Archive for July, 2007

It is official.  Drew Carey will be replacing Bob Barker as the host for The Price Is Right. Yes, you heard me right, I said Drew Carey. It was confirmed when he made the announcement on Letterman Monday night.

I liked the Drew Carey show, and I really liked Who’s Line Is It Anyway”. I have to wonder though, does Drew have what it takes to host The Price is Right? Bob Barker has some pretty big (huge) shoes to fill. Bob Barker has only been doing this for 35-40 years ya know.

Another thing to think about is that Drew will be hosting another game show this fall called The Power of 10. I’m sure you can host that show Drew, no problem at all. But hosting The Price is Right is going to be your main focus, and The Power of 10 is only going to get in your way.

Good luck Drew, I have watched most of your previous work, and I will continue to catch you when I can. Be sure to get Ryan Stiles and Colin Mockery on the stage every chance you get!  

I was browsing the top stories on Digg yesterday, and I saw a page that was about flip-flops burning someones feet. Being human, I had to check it out. What I saw was a terrible tragedy that this poor lady is currently going through.

I can’t figure out why this hasn’t caught the mainstream media’s attention. It definately should. If I were the lady I would be contacting my local news station…they would eat this stuff up, and she could get the exposure that she is wanting.

Lovely aren’t they? Too bad they will rot your feet right off your leg!

View all of the WalMart photos, along with the story that is being updated daily.

You can call it “The Dark Side of Oz” or “The Wizard of Floyd” or “Dark Side of the Rainbow, any title will do. Mention those titles, to any Pink Floyd fan, and they will be able to tell you a little story. When you play the cd “The Dark Side of the Moon” along with “The Wizard of Oz”, there are some very interesting similarities.

Here are a few of the more interesting ones:

Song “Breathe”

• “Balanced on the biggest wave” as Dorthy’s balancing on the fence.
• On the Run starts as Dorthy falls. Notice the theme of the music as everyone panics.

Song “Time”

• The ringing of bells is heard as Time starts and the witch enters on her bike. (This is my 2nd favorite similarity.)
• During the guitar solo in Time, you will see the fortune teller’s sign. It reads Past, Present, and Future.

Song “Money”

• The song starts as Dorthy enters Oz to the sound of cash registers and money chimes. (This is my favorite similarity. It is quite amazing to hear the cash register chime as soon as you see yellow brick road. It gave me chills the first time I saw it.)

That is just a very small sampling of what you can expect to see. I won’t list out all of the similarities here. If you are interested in reading them though, a quick google search will turn up all you ever wanted to know, and then some.

The reason for this post is because I took my DVD of “The Wizard of Oz” and ripped it to my HD. After that, I ripped my cd of “Dark Side of the Moon” to my HD. I created a new language channel on the movie, and put “Dark Side of the Moon” into that channel. I got it synced up perfectly with the MGM lions 3rd roar and re-created the DVD with the new language channel.

It worked! I can now show all of my friends and relatives what I have been telling them for years. There was one problem though. I had no dvd cover or disc label to put on my new “Wizard of Floyd” compilation.

I fixed that problem by creating my own label and cover which you can see below. I have also provided a download link if you have a need for the covers. I noticed that someone else had created a compilation DVD and released it on usenet a while back. It is not the compilation I created, but after watching that version at a friends house, I can say that they are nearly identical.

The cover isn’t the greatest piece of artwork that I have ever seen, but it seemed to work in a pinch.

Download via Rapidshare. Feel free to mirror, but give credit (a link) back to this post.

Enjoy!

The wife and I were having the usual conversation over dinner yesterday and for some reason we got on the subject of diet plans. We both wondered how much money each year people spend looking for that infamous miracle burn that could just melt the fat right off of your body without having to do any more exercise than moving your thumb across the remote control. Thousands? Millions? Billions?

We both agreed that it is probably in the Billions of dollars. I would like to do a little research on this when I get a chance, just to find out how much of a booming industry this is.

It’s such a tremendously bad idea that it’s almost bound to succeed. Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an “advertising framework” that uses “context data” from your hard drive to show you advertisements and “apportion and credit advertising revenue” to ad suppliers in real time. Yes, Redmond wants to own the patent on the mother of all adware.

The application, filed in 2006, describes a multi-faceted, robust ad-delivering system that lives on a “user computer, whether it’s part of the OS, an application or integrated within applications.”

“Applications, tools, or utilities may use an application program interface to report context data tags such as key words or other information that may be used to target advertisements,” says the filing. “The advertising framework may host several components for receiving and processing the context data, refining the data, requesting advertisements from an advertising supplier, for receiving and forwarding advertisements to a display client for presentation, and for providing data back to the advertising supplier.”

The adware framework would leave almost no data untouched in its quest to sell you stuff. It would inspect “user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, computer status messages (e.g., a low memory status or low printer ink),” and more. How could we have been so blind as to not see the marketing value in computer status messages?

The software would also free advertising from its traditional browser yoke. “A word processor may display a banner ad along the top of a window, similar to a toolbar, while a graphical ad may be displayed in a frame associated with the application. A digital editor for photos or movies may support video-based advertisements,” the patent application says.

The patent application, first unearthed by InformationWeek, gives the impression that your software would have more control over the advertising than you would. “An e-mail client may specify that ads from competitors must be excluded, that its own display client must be used… (that) no more than 4 ads per hour are allowed, and that only text or graphical… advertisements are supported.” The patent makes no mention of any method by which an actual user might exert control, nor does it mention very real privacy or security concerns.

That’s okay. It’s still a good thing. It says so right in the application: “The ability to derive and process context data from local sources rather than monitor interactions with a remote entity, such as a server, benefits both consumers and advertisers by delivering more tightly targeted advertisements. The benefit to the user is the perception that the ads are more relevant, and therefore, less of an interruption. The benefit to the advertiser is better focus and a higher chance of conversion to a sale.”

The patent is a fascinating exercise in advertising delivery systems. But surely that’s all it is—an exercise. No way anyone would ever actually make a thing like this. Right?

Via arstechnica