Alston Grove

People are bidding on Ebay for a grilled cheese sandwich that has the Virgin Mary toasted onto one side. The seller claims to have noticed the resemblance after taking a bite, and the sandwich hasn’t molded 10 years since. They claim to have won money gambling during the ownership of this sandwhich, and now they wish to sell it.

It looks a little like Marilyn Monroe to me. At this point, the bidding looks to be around $70,000. Boy, I need to start paying more attention to my food before I eat it.

Have you seen one of the K-fee television ads yet? K-fee is an energy drink from Germany, and their ads are unique. Their slogan is “the natural boost,” which they incorporate into the ad itself. Watch one and you’ll see what I mean. Here’s one with an automobile, but there are six other ads you can find on their website.

Have you ever dropped an upside-down cat to watch it land on its feet? Apparently, they land on their feet in zero gravity also, as shown by the Air Force with a video on their website. The video quickly disappeared after BoingBoing got word of it, but it’s been mirrored here, and I have a local copy of it here. The cat really starts freaking out, doing barrel rolls.

Volkswagen sent me their latest marketing campaign. Flush from success of using a German word, Fahrvergnugen (meaning “driving pleasure”), in American ads, they decided to try another foreign word… Auffahrt.

When you just now read that word to yourself, did you think it sounded kind of funny? Using a word that means “driveway”, “ascend to”, or “approach road” seems like a great idea for an automobile brochure. But when the word is pronounced, it sounds roughly equivalent to the English phrase, “oh fart”. Yep, brilliant bit of marketing there. Maybe instead of putting “enter” in parenthesis at the bottom of the ad, they should replace it with “exit”.

I just found out about Photo Stamps, which I think is a fun idea. You get to upload your own images that will be printed as legal US postage and sent to you. It is a little pricey, about twice as much as regular stamps, with a minimum order of a sheet of 20 stamps costing about $20. Of course, you can’t use copyrighted or objectional images:

You further agree not to use the Customized Postage website or service:
A. For any unlawful purposes
B. To upload, order for print, or otherwise transmit or communicate any material that is obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, unlawful, deceptive, threatening, menacing, abusive, harmful, an invasion of privacy or publicity rights, supportive of unlawful action, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, illegal or otherwise objectionable

The guy at Smoking Gun decided to find the limits of what stamps.com considers objectionable. He got some interesting photo stamps past the screening process and he posted them online.

Steve Wozniak (who likes to be called “Woz”) of Apple fame is back in action. You may remember that after engineering the early Apple computers, Woz quit to teach public school. Now, 20 years later, he’s started his own company called Wheels of Zeus to make a low-cost GPS tracking system. The “wOz Platform” includes a reference design, wireless network, and online service that enable people to locate and take better care of what’s important to them. With venture funds from multiple firms and corporate commitments from Motorolla, there seems to be momentum, but there is no product available yet. An article at Wired talks about wOz.

I admit paper is the ultimate surface for reading text. But my collection of tech magazines is using up too much physical space. Wired, Linux Journal, Dr Dobbs, MIT Review, Business 2.0. Stacks and stacks of magazines clutter my shelves. I feel like a pack rat, so instead I just now put them in a recycle bin at the curb. But I feel bad, because what if I needed an old article for reference?

Weren’t these magazines in some electronic format in order to typeset and print them? Of course! Why didn’t my subscription earn me access to an electronic version? Imagine 5 years of a publication on CD or DVD. It could be indexed and searchable. And it would fit nicely on my basement file server. Linux Journal actually is available on CD-ROM, probably because they use SGML, XML, or TeX for their typesetting. Except, I have to pay another $30 for the CD after I’ve been a loyal subscriber? At least it’s available! Wired Magazine hits newstands and then main articles appear online shortly after. Why did I bother to subscribe? Well, it was only $5, and the paper magazine is pretty. But why can’t I get a year of the mag on a CD? As for the other mags, they suck.

Forgetting magazines for the moment, why aren’t more books in eBook or some online format? Amazon has a growing eBook section. But selection is paltry, especially tech books. O’Reilly does a much better job with their Safari Books Online. Unfortunately, the basic monthly subscription price of $14.99 needs to come down about $5.

Why are tech books so expensive anyway? If I want to buy a new fiction book like The Da Vinci Code, it costs me $15, but a book on Programming Java costs me $85. Come on! Do programmers make too much money, or are most tech books bought by corporations for training?

And then I compare the paperback version of tech books to the eBook version, and the price is the same or $5 cheaper. What?! We’re not procuring matierals and manufacturing bits here — it costs nothing to make a copy of bits and very little to pay for shared bandwidth. The publishing industry needs to get the cost low enough for the convenience of buying the PDF instead of finding it on BitTorrent for free. Before this medium becomes more popular, they better look at what happened with the music industry.

I think eBooks are about to become more popular as CRTs are displaced by LCDs. An even bigger innovation, called e-ink, is about to create buzz and provide an environment for eBooks to really take off. Sony’s e-Book reader LIBRIé is the first display using electronic paper ink. Now, if they don’t screw consumers too much with the DRM and the cost of eBook files, we can all be happy.

Steve Balmer’s infamous monkeyboy dance video was spoofed as an iPod advertisment. If you haven’t seen the original conference clip before, check it out here. The one where a sweaty Ballmer chants “developers, developers, developers” is quite funny too.

I saw this traffic ranking chart that shows how quickly Friendster caught on, and I was impressed with it.

Until I saw this one:

That meteoric spike of traffic is Google’s foray into the social network space with a little website called Orkut. Apparently, Google wanted to acquire Friendster at first, but was turned down, so they started their own. They launched the site by sending out 12,000 invitations, then waited for those people to invite others. Orkut is an interesting social experiment because you can only join by invitation.

I just spotted a Geek Squad car on the northern outer belt for a second time. Although their website doesn’t proclaim it on their national map, if you search on ZIP code, they claim to service Columbus. And apparently they’ve had business lately.

Even though tech support is a lousy job, these guys make it fun. First, you get a sweet company Geekmobile. They are completely web-based, so you drive right to your first call in the morning, and straight home after work. You also get a smart phone running a mobile app to access your schedule, process credit cards, and log your time and mileage.

It reminds me of the Black Team at IBM. It was a team of people who could test software just a little bit better than others. So you would expect a modest improvement in bug reports. But they went far beyond that. They became notorious for nasty testing that destroyed code and sent bug reports back to developers. They even started wearing all black to work and laughing horribly when they found bugs. The team had jelled, excelled at their work, and made something as mundane as testing fun all at once.