Pete told me about this oralpixation project. I'm a big fan of random pictures from a shoephone. I think I'll have to participate. Of course, it could just be an April Fool's joke.
But that shouldn't stop folks from doing it.
Back in the day, my friend Strick wanted a way for all of his friends to associate themselves together, even if they perhaps did not know one another. Effectively, the idea was to have a friends-of-Strick tag that could be distributedly applied by each of his friends to their own sites and servers.
Strick accomplished this by inventing a new word, such as frobnovich-1 or qwertyak, and having folks plonk them on their pages (such as I just did). Then it's just a matter of plugging these tags into AltaVista (and later Google) to see who is part of Strick's social cloud.
This was back in 1997, if I recall.
Of course, folks play games with Google, trying to find queries that return exactly 1 result, or folks will Google-bomb a term to push an alternative (typically making a social or political statement) result to the top of the list. But for 1997, before the tag-everything days of Web 2.0, I think Strick had himself a pretty good idea.
Strick wrote a FAQ about altavistaincantation.
I've become the admin for a growing number of machines for my day job, hidden away in our underground bunker, deep within one of the appalachian mountains. It's been a while since I've played with hardware, since I've become a fan of the Apple Macs. Macs, having virtually no user-serviceable parts, let you forget about hardware. Right now, though, I definitely cannot forget about the hardware.
Congrats to Sam Pullara and his team at Gauntlet Systems on their recent acquisition by Borland. Nothing sucks worse than a broken build, and Gauntlet seems to have taken continuous integration into a nicely packaged commercial software-as-a-service offering. Let's hope Borland doesn't screw it up. Anyone remember Together/J?
Watching TV lately, I've seen this commercial for M It's a fun trippy commercial with a mellow Donovan-esque soundtrack. Personified M are floating, probably tripping balls, in a kaleidescope swirl. Then a hand reaches down, grabs one, and devours poor little M in one bite. The M has a face, and is clearly upset by this.
Even more disturbing, the version of this commercial airing in my area has replaced the tagline of "Chocolate is better in color" with "Choose Fun!" I think it's pretty obvious that the M plucked from the hippie swirl definitely did not get to choose fun. At the end, the camera pulls back and shows how we humans are like M, swirling around. Waiting to be grabbed by a creature larger than ourselves and popped down their gullet.
Fun indeed!