Month: April 2005

Spelling With Pictures

Sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words … sometimes they’re worth just one letter. Sad but true.

But it also gives some really cool spelling opportunities. Check out this little site that allows you to spell anything out using photographs. You can choose amongst a few images for each letter, but in general you have little choice as to what images spell out the words.

But in a meta-image sense, would this be considered art? Are you the artist? Is a collage not the same thing, but this time the pictures making up the piece of art are chosen at random. Imagine if someone cut up all sorts of catalogues for you, mixed all the images up, and asked you to pick randomly from piles to spell a word. I’m willing to bet someone would consider one of the two of you an artist.

Isn’t digital life fun?!

Fiona, Fiona, Wherefore Art Thou?

Does anyone remember Fiona Apple? She had a small hit with her song ‘Criminal’ some time ago. Well, I’ve been a fan of hers for some years now and I’ve been waiting patiently for a new album or song from her to appear on the scene.

It turns out I’ve been waiting along with a whole bunch of other people. Back in 2003 she completed an entire album’s worth of music and submitted it to her record company (Sony) for release and distribution. Sony apparently didn’t like what they heard, as there were no radio-friendly singles on it, so they asked her for another song. She served up another one, but Sony was still unhappy with the album. So they shelved it. They literally took the entire album and put it in some distribution warehouse.

Fiona’s unable to do anything because of the contract she has signed with the recording company, and the album has sat unheard for years. Several of her fans created an entire movement to try to get that album (called “Extraordinary Machine”) released somehow, pestering Sony by sending apple-related messages and objects.

Now here’s where things get a little interesting.
Continue reading Fiona, Fiona, Wherefore Art Thou?

Badgers, Badgers, Badgers, Badgers

Last summer my cousin Adrian introduced me to something a little special. I wanted to share it now, as I’ve only recently encountered it again.

I’m happy to say that it has survived the test of time. Back in those hot sunny days of summer it seemed downright hilarious, but we all know that bright days and cool nights can do some funny things to a person’s mind. So now that I have come across it again, and I have confirmed that it still is, in fact, damned hilarious, I wanted to share it.

Some of you may take a look and not laugh, heck you may not even smile. But I assure you, this is damned hilarious.

Enjoy.

Please note, you’ll need to be able to play Flash animations for this one, but the site can walk you through that if you don’t have it installed yet.

Wal-Mart – I Cast Thee Out!

I’ve brought up the topic of my dislike for Wal-Mart several times in discussions with friends. I mention this because I’ve found an online copy of a 60 minute program put together by a television show called Frontline. The 5 parts can be found for free here.

I thought the show picked up on a few interesting aspects of how Wal-Mart controls so much of the industry it participates in. However it never really talks about some of the disgusting practices Wal-Mart has employed in the past in order to maintain those low prices (and high profit margins).

Specifically I am thinking about the practice of taking out life insurance on employees, and making the corporation the benefactor. Often companies will do this for their CEO, as the case can be proven that if they were to die, the company would suffer financial harm. As such they take insurance out on their top dogs. The practice is called Corporate Owned Life Insurance (COLIs). However this practice was extended by companies such as Wal-Mart to the so-called peasants of the company – the entry-level employees, and the company would not inform the employees about these policies. These policies have been coined ‘dead-peasant’ policies.

According to this article Wal-Mart took out insurance on over 350,000 employees in around 1994 after choosing two insurance companies.
Continue reading Wal-Mart – I Cast Thee Out!

Can I Patent the Patent Process?

My recent acquisition of an iPod has lead me to a little thinking in terms of interfaces. I understood that nobody else could use the circular interface found on the iPod because Apple had a patent on it. I thought this was a little silly, and wanted to see the contents of the patent with my own two eyes. The US Patent Office offers a public search of all granted and pending patents through it website (found here).

I found an interesting article that took a look at some of Apple’s current patents, and my mouth fell a little agape. Apple’s patenting practises right now make me think that the patent process is simply broken. They have attempted to patent some amazingly simply things in an effort to (apparently) protect their intellectual property and innovation. As the article points out, they were smart enough to patent the trash icon you find on their desktop. Notices that Windows does not have a trash icon, but rather a recycling bin?

But things get a little sillier.
Continue reading Can I Patent the Patent Process?