Everything is Amazing Right Now, and Nobody's Happy

The "funny because it's true" factor on this clip of Louis C.K. on Conan was so high for me that by the end of it, my eyes were red, my cheeks were stained with tears, and my jaw and neck were sore — and that's so true it's not even funny.

Update 2009/03/04: Replaced the original YouTube embed with a higher-quality (and more legal) Hulu embed.

Update 2009/03/18: Time interviews Louis about the clip.

Awesome Game Wallpapers

Here are some awesome looking game wallpapers from deviantArt.

Via Kotaku.

Super Bowl Commercials 2009

One week later, here's my take on 2009's notable Super Bowl commercials.

The Good

• Audi — The Chase: Jason Statham helps Audi take a stab at its competitors, saying that while previous decades might have been owned by Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Lexus, it's now time for the four rings to shine. It doesn't hurt that the car itself is one slick beast.
• CareerBuilder.com — Tips: I agree with everyone who says that this ad got tiring after the first 30-45 seconds, but in terms of getting people talking, it was second to none. Watch twitter explode when it airs, in The New York Times' interactive tracker (click "Talking about ads").
• Cars.com — David Abernathy: This type of ad has been a trend recently (e.g., Dos Equis' "Most Interesting Man in the World" ads), but I can't argue with the result here, even if it was a bit disappointing, for some reason, to find out that it was for cars.com.
• Hulu — Alec in Huluwood: I love 30 Rock and I love Hulu, and I love 30 Rock on Hulu, and I don't love this ad, but I like it a lot.
• Monster — Double Take: Simple, well-crafted, and clever. It easily got a laugh out of me.

Honorable Mention

• Bud Light — Sweden: Conan O'Brien + Japandering in Sweden (Swedepandering?) is a great starting point for comedy, but Bud Light's typical frenetic editing left the overall commercial a bit lacking.
• Coca Cola — Avatar: You can always count on Coke to bring the harmless but fun branding ads. "Avatar" is a take on our increasingly virtual connectedness, and the power of physical contact. Also, pretty girls are gamers too!
• H&R Block — Death & Taxes: Something about the tax services provider's ad stood out to me over many other equally eligible candidates. It must be the Abe Vigoda.
• Miller High Life — 1 Second Ad: If this really aired during the broadcast, then I missed it, but it's a concept that always gets a response when I mention it to people. As expected, it's just one small (but expensive) part of a bigger overall campaign.
• Pepsi — Refresh Everything and Pepsuber: The Pepsuber ad (with Richard Dean Anderson) probably wasn't very funny unless you've been following the recurring MacGruber sketches on SNL (and even then, maybe not, for many people). Combined with the aspiring-to-be-anthemic "Refresh Everything" ad, though, it was a decent one-two punch for Pepsi. Still doesn't make up for the logo downgrade ...

The Bad

• Cash 4 Gold — Ed McMahon & MC Hammer: Setting aside the fact that the shady company is basically a scam, it was pretty sad to see the hard-for-cash Ed McMahon (fresh off a stint rapping for FreeCreditReport.com) and MC Hammer trying to make the funny, though there are chuckles to be found.
• Castrol — Grease Monkeys: There are worse ads that I could have put on my list (I'm glancing at you, Doritos). Indeed, the production values here aren't even that bad. It just seems like they took the path of least resistance. I kept waiting for the punchline, and all I got was a man-on-chimp smooch. That's not going to cut it, Castrol.
• GoDaddy.com — [all of them]: Scraping the bottom of the barrel again. I wonder what Danica Patrick gets paid for these ads.
• Jack in the Box — Hang in there Jack: On the whole, I'm a big fan of the long-running campaign featuring Jack Box. This one had some nice touches — did you notice the angel on the store window in the final shot? — but it and the associated viral campaign seem wholly unnecessary to me. Or, maybe I just can't stand the thought of Jack not making it!
• Sobe — Lizard Lake: It's the second year in a row that SoBe has wasted its money on these pointless dancing lizard ads. Adding 3-D, football players, and ballet only made it worse. Whenever I see these ads, I can just picture the marketing meeting from which this mish-mash of bad ideas emerged. The focus groups must dig it or something. On the other hand, I credit them for being way above GoDaddy.com's level.

Now you've heard from me. What's on your list?

Sunday Night Videos

I would never, ever attempt to be like these guys ...



... for fear of ending up like this guy:



Steve Nash is more consistent at free throw shooting than I am at ... breathing ...



... though I am better than this girl at explaining the plot of Star Wars:

Windows 7 Beta: First Impressions

I'd have to say I'm pretty impressed with some of the changes from Windows Vista to Windows 7.

Some new things I noticed:

• The new dock taskbar actually works! There are still some minor bugs, but then, this is a beta. The dock taskbar functions somewhat similarly to the Mac OSX dock, except with way too much eyecandy. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing.


• UAC by default isn't as annoying as it was before. Its more inline with what Ubuntu does with the sudo dialog for administrative tasks, but the UAC popup frequency is a little too frequent for my tastes.


• Those taskbar status icons are consolidated to a small popup window. No more long list of status icons invading your dock any more.


• Sidebar dock from Vista is gone. You can now just add Gadgets directly to the desktop.

Application compatibility is currently an unknown, but I will be installing some games to see how performance is with the current beta. All things said, things appear to be more responsive and whatnot, so we'll see how it holds up in the next couple weeks.

Obviously, things might change when they release the final version of Windows 7, but these current changes from what I've seen are good.

No-keyboard Apple Notebook

I'd so buy one.

From the Onion via DF.

Great fantasy fantastical fight

Speedy Delivery

I'm pretty sure that some of the UPS drivers who've delivered packages to my house work something like this:



I once had an envelope with hundreds of dollars worth of software "delivered" into the Lilies of the Nile on the opposite side of my house from the door and mailbox. Didn't find it until a couple of weeks later, when the sprinklers were off due to a leak and we were watering the plants by hose.

(At least it was delivered to the right house that time, unlike some of the notebook computers I've ordered!)

My FedEx experiences are about on par with my UPS experiences. I sleep much better at night when packages are sent to my house via U.S. Postal Service. Thankfully, all the services deliver reliably to my work, where they are cool about us receiving personal packages.

Aronofsky and Boyle Interviews

Fox Searchlight, which has two films on all the shortlists this award season — Slumdog Millionaire, which I've seen twice now and highly recommend, and The Wrestler, which I'm looking forward to seeing after New Year's — had the brilliant idea to have the films' directors (Danny Boyle and Darren Aronofsky, respectively) interview each other in a series of web videos.

To save you all the trouble of searching around for the film blogs with "exclusive" embeds of each video, here are the links to all the available parts, which can be viewed directly on Fox Searchlight's site:

• Full Interview
• Part 1: Directing The Wrestler (topmost video)
• Part 2: TBA
• Part 3: Camera Technology
• Part 4: Directing Style
• Part 5: Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei
• Part 6: The "Millionaire" Game Show Rights
• Part 7: Film Development

Update 2009/01/11: Still waiting for Fox Searchlight to post the two remaining clips. In the meantime, here are some interesting videos on YouTube (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) taken by spectators at a CZW event in Philadelphia where the fight between "The Ram" and Necro Butcher was filmed. (The rematch with The Ayatollah was filmed across two Ring of Honor events.)

The clips really show why Aronofsky chose a cinematographer with a documentary background, as well as the pressures of shooting in such a chaotic environment, without having the safety net of doing many takes.

Update 2009/03/01: I can't find Part 2 on Fox Searchlight's website, but they now have a version where everything is in a single video, so I've added the link to that along with the link to Part 1.

VLC Easter Egg

The Santa hat that my VLC player has been sporting this holiday season was a fun surprise.



I know, I know; I should be using a skin, but VLC is good looking on the inside, and that's really what counts.

Put On Your Tinfoil Hats

Every time it seems like the fantastical visions of the future from Sci-Fi are slipping further away in real life, there's a new development that reels them back in.

As reported across the web, Japanese researchers used fMRI technology to study test subjects' cerebral blood flow while viewing 400 random 10x10-square black-and-white images, to the point where they could reconstruct and display a totally new set of viewed images — the letters of the word "neuron" — using only fMRI data. Scientists are saying that techniques like this may be the first step towards the ability to basically read minds.

So, readers, does news like this amaze you or terrify you?

DSL or Cable Modem Not Working?

If you're getting errors loading web pages, and have already tried restarting your computer, modem, and wireless router, it might be an issue with your internet provider's DNS servers.

For our less tech savvy readers, DNS servers basically translate a domain name like "example.com" to an IP address like "208.77.188.166", which your computer can then use to contact the example.com web server.

You can switch your PC or router to use OpenDNS, for example. (There are instructions on the site for configuring different operating systems or many types of routers.)

I've recently been experiencing what I thought were outages, but it turned out to be flaky DNS servers. I've seen people on Time Warner / Road Runner, Comcast, and Cox complaining about this issue, but had never experienced it personally until the past few weeks. OpenDNS solved the problem, and has been working flawlessly so far.

Another good resource to consult, if you have another means of getting on the web, is the Broadband Reports forums section. There are sections for individual providers and regions, which makes it easy to see if others in your area are having issues, and what, if anything, they did to solve them.

Although I Don't Believe In Coincidences...

A really good music theory explanation of the Joe Satriani v. Coldplay thing. Joe Satriani is and has always been the real deal.



He has a detailed blog post which is a really good read.

Inspirational Montage

(Credit: Matthew Belinkie; via Cinematical)

Jack's Bowl Cut

I saw a billboard for Jack in the Box's Teriyaki Bowls the other day and couldn't help but laugh at the photo and tag line. (The line "curds and whey" [and its delivery] in the commercial cracks me up, too.)

Lucky Penguin

I feel like the penguin in that video is smarter than the humans.

The killer whales may not be so merciful next time, my friends!


Aside: I have seen the future, and it is YouTube in 720p HD! (1, 2, 3).

(I have also seen the past and the present, a.k.a. Vimeo HD.)

Import a Library in iTunes 8

In iTunes 8, there's no longer a File > Import... item in the menu.

If you want to import a library XML file — after re-installing your system, or when moving the library from another computer, for example — you can use the File > Library > Import Playlist... menu item.

It's confusing, since there is a File > Library > Export Library... command, and it's not obvious that you export a "Library" but import it back as a "Playlist".

Billions Gone Wild!

Yes, just another link but wow! I knew about a couple of "big" buildings and a "big" amusement water park over there but never about all of this! Check out Dubai Building Projects

Eat the Head!

Have your birthdays been, well, a bit dull lately? Try being this guy.

Head tracking without a Wii.

Head tracking with a chicken. (+ superz-kyut follow up)

Yao's favorite food.

(first three videos via Waxy)

Midnight Movie News

That's "movie news at midnight", not "news about midnight movies"!

The Good: Jeffrey Tambor hints that the Arrested Development movie might finally be happening!

The Bad: Sir Ridley Scott — director of Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator — will indeed direct the feature-film adaptation of Monopoly. Yes, that Monopoly.

The Ugly: Much to alliesglove's chagrin, Jaden Smith (son of Will) is officially the new (wannabe) Ralph Macchio, in a remake of The Karate Kid ... set in China!?