The New Yorker’s Hallowe’en Cover

I make sure to keep an eye on how technology pops up in mainstream non-geek culture because it’s a good way to gauge the techno-cultural zeitgeist and see how technologies are being received by the public at large. As techies, we’re all too happy to be early adopters and are willing to put up with usability problems, annoyances and extra work just to have the latest and greatest gear for its own sake. We have a tendency to forget that many non-techies don’t adopt technologies while they’re still new and need a techie mindset to use; they’ wait until technologies evolve to the point where the benefits outweigh the annoyances.

The current issue of The New Yorker has a Hallowe’en-themed cover that hints at how much smartphones have worked their way into everyday people’s lives:

Here’s a closeup:

(I’ll bet that at least one of you went out Saturday night trick-or-treating and checked your smartphone.)

The practical upshot of all this: the mobile platform is in your future. It’s the one that people take everywhere and it’s growing in power in leaps and bounds the way desktop (and later, laptop) computers did in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

WinMoDevCamp

Speaking of mobile platforms, we’re holding a full-day workshop on Windows Phone development called WinMoDevCamp Toronto next Wednesday, November 11th  from noon to 9 p.m. at the Microsoft Mississauga offices (1950 Meadowvale Boulevard). It’s free of charge and your chance to learn how to develop applications for Windows Phone.

• For more information about WinMoDevCamp, see my earlier WinMoDevCamp article.
• To register for WinMoDevCamp (remember, it’s free!), visit the registration page.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

My spider-sense is tingling, and not in a good way: Disney is buying Marvel Entertainment (yup, that Marvel, as in Spider-Man, the X-Men and so on) for $4 billion in stock, acquiring the rights to all their characters. Soon we’ll see the cast of High School Musical as the newest young mutants to join Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters and a Marvel Team-Up featuring Spider-Man and the Jonas Brothers.

I feel like this:

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

There’s a small TV set in my home office that I sometime turn on – usually to one of the cable news channels — as “background noise”, which I sometimes find helpful when I’m trying to get work done.

Today, I’m on the road in London, Ontario with Microsoft’s EnergizeIT tour. I’m hanging out in the hotel room with my coworker Rodney with the TV on as background noise and here’s what’s on right now:

When I tell people that I often work from my home office, they ask if I ever get the temptation to plunk myself in front of the TV instead of getting work done. The answer is no, and part of the reason is that there’s nothing but this junk on during the day.

This ad won’t make any sense if you’re not a follower of the TV series Lost. However, if you are, you’ll find it amusing…

Click the ad to see the original on its Flickr page.

One of the best sci-fi series on television, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, comes to an end this Friday night at 9 p.m. on Space here in Canada and the Sci-Fi channel in the States. With only one episode left, it would seem an appropriate time to point you to the Battlestar Galactica Frakmap, a little chart that tells you which characters have been intimate with each other and quick summary of their story.

The screenshot below shows only a part of the Frakmap, but it’s the part with the most promiscuous of the bunch: Kara “Starbuck” Thrace and Gaius “Horndog” Baltar. Click on the image to see the whole Frakmap:

Photo courtesy of Matt Gunn.

Here’s the bit from last night’s Daily Show called Old Man Stewart Shakes His Fist at Twitter, courtesy of VentureBeat (at least until the folks at YouTube have to remove the video):

And for those of you who missed it, here’s Twitter co-founder and chief exec Evan Williams talking about Twitter on Charlie Rose, once again courtesy of VentureBeat:

Over at Kevin Kelly’s blog, The Technium, there’s a video of an amusing interview on Conan O’Brien where comedian Louis CK talks about how we take today’s technology and the way it improves our lives for granted. Kelly describes it as "a cartoon version of a more serious argument that we become blind to progress".

Here it is, the second trailer of J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek movie, all hellzapoppin’ and complete with an homage to the "chicken run" scene from Rebel Without a Cause.

I’m keeping in mind that it’s the job of the people who produce trailers to make a movie seem more interesting and exciting than it actually might be, but I’m still holding out hope that Abrams has been taking the story-crafting skill he hasn’t been using on the TV series Fringe and pouring it into Trek. I guess we’ll find out in a few months…

It’s a busy day for me: I’m gearing up for my first presentation on behalf of "The Empire", which will happen at Microsoft’s TechDays event in Calgary (Wednesday, December 10th and Thursday, December 11th). More on that in a later post.

In honour of this preparation, I thought: here’s an opportunity to riff on the theme of “The Empire” (and to provide you with some reading material)  — I can present the storybook version of Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope. Of course, back in those days, it was known simply as plain ol’ Star Wars.

The book came with a vinyl record that was meant to be played along with the book; I’ve included its audio below in MP3 format:

• The Story of Star Wars, Part 1
• The Story of Star Wars, Part 2

The voice work on the record is terribly off – whoever’s playing Darth Vader sounds more like Count Dracula, but you have to keep in mind the book was released in 1979, well before Star Wars had firmly established itself as part of the pop culture canon. Enjoy!

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the latest trailer for The Dark Knight, the upcoming Batman movie with Christian Bale in the title role and Heath Ledger as the Joker:

Better still, here’s a trailer that mashes up the audio from the trailer above with scenes from the 1966 Batman movie, in which Adam West plays the title role. It’s camp-licious!

Links

• YouTube page for the latest trailer for The Dark Knight
• You Tube page for the trailer that mashes up 2008 Batman movie audio with 1966 Batman movie clips
• The 1966 Batman movie, silly as it was, had some lovely visuals, which you can see in this page of stills from that movie.
• Bat Battle: Who’s The Best Movie Batman Ever? Cracked.com investigates.

Hey, it’s Friday, so it’s “funny pictures day” as far as I’m concerned. Here’s an animation featuring the graphics from Nintendo’s Duck Hunt, with a Vietnam setting…

Animation courtesy of Miss Christie St. Martin.

A Different Kind of “Code Smell”

First, let’s look at a new ad for Axe body spray…

Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

I think the suggestion in the ad goes double if you start pointing out what’s wrong with the code (“you == understand.this? get as an object name? Couldn’t they have hired a real programmer to write the ad copy?”).

359 is the new 555

Fictitious phone numbers on many TV shows and movies begin with the number 555, which I presume is to avoid the legal hassles that arise when people try to call those numbers (I remember that a number of people whose phone numbers were actually 867-5309 had their phones ringing day and night when Tommy Tutone’s song Jenny became a hit).

The people behind the TV show CSI: Miami probably wanted to avoid similar legal trouble in an episode where an IP address was shown onscreen. I don’t think I’d go to the trouble of portscanning some IP address I’d seen on a fiction TV show, but somewhere, out there, someone just might. Hence their invention of an IP address whose first “octet” is 359. It’s IPv4.5!

And finally, here’s a graphic that I whipped up for an article with links to recent articles on version control on the Tucows Developer Blog: