Ooh La La...NSFW

NSFW!!

If someone had told me in high school that you could make good money taking pictures of hot naked women then you wouldn't have been able to pry that camera out of my hands with a chainsaw.

I give you the making of the 2010 Pirelli calendar.

The Making of the 2010 Pirelli Calendar by Terry Richardson from Rafael Rubira on Vimeo.

It all makes sense now.

Read this article about the iPad at Gizmodo.

All of the iPad's features and functions make sense now. Steve Jobs is advancing in years and it's inevitable that his focus has to shift with his perspective and world view. Don't forget that he has also spent the last few years fighting for his life due to his health problems. With those things in mind the iPad's function becomes all to clear, it's for old people that find existing computers too complex and overwhelming.

It can only do one thing at a time. It has a simple icon based, non customizable interface. It has an easy to use(relatively) content purchase and distribution system in iTunes. It has a ridiculously low resolution so that things will render nice and big on it's screen. It has a 4:3 display ratio which is familiar and comforting to people that grew up watching traditional SD television. It has a MASSIVE bezel that is easy to hold. The photo app is obviously central to the experience of the device given the lavish interface it has yet the device has no camera. Who likes to look at picture but not take them? OLD PEOPLE!

I'm still young dammit! I want a ridiculously high res display for my young eyes to watch HD content on. I want fucking widescreen because 4:3 just looks wrong to me anymore. I consider iTunes to be the worst product Apple has ever created from an interface and usability standpoint. Give me a more innovative way of holding this device instead of a MASSIVE black bezel which only serves to highlight the ridiculous 4:3 size of the display. I don't give two shits about looking at pictures I just need to have a camera to record any number of fucked up things I see everyday so that I can put them on YouTube! My young brain needs to MULTITASK or my ADHD will take over and I will kill everyone around me out of sheer fucking boredom!!

Some people are claiming that this is the first time that Apple has failed to deliver a device that meets the hype surrounding it. I think this is the first example of something even more sad, Steve Jobs is either loosing his edge or he his more interested now in a market that I just don't care about.

Hitler versus the iPad

The obligatory Hitler meme iPad mashup is out. It may be the only time that you can ever say that you agree with Hitler. Man, that's fucked up.

The future of music?

Or alternatively titled...the power of connectedness.

You want to know what is really going to kill the music industry? It's not piracy or sinking CD sales. It's the fact that nearly ANYONE can now produce amazing music on their own and in far more creative ways than the stifling traditional studio system. I just hope that people haven't gotten too used to the mechanical and grossly overproduced music that the industry behemoths are cranking out these days.

Look at what the promise of home studio equipment and the Internet can produce. Sprinkle a little bit of YouTube for self promotion....

The little rover that could

The Spirit rover is now officially stuck on the surface of Mars and will now be treated as a stationary science station. It's sad that it's no longer to wonder the landscape as was intended but the rover has outlived it's intended life span of 90 days by nearly 25 times! It's twin rover Opportunity continues to explore the Martian surface on the opposite side of the planet. It's just hard to believe that they have been on the surface since 2004...it's a fantastic testament to good design and engineering.

Of course it reminded me of this Chris Rock bit....NSFW

Seperate this, bitches.

I must say that Obama was really on his game with this State of the Union Address. My personal favorite was when Obama took the Supreme Court Justices to task over their bullshit ruling on campaign finance "reform". Their expressions are pretty priceless. I love that they are sitting right there in front of him...fucking awesome. Of course they had to feel like real douchebags when the other 2/3rds of the government is taking a huge public shit on them.

I'm surprised that The Congress applauded so vigorously. Most of them usually have their hands out for that special interest money or are to busy jerking each other off. Probably just making nice for the cameras.

iPad

So it's called the iPad. It is the obvious name but it just has a very feminine hygiene kind of ring to it....in fact.

Happy Nerd Day

For those of you that are NOT nerds, today is a big day in the technology world. Apple has an "event" scheduled for today to announce new products. You may think this no big deal but let's think about the last few years of these Apple product announcements. The iPhone was announced in this way back in 2007 with the 3G iPhone following in 2008 (along with the revolution of Apps for the iPhone) and the 3GS iPhone in 2009. Not a big enough deal for you? In 2001 one of these events was held for the launch of an small product called the iPod followed by the iTunes Store in 2003. Just think about the leaps forward in consumer electronics those two products represent. The iPod revolutionized the portable music player market and the iTunes store is now the largest retailer of music in the world. The iPhone has created an entire new market of "Smart" phones in just under three years, something that Microsoft had tried for nearly ten years prior to that with their Windows Mobile initiative.

So what's Apple up to today? Well if you've been sleeping in a cave for the last six months then you'll have no clue but if you read nearly any online new sources you know that the entire tech world is on the edge of it's collective seat waiting for the Apple tablet device. A brief history; Apple has supposedly been working on a tablet device since 2003 but none of the devices they proposed were good enough to meet with Steve Jobs approval. Supposedly the iPhone itself was born out of the previous failures of these tablet designs. The recent innovation of "Unibody" construction of Macbook laptops was probably originally intended to make this tablet device a reality(IMHO). You don't need to have that ultra-strong rigid aluminium backbone in a laptop but in a thin and light "tossable" device like a tablet it will be critical.

At this point speculation is rampant but in my opinion this device(s) will end up being like an iPod Touch/iPhone on steroids. It will have at least a 7" screen and more likely a 10" screen that is geared towards watching video and reading newspapers, magazines and books. Apple has already dominated music with the iTunes store so this device is their gateway to dominating eBook, news and TV shows. It will be a gorgeous device that people will lust after...and it will have shitty battery life just like my iPhone.

If you want to follow the announcement in real time then I would recommend Engadget's live blog of the event.

Goodbye Old Friend

Firefox you are a great browser. You gave me shelter from the IE terrors for many years but it is time to bid you a fond farewell. Now, if you're first thought was dear god he's using IE8!! Someone stop him before it's too late! You need to smack yourself.

The new browser in my life is Google Chrome. I've been it right alongside Firefox for a while now because it was so much better at doing anything that required Flash support. Chrome also uses significantly less memory than Firefox and was a lot faster at almost anything. But I couldn't completely abandon Firefox because of all the great extensions that I just could live without. The latest 3.6 release of Firefox also upped performance quite a bit but it was still slower than Chrome.

Now, the latest release of Chrome supports extensions and nearly all of the ones I use daily are already available. I'm sorry Firefox but you are no longer my daily browser, we had some good times together. We can still be friends, I won't delete you.

Cats...more balls than brains.

Check out this cat...video could have ended very differently.

I give her an F for effort

Now this is an inspiring piece of parenting. How disgusting.

Best recap ever

If you're a Lost fan then you have to watch this fan created video. Someone went through all five seasons and pulled together all the scenes of the crash of Oceanic 815 then put them together 24-style. It's hard to follow some parts but still awesome.



It would be awesome if the creators of Lost could come up with some way to do this for lots of pivotal moments on a DVD extra or boxset.

Ouch

I found it odd that recent articles had referred to the world's tallest building as the Burj Khalifa instead of the name it had always been known has, the Burj Dubai. The Burj was meant to be the ultimate example of the wealth, power and prestige that the leaders of Dubai have been spending billions of dollars to build over the last few years. Unfortunately, all that money spent has driven them into stratospheric levels of debt which resulted in them having to seek a 20+ billion dollar bailout from their SLIGHTLY more restrained neighbor, Abu Dhabi.

The new name, was announced only minutes before the building's official opening ceremony by the leader of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. What is the significance of that name....it's happens to be the family name of the leaders of Abu Dhabi. Now that amazing building stands as testament to Dubai's reckless spending.

That has to hurt.

Oh and here are some new interior pictures of the Burj Khalifa, they are pretty stunning.

I spit in your eye

NBC and Conan O'Brien may have finally come to an agreement about his leaving The Tonight Show but that doesn't mean that Conan is going to cut them any slack. Of course NBC doesn't have to play ball either.

That will help...

The Supreme Court may have opened the flood gates for corporations and other business entities to more thoroughly buy politicians. This is the extreme downside to the idea that corporations are entitled to the same Constitutional rights and protections as individual citizens. I'm not saying that corporations don't deserve protected speech rights but at what point does a deep pocketed multinational corporation have the ability to effectively drown out the voice of individual constituents or small local organizations?

I really disappointed that The Supreme Court as ruled in this manner because it is obvious that Congress is incapable of legislating these matters themselves. So much for checks and balances. The amount of money being paid to some Members of Congress is really sickening and if you don't think that it will ultimately result in a failure of the Democratic Process then you are an idiot. My personal favorite idea for removing the veil of bought politicians is the idea that they should be required to wear Nascar style uniforms with the names of their largest campaign contributors emblazoned on them. Or they should be required to talk like the Nascar guys do, "This bill was a really hard win but the Merck lobby team threw a ton of money at me and we greased this bitch right through committee."

Help for Haiti FAIL!

Here are some runners up to Pat Robertson for the most likely to not help Haiti in their current humanitarian crisis.

Faith Comes By Hearing sends 600 "audio bibles" to Haiti earthquake victims. Way more useful than actual radios that could pickup vital transmissions from overflying USAF radio stations. FAIL!

John Travolta to airlift "e-meters" to Haiti to help victims with Scientology "Purification Rundowns". Are you fucking serious? No, I don't need food and water because Xenu has polluted my soul! MEGA FAIL!

The Pay Wall

Learn that term because it is going to be THE topic of 2010. The idea of "The Pay Wall" is a paradigm shift in thinking about online information. For the last decade we have all been trained that Internet content is "free" because most content providers currently use an advertising supported model to run their websites. Well, that model is either not financially viable (bullshit) or just not lucrative enough (ding, ding, ding). Why do I say the ad supported works....how the fuck did Google become the behemoth that they are? If you answered by selling internet based advertising then pat yourself on the back.

The only really successful large scale "Pay Wall" based content provider is The Wall Street Journal which most people agree is a special case due to their limited audience. Apparently The New York Times thinks that they can follow the WSJ lead and start charging for access to their content. That means that ANYONE that clicks on a link to a NYT article is going to have a subscription and will have to login prior to reading the article that link points to. So the real question is...how much is NYT online content worth to you? Currently the WSJ online only subscription is $1.99 per week which is $.30 less than the print edition(6 days a week delivered.) The NYT is currently running $3.70 per week (five days delivered) for their print edition, so would you pay $1-$3 per week to be able to click on links to NYT content?

I'm sorry but I'm not going to sit and read enough of the NYT on a computer screen or even an eReader (Kindle, Nook, etc) to make that worth while when I can get similar content from any one of another dozen papers at no cost. You should pray that this fails because if this actually works and they get enough morons willing to fork over this subscription fee then you can bet that every other news organization with an Internet presence will follow suit.

This whole idea of a Pay Wall goes pack to the old days of America Online. AOL started out as not just an Internet Service Provider but a content provider. The concept was you were connecting to AOL to get information and content that AOL wanted you to see, content that they paid for or paid to have created. The problem was that once you could get to the larger Internet via AOL that bloated content infrastructure became irrelevant because there was so much more and better content beyond AOL's walled garden.

Freely available, ad supported content is what has grown the Internet to the amazing thing it is today. That model has made "New Media" companies into the successful businesses that they are today. Now "Old Media" behemoths have realized that they cannot support their massive infrastructure that was built around a dying business model with Internet advertising revenue. The newspaper industry, and I mean the idea of actually collecting information and printing it on paper then distributing that paper, is a Victorian throwback. The business has lost market share and relevance to every other form of media that as come along in the last hundred years. The radio came along and stole some of the advertising money that went to newspapers AND it eroded the newspaper's dominance on disseminating news to the masses. Then along came television which again cannibalized the ad revenue and now you can get your news by watching pretty people talk. But those types of media are fundamentally different than newsprint being audio/visual in nature.

The Internet represents the nail in the newspaper coffin because you consume content in nearly the same way, by reading text on a surface of some form. But think of all the HUGE advantages of getting your text based news via the Internet instead of a sheet of paper. Interactive content, audio/video integration, searchability, manipulation of the size of print.....how about COLOR images(I know that's a cheap shot.) I personally think that the death of the newspaper and professional journalism is a bad thing. I believe in the idea of "The Fourth Estate" and believe that professional journalism is vital to a stable society. Journalists provide a vital check against secrecy in both the private and public sectors.

There's an expression that has gone around the Internet for years, "Innovate or die." The Newspaper business in general has resisted Innovation and now they are dying.

Sign me up!

Who wouldn't want a personal Tilt-Rotor aircraft? I'll take mine in black please!

Wow, that's screwed up.

This Daily Show piece lays out just how likely it is that a Republican will win the Senate seat that has been occupied by a Kennedy since...well for fucking ever.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mass Backwards
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

The funniest guy in the room

First of all I really like and respect Jay Leno. He's a serious car nut and I seriously respect that.

That said, Jay Leno's version of The Tonight Show is at least two generations behind the times. It's not that Leno is that bad, he's just not as good as Conan O'Brien. I just can't understand why NBC wants to give Leno another chance after his absolutely disastrous turn in prime time has probably cost NBC something on the order of $250 million in lost ad revenue.

Conan is the best man for the job and he's getting seriously fucked by NBC. Here's my favorite Conan bit regarding the current situation. Conan decides to sell The Tonight Show on Craigslist...priceless.

The Monkey House

I've blogged before about the job I once had as a telephone tech support operator for the shady software company. Here's another little story about that trilling experience.

The company was based out of an old grocery story and was basically a two story building that looked like a barn. All of the telephone support people were located in a cube farm on the second floor and the first floor housed various offices, break rooms, shipping and the assembly room. The assembly room was where they built all of the computer systems and installed all of the software prior to shipping. There was a big picture window that allowed the douchebag salesmen to show touring clients what they were getting for the outrageous amount of money the company was charging. The window was a source of great amusement to those of us in the call center that actually knew something about the construction of computers.

You see, the people they paid to assemble the computers were mostly untrained, minimum wage mouth breathers that knew absolutely nothing about what they were actually doing. The room was also extremely loud because of all of the hard workbench surfaces, the blaring classic rock/country music and the constant arguing of the hillbillies as they toiled. One day while watching from the window with some of my co-workers I suddenly realized that they were like barely trained monkeys, howling and throwing shit at each other. So we started calling the assembly room The Monkey House...when the guy who ran the build crew found out he was pissed...it was one of my few fond memories af that hell hole.

I realize now that it was cruel and unfair to refer to those under paid people as monekys.....yeah, unfair to fucking monkeys!! Watch this little guy, he's way faster than the people I worked with.

Now that is classy.

Pat Robertson really cares about the people of Haiti....even if they did make a pact with the devil.


What's worse, the fact that he said it or the fact that the loonies watching his show actually BELIEVE it?

That Shredds!!!

Why not another Animal/Death Metal juxtaposition? Camels make the best throat singers ever!

Rock out with your cock out.

Check out this awesome YouTube Doubler jam session. Death Metal....Poultry Style.

Do as I say, not as I do

Google has always said that their underlying philosophy is "Don't Be Evil". Plenty of people accuse Google of having questionable ethics and even more suspect ambitions but I've always believed that they stick to that ethos pretty closely. If Google looses that credibility then what would they have left?

The one thing that Google has done that I always found deplorable was their stance on censorship in China. Up to this point Google has bent to the will of the PRC government by providing completely filtered search results within China. It looks like Google may be finally fed up with the tarnish to their name that this has brought.

You can't possibly imagine how much money this could cost Google, after all China is the largest and fastest growing market for Internet related business. If the Chinese Government doesn't blink (and they probably won't) then Google stands to loose BILLIONS.

Best thing ever

In a move that is sure to delight stand up comedians and self-loathing christian housewives across the nation, Sarah Palin has signed a deal with Fox News. At first I was sure that this was yet another sign of the coming end of days but as I considered the hilarity that would ensue from hour upon hour of her appearing on television I became very happy. I mean NO ONE takes Glenn Beck's fanbase seriously anymore because they are a bunch of monosyllabic idiots...Palin's will be even better. Man I hope it's a call in show, let the mockery begin.

Classic

I happened upon a Patten Oswalt clip today that led me down a rabbit hole. It took a while but I found an audio only recording of his first HBO stand up special from 1997. It is without doubt one of my favorite stand up performances of all time.

That didn't take long

Looks like some guys have officially set the world base jumping record by jumping off of the recently completed Burj Dubai. Watch the video, it's pretty crazy.

Ford FTW.

Ford is taking in-car electronics as seriously as all of their other design considerations. Long gone are the days that every model Ford sold had the same nasty black plastic radio stuck in the dash like some kind of afterthought. This week at CES Ford announced their new MyFord/MyLincoln system for in-car control and entertainment. They are building on their already amazing SYNC system that was created in conjunction with Microsoft.

Basically MyFord adds two more 4" LCD screens flanking a center mounted speedometer directly in front of the driver. Watch this video...it's pretty cool stuff.



It looks like those years Ford spent draining technology and engineers from the European car companies they bought (and have since sold) is really paying off now.

It's over.

Thanks Vitamin Water...you have officially jumped the shark with this shit. They have allowed Facebook to jump the digital wall into the real world, it's like something out of The Matrix. Everyone that drinks this will become digitally enslaved.


Have fun building the pyramid...slaves.

There is no plan B

Here's a really shitty quality version of the trailer for the new A-Team movie. Liam Neeson as Hannibal looks to be awesome.

Mac vs. PC

NSFW....LOL.

Little asian PC girl vs. MAC parody - watch more funny videos

Those little girls are almost cute enough to trick me into wanting to have kids of my own. Then I remembered this video.



No fucking way....fatherhood is my gateway to murder-suicide.

Up in smoke

The Burj Dubai is now officially finished and opened. Someone forgot to tell those guys that they are tens of billions in debt because the opening ceremony was a little over the top.

If's finished, LET"S BLOW IT UP!!