Geek Chic

Ok.  It’s now been generally accepted that Microsoft’s Seinfeld-powered ad campaign was a major bust (although to give them a small amount of credit, the edited version of commercial 2 was better than the full 4:30 disaster).

This morning I thought it’s perhaps time to get to the bottom of this: which ad firm has the monumental task of trying to make Microsoft look cool.

The answer? Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Apparently the go-to people for when your company is completely out of touch but you want to be perceived as being ‘with it.’ (you can read more about them on Ajax Blog)

While I have to say they’ve been doing a pretty pathetic job on the Microsoft campaign so far, I was at least curious enough to check out what else they’d done.  Turns out many things.  This was my favorite:

I hadn’t seen that round of VW commercials — the only ones I’ve seen are the talking car/brooke shields ones which are not as funny.

So they can do something right, I guess.  We’ll have to wait and see how the Microsoft campaign goes.  I can’t imagine any other outcome than the commercials being kind of ok — at best — but mostly serving as an excellent set up for a hilarious Apple counter-attack.

A Microsft engineer who looks like John Hodgeman whining about how ‘I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype’? Come on!  Does it get any easier than that?

BTW – Apple’s market share is up to 10.6% in North America.

Well… Here I am again. McCarren Park Pool. More for the fact that it’s going to be the last concert than the band this time (Sonic Youth is totally respectable they’ve just never been my cup of tea)

And guess what? It’s threatening to rain again!

What can you do? I’ve got nothing to say but it’s okay. :)

Anyway, you should check out more about the Pool when you get a chance. It’s had a pretty amazing history. And they’re now trying to revive its former glory. We’ll have to wait and see how that goes..

It’s interesting how much we take for granted when it comes to the design of the objects we interact with on a daily basis.

After jailbreaking my iPhone yesterday (!!!) I installed the Nintendo original NES emulator.  Which is awesome in theory — it’s nice to see my old friends Elevator Action, Super Mario Brothers, Metroid, Rad Racer, etc. again.  But there’s a problem: the games are almost impossible to play.

NES Emulator for iPhone

When we were using the original NES controllers I, for one, took for granted the fact that you get (and need) tactile feedback when you’re playing those games.  When you’re playing Spy Hunter you’re getting contstant feedback from your left thumb — as to when you’re pushing ‘left’ vs when you’re pushing ‘up’.  On the iPhone you don’t get that feedback — it’s just a flat surface.

The designers of the emulator tried to compensate for this by giving you visual feedback (there’s a little readout that tells you explicitly when you’re pushing up vs pushing left).  But this doesn’t solve the problem becaue it’s giving you cues that are a) not in the most relevant medium (visual instead of tactile — which slows down your reaction time) and b) not in a relevant part of the screen (you’re looking where the action is — not where your fingers are.  If you’re looking at your fingers to see where they’re pushing you’re in danger of having a Metroid suck off your face).

Old School NES

All of this, in my ‘I took Psychology of Perception 10 years ago so I totally know what I’m talking about’ kind of way, is to say that Nintendo did something right when they made those controllers.  We needed the little raised + of the directional pad (the edges, the clear spatially mapped directions, etc) to input directional data and get the kind of relevant feedback we need to play the game.

The things we take for granted…

Maybe next time we’ll talk about Nintendo Synesthesia (although maybe Rad Racer’s pseudo-3D is as close as most of us come to that… ).

One of my friends mentioned that if the Times mentions you 3 times, you get listed in their obituaries when you die.

I’ve got 2 already: here and here.  I guess that means I’m almost there.

What a morbid thought for a Monday.

Ok.  I know.  This shouldn’t be my own personal reading list — I don’t want this blog to turn into an interminable list of ‘The Books Jeff Wants to Read But Probably Won’t Get Around To For Like 5 Years’ … but if this blog were to turn into such a list, this book would be it.  Sounds cool:

The Amnesiac by Sam Taylor

You can read more about it on VSL

I read an article last week about sleep myths — mainly how our conceptions of our need for sleep are slightly off-base.

The most interesting part of the article (I found) talks about the myth that humans need eight continuous hours of sleep a night.  This is not necessarily the case.  In fact, the author notes that until the Industrial Revolution, Western Europeans actually divided the night into two periods of “First Sleep” and “Second Sleep.”  The article notes that:

They’d go to bed soon after dark, sleep for four hours then wake for an hour or two during which they’d write, pray, smoke, reflect on dreams they’d had, have sex or even visit neighbors. In fact, there’s some evidence to suggest that this sleep pattern may be the one most in tune with our inherent circadian rhythms.

Wild huh?

Read the full article on Newsweek

I really wish I understood patent law better, I must say.  But I just read this article and it seems unbelievable to me.  If I gleaned this correctly, a shifting of the Patent Office’s position on what technically qualifies for patents basically invalidates software patents.

Now that I look around, it seems like this has actually been up for debate for quite some time.  Even Wikipedia seems pretty opinionated about the matter.  And I guess there is definitely some debate as to whether software should be protected by patents or by copyright.

Still.  Seems pretty aggressive on the part of the patent office to go after Google.

And this after the nonsense yesterday where one guy (he’s got a company called Anascape, but it’s basically one guy working out of Carson City, Nevada — the sketchiest place on earth) is suing Nintendo over patent infringement on his highly specific patents such as

• Patent 6,208,271 “Remote Controller with Analog Button”
• Patent 6,344,791 “Variable Sensor with Tactile Feedback”

… which seem like they could be applied to pretty much anything!  I mean, a mouse is a remote controller with an analog button! And the guy already won $21 million from Nintendo in ‘damages’.

Long ago I should’ve patented ‘Flat Surface with Texture’ and sued the entire world.

All of that said, I’m all for open source culture.  I think it’s a step in the right direction.  But when it’s the patent office and the courts that are making the decisions, I find they are generally completely ignorant about most things technical.

I’m all for making Google fight harder for their bread.  But only if the Patent Office actually knows what they’re doing.