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Anytime is a good time. For beer.

Sat, 26 May 2012 16:35:23 +0200

Anytime is a good time. For beer.

Good morning Bucharest!

Sat, 26 May 2012 16:33:31 +0200

Good morning Bucharest!

Hors de prix

Mon, 21 May 2012 18:34:26 +0200

Hors de prix

The view from a room without a view.

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:50:50 +0100

The view from a room without a view.

The end is nigh.

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:49:44 +0100

The end is nigh.

Reborn from dust and dirt, a new analog companion from a time in...

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 18:18:00 +0200

Reborn from dust and dirt, a new analog companion from a time in which the quality and durability of a product was not decided by the sales department.

The Shining

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:58:12 +0200

Photo

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:37:32 +0200

So it’s not enough that you want access to all my...

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 17:37:06 +0200

So it’s not enough that you want access to all my information and activity, you also want it over a non-secure connection? I’ll just click on the ‘suck it’ button.

United Holes of Benetton

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 09:32:47 +0200

I hate it when a company puts merchandise protection above customer respect. They assume everyone is a thief before being a customer, and that’s insulting. Software activation that is taxing the legitimate users, not the pirates. Hard to open huge blisters for items the size of a stick of gum. Those horrible anti-theft tags on clothes that damage the material.

Here is a sad statistic: out of 5 shirts and 2 t-shirts bought from Benetton, 4 shirts and 2 t-shirts have a hole on the back right under the collar. That’s a little over 85% of purchases being pre-damaged.

OK, I can understand that Benetton doesn’t want their shit stolen, but that doesn’t entitle them to sell broken shit. Don’t create rips where there are high stress points, ie. where the material gets stretched every time you put it on or take it off. Add a few wash cycles to that, and you’ll be able to put your head through that hole.

You wouldn’t sell me something if I offered to pay less than the listed price, and yet you are selling me something worth less than I paid for.

Now, if 85% of your merchandise ends up being returned (and then destroyed) maybe you should start thinking of your customers first, and the thieves second. Wouldn’t it be easier to just let some of it be stolen for the sake of happy customers?

Your costs will also go down because your employees will focus on selling rather than carelessly putting and removing anti-theft tags, not spending money on an anti-theft system in the first place, and as an added extra, you won’t have to deal with returned stuff that cannot be resold.

That’s my tip to you, United Colors of Benetton. Now I want my money back, in cash please, not that store credit crap (don’t get me started on that).

Perfect timing

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:03:10 +0200

It’s a soft longish beep (it’s like the drive is taking a deep breath), followed by a sharp increase in tone (an exhaling that becomes whistling) and then a constant hum. The soft longish beep happens just before the hard disk drive starts spinning up, while the sharp increase in tone is the spinning up. Then the comforting hum.

My new external disk drive seems to be suffering from some lung related disease. It’s stuck on the deep breathing part. Inhale. Stop. Inhale. Stop. For about ten minutes, then just stop. It’s just 31 days old, perfectly enough for Amazon to not accept it on their 30-day return policy. Perfect. Timing. Design is not only how it looks (as Steve Jobs says), it’s also how it works, right? Well, I think we can extend that to how it doesn’t work as well.

I bought a LaCie drive to replace a quirky 3 year old Western Digital, which likes to go to sleep if inactive for 20 minutes. *Great* feature WD, of course it can’t be disabled, why would anyone in their right mind want to do that? It’s not like disk drives die a little every time they spin up.

Anyway, I kept the old drive as a mirror for the new one, so the data is still safe. The lesson here being that with these new disposable-grade disk drives, always buy in pairs and have a back-up.

The thing with LaCie drives is that you never know what you are getting. Sure the cases are nice and all (actually they are pretty great), but the disk inside (the problem in 99% of the cases) can be any brand. Never touch anything with Maxtor drives inside, unless you like electronic music.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a support service to contact.

Photo

Sun, 29 May 2011 13:40:00 +0200

Marco! Polo?! I wish I would have been a fly on the wall when...

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:59:14 +0200

Marco! Polo?! I wish I would have been a fly on the wall when the marketing department came up with this gem of a brand name.

Three layers, one sip.

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 22:35:36 +0200

Three layers, one sip.

The perfect finish to a sunny day at the beach.

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 12:55:54 +0200

The perfect finish to a sunny day at the beach.

The curious case of the invisible cat.

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 12:53:56 +0200

The curious case of the invisible cat.

Karaoke Overload

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 11:01:59 +0100

Don’t be afraid to sing along, and to not be confined to only one song, try to do them all! (at the same time).

Also, notice the abundance of ‘baby’. And the fact that most of them are a lot more pornographic than the actual music videos, probably because our brains are already desensitized to boobs and cheeks and tongues and shit, but when we see written “…are you big enough? / …can you get it up?”, well, our brains start filling up details that the video directors might not think about.

Like a stock exchange for lyrics, watch six songs battling it out text-wise. Like music videos from another universe where YouTube would be all about the writing.

Overload

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 00:34:50 +0100

If you’ve been wondering what’s up with all the slow weird videos, they are all part of a greater scheme. There was once upon a time an Youtube aggregation project called ‘zeitgeist’, in which six Youtube videos would play simultaneously on one page (while you can still find the posts here on Central Feed, the links lead nowhere I’m afraid…)

Overload is the evolution of that, with the addition that you can now control the audio (select only one of the six soundtracks or all mute) and the playback. You can play with it here.

The particular episode with the slow videos is Nice & Slow.

Deconstructing sexxy - sexy si rea at 40% speed.

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 12:15:00 +0100

Deconstructing sexxy - sexy si rea at 40% speed.

Deconstructing blondy - iubeste-ma bine at 40% speed. Also...

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:35:00 +0100

Deconstructing blondy - iubeste-ma bine at 40% speed. Also features about 90% less moaning than the previous video, but it compensates with plenty of whoas, woos, yeahs and aahs.