know many of the things I liked growing up were probably stupid and lame and awful and unbearable if I were to watch them now (Pete will tell you that’s SeaQuest but I still stand by it)…but Fred?  Really?  Huh?  Barney is forgivable because 3-year olds just don’t actually know what’s going on.  But 14 year olds should have started to develop some kind of taste for the non-shittastic.

I wonder if Fred will really drive sales of the ZipIt.  It has some “interesting” features.  It’s an “All-in-one WiFi Messenger” which only costs $49.99, plus a $9.99/month service contract.  You can chat with up to 99 friends at the same time. 99?  Damn.  It does “let u chat, control ur IM accounts, and set IM options.”  What is good about it is that they let you send and receive text messages to other cell phones, and your parents will “luv” that there’s never any (why not “ne”??) overage charges or surprise fees.   Built-in mini-SD card for showing off “ur favorite pics” (again, why not “ur fav pics”??).  Interestingly you can listen to music and also stream live internet radio from “ur favorite stations.”  ”How much do you <3 that?”  I <3 that a lot.

So…this is almsot like a glorified pager.  For $50 that’s really not that bad, and I suppose I’d much rather see parents buy this for their kids than an overpriced smartphone.  I don’t really see this taking much market share away from mobile phones though.  Kids are going to want to have gigabytes worth of songs.  They’re going to want to surf the web.  They’re going to want to make phone calls.  They’re going to want to take pictures and send them via MMS.  So while parents will be stuck with a heftier monthly bill, I don’t really see this product taking off, unless it’s with kids who aren’t quite at the point in their social lives where they’re wanting to talk on the phone all the time.  And honestly I don’t think a 12 year old needs a) one of these, b) a mobile phone, or c) anything more than an iPod Shuffle.  

Plus this device looks huge…definitely not hip and trendy at all.  That being said, I almost want to buy stock in the company, because if even a fraction of Fred’s fans go out and buy this silly device, there’s big money to be made.  Sadly, Fred is probably getting a decent chunk of money for this.  Which is annoying.  Just like the Kev Blaze video featuring Fred.  Who the hell is Kev Blaze?  And more importantly, how did “Fred” manage to get the username “Fred”.  I suppose that means he should get some kind of “props”.  But not from me.

Update:  CNN gives a glimpse of who is behind Fred.  Ending with “it’s really incredible…”  I consider this to be…incredible yes…but I’m glad I haven’t rocketed to stardom this way.

The surgery itself took place in Barcelona but preparation took place in Bristol, England, Padua, and Milan. This international cooperation has brought forth the dawn of a new era of humankind. It changes the fundamentals of what humans can become. The near future isn’t a battle between humans and mechanized robots its going to be over the God factor and the limits of humankind. This procedure opens the door for huge potential even in the US (even if president-elect Obama reverses the ban on embryonic stem cell research), as this procedure was performed with all adult stem cells. The potential to take used parts from deceased donors and grow them as our own for any purpose walks a thin line. For now the procedure is new and the first of its kind, but the precedent it sets is where the ‘new age of surgical care’ comes into play. Your kidney’s are failing? No problem, we’ll have you grow a new pair and live 10 years longer than you would have. I’m not saying that humankind’s life-span just increased 20 years because of this, but give it another 10 years and who knows where this will lead.

The difficulty with medical advancement is where to draw the line. Even if we can keep creating new parts for you when your old ones stop working, is that a future we want to see? Is it a future we’d even see during our lifetimes? Hard to say, but one thing is certain, the dawn of a new era for mankind is underway.

I thought I’d tell her about Enigmo, which is, according to creator Pangeasoft:

Enigmo is the most unique game that you’ll find for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It is a 3D puzzle game where you manipulate slides, bumpers, and other pieces to control streams of flowing liquid. Liquids (water, oil, and lava) fall from “droppers” and will bounce around the walls of a puzzle. You move and rotate the various puzzle pieces in order to divert the flow of the falling droplets so that they can reach their target. The faster you complete each level, the more bonus you will receive.

It looks somthing like this:

Now, I think this game is pretty fun. But her reply was this:

I don’t know.  It looks kind of like a boy’s game.  Like playing with your peeper.

No joke.  It was hilarious.  Because of this, I’m giving Enigmo my “Game of the Week” rating.  Because it’s almost as much fun as playing with your peeper.

So that’s pretty sweet.  But what’s great, is watching some kid get pwned by one of these.  Nothing at all to do with webcams mounted to the airplane, but hilarious nonetheless. Sadly you can’t watch this video unless you go to YouTube…but please do…it’s totally worth it:

Watch it here (make sure you have sound on):  R/C Freedom Firebird Crash

The iPhone crashes. A lot.

Calls drop all the time. Safari, the Apple web browser, crashes continually. Woe on you if you navigate a partially-loaded page (fed up with the abysmally slow AT&T network). The mail app creaks when opening, often leaving you with a blank white unresponsive screen. The SMS program occasionally refuses to open.

Owning an iPhone–even the second-generation iPhone–is much like fighting through Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 3.0 on Windows ‘95. When it works, you get a clear sense that this is the new way of doing things. Through the grime of incompetent implementation can be seen glances of what could, and likely will, be.

Apple maintains control over most every aspect of their hardware and they currently have the luxury of telling the unruly kids who don’t want to play by their rules to take a hike. Now, I’m not the Apple expert between the two Jason’s, but I know when a product isn’t living up to the hype, expectations, and reputation the company set for it. Maybe it was the public that brought on this unobtainable level of perfection, but for whatever reason it exists it might be time for Apple to try to fix the problem.

In the time being we’ve put up a new widget that we’ll update for every hard reset we have to do as well as what I call ‘the black screen of death’. Windows users might be familiar with ‘the blue screen of death’. Well, to all those Windows diehards who like to mock Mac users, here you go. When an app fails on the iPhone the first thing that happens is your screen goes black, then anywhere from 1 second to a minute or two your main icons re-appear like an annoying magic trick you can’t avoid.

I, like Jason T, and Jonathan Golob see the great potential in this phone. When the phone works as a phone, and when applications don’t crash it’s pretty much the greatest device out there. However, given the fact that it does crash so much and it drops calls like its going out of style the idea of waiting until the iPhone ‘98 platform comes out might not be the worst idea ever. I’m not saying don’t get the iPhone if you want it, but know that you are getting the latest and greatest and there are going to be pitfalls and practical issues that come with it. Now, if Apple, or from what I hear AT&T, could get its act together and focus on fixing these issues we can feel like we are using OS X and not Windows ‘95.

That being said, MS is going to make the new social networking service more like Facebook and have lots of status updates…which can integrated with a lot of other accounts you might have–allowing your status to be updated automagically when you write a blog post or a review or something.

I highly doubt that this service is going to take off like MS hopes.  Granted it is possible for new social network sites to take off and make it big, but at this point Facebook is so ubiquitous that I feel the switching costs for most users are too high to try and bother switching over to the Live network.  That being said, MS seems to be taking the approach of making the network more about providing status updates about what you’re doing on other sites.  This could either be really great, or fail miserably.  I suppose if they linked it to Facebook status updates it could be okay.  But this service doesn’t seem to really bring anything new or innovative to the table.  But then again…when was the last time MS did something new and innovative?

And you gotta love this: 

“For its fiscal first quarter, which ended in September, Microsoft lost $480 million from its online unit. “We have to get great at the advertising business,”  Hall said.

Hrm…they have to get great at the advertising business…isn’t that why they acquired aQuantive?  One would think that $6 billion would go a long way towards being great at something….