Osama bin Laden has just become the world’s most evil action figure.
The kids in Karachi (that’s in Pakistan, folks) are mad about the toy Osama. Says one misguided little rugrat: “As you know Osama is very popular in the whole world. The same thing is happening in Pakistan. People like him and he has become a celebrity now.”
With allies like these…
I used to think IKEA was a fun place to shop. A fair number of neat things that fit in with my house, Swedish meatballs with lingonberries, and an almost singles-bar like atmosphere — there are a lot of good-looking women and lots of flirty eye-contact at everyone’s favourite assemble-the-bookshelf-yourself store.
(I’ve even gotten someone’s phone number there once; while I’m sure the accordion helped, the IKEA vibe played a large part too. I’ve always held the belief that IKEA should turn itself into a singles bar on weekend nights.)
Now I’m scared of the place. Their new television ads creep me out.
I recently saw IKEA’s two new spots, which I mentally refer to as “marriage on the rocks” and “pregnant teenage daughter”. Here’s a description of the ads, taken right from IKEA’s own press release:
Directed by The Royal Tenenbaums writer/director Wes Anderson, the second series of the campaign’s TV ads, “Kitchen” and “Living Room,” use humorously frank family discussions to show that life is “unböring” and so is shopping at IKEA.
The first thirty-second commercial, “Kitchen,” peeks into the life of a couple that is in the midst of an argument. The wife is “stuck in here like some prisoner” and accusing her husband of “prowling the streets,” when suddenly they are interrupted by a voice, “so…” The camera pulls back to show an IKEA showroom display and an IKEA co-worker, “what do you guys think?” The couple looks around the IKEA kitchen and says, “it feels good, we’ll take it.” A product montage with the IKEA logo and “shop unböring” flashes during the last few seconds.
In the second spot, “Living Room” which will air later in the month, we see a young woman slouched in a chair across from her mother. “Honey, what’s wrong?” her mother asks. “I’m pregnant,” she answers. Her father begins ranting about her “creepy boyfriend” and saying “I knew this would happen.” An IKEA co-worker interrupts the two, “so…what do you think?” The camera pulls back to reveal an IKEA living room showroom display. “I like it. It feels good, we’ll take it,” says the couple. The IKEA logo and “shop unböring” flash during the last few seconds.
I’m waiting for an ad where a couple are sullenly eating their Swedish meatballs with lingonberries at the IKEA cafeteria when she throws down her fork, narrows her eyes to cold slits and says with gritted teeth: “Where…is…this…relationship…going?”
[Thanks to EveTushnet.com for the link.]
It must be one of those synchronicity things: Jane Jacobs keeps getting mentioned in the bloggy circles in which I travel, both online and in real life.
Luke Francl, Aaron Swartz and Rael Dornfest are currently reading her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It’s one of the books cited in the bibliography of Steven Johnson’s book, Emergence (I had the pleasure of hearing Johnson speak at the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference earlier this year). I remember talking about her with Emma and Graig when they dropped by my house late last week, Dan mentioned her in his blog just the other day and Cory invoked her name when he told me about how his barber got royally shafted by the landlord.
Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities during the postwar boom years, when the car was becoming an increasingly important factor in urban and suburban planning, and when the ‘burbs were beginning to expand. It’s not a book written by a trained urban planner, but rather by a keen observer who learned about cities and city life by being empirical and walking the streets and watching carefully. The ideas she put forth in her book — although counter to conventional urban planning wisdom at the time — are embraced by many of today’s urban planners.
Although she lived in the so-called greatest city on earth — New York — when she wrote the book, she moved here to Accordion City shortly after it was written and settled down in The Annex, an area with beautiful tree-lined residential streets joined by an eclectic shopping and restaurant strip, not far from the University of Toronto and the main east-west subway line. We have her to thank for killing plans to develop the Spadina Expressway (a proposed highway that would have run roughshod over several key neighbourhoods) and inspiring the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, a pleasant area where people of all income levels live together in a single neighbourhood. She’s still quite actively involved in city affairs, and Toronto is a better place for it.
If you’re looking for some holiday reading, I highly recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Next: The neighbourhood I call home.
So much for the “mild winter” I kept hearing about. I’ve just come in from the cold, and right now it’s -10 degrees C (that’s 14 degrees F for my American friends). There’s also a nasty wind blowing from the north, which is making it feel even colder. I’m not sure if it’s going to be like this all winter, but I’m thankful that I have a roof over my head and a nice warm bed where I can curl up with a good book (that good book a copy of Beginning PHP4 that Rob loaned me).
Not everyone is so fortunate. While driving home from a birthday dinner for Richard, I passed by a couple of homeless people wrapped in blankets and gathered over an exhaust grate for wamth, and three more huddled in an alcove. Sleeping on the street is brutal enough when the temperatures are just above freezing, as is normal for this time of year. During this unusual cold, it can be fatal.
I’m going to give five bucks and some winter clothes I no longer wear to the Sally Ann tomorrow. If you’ve got even a little spare change or an old parka or sweater just sitting in your attic, you might want to do the same. It’s a little act of kindness, but it could make all the difference for someone out there.
Happy birthday to the best brother-in-law a guy ever had.
A-list blogger Tony Pierce writes in a recent blog entry:
ashleys been calling me every night. she might think it’s hard on her. it’s doublely hard on me. see, ive been to the edge, and there i stood and looked down. i know what the future holds for me, and its definitely not super hot twenty year old blonde girls with cheerleader outfits and glitter.
Funny, that’s exactly what I see in my future.
My ongoing job search has made it quite clear to me that I have a problem with my portfolio.
In my two years of work for OpenCola, I wrote a lot of software prototypes that never made the leap to finished, complete, released application. With my friend and co-worker Chris Cummer, I wrote an application that grabbed video and MP3 files from the Gnutella file-sharing network and broadcast them as a stream, essentially creating a “what’s on the Internet?” station; the lawyers killed that project. I also worked on the user interface for two version of OpenCola’s file-sharing-and-news-finding software. both these versions were scrapped and bear only a very fleeting resemblance to the current version.
My recent work — an Web-based player registration and account management system for Silvercloud’s online trivia game — will probably never see the light of day. The company ran out of money in August, the partners have gone their separate ways, and the other members of the programming team bailed for less deadbeat pastures.
The end result is that my interviews with placement agencies and prospective employers sound similar to this conversation between a builder and someone looking to buy a house:
Potential house buyer: So, Mr. Builder, may I see the last house you built?
Builder: Um, you’re looking at it.
Potential house buyer: Looking at it where?
Builder: Right here. Right…ah…in front of you.
Potential house buyer: This is a model of a house, made out of balsawood!!
Builder: I prefer to call it a working prototype. See? A nice island in the middle of the kitchen; it’s all the rage on the home decorating shows. Look here: that’s real water coming out of those miniature sinks! And feel here — the heating ducts work! There’s a miniature water pump in ther basement, and I’m simulating a furnace with a Zippo lighter! And don’t tell me you don’t like the teeny halogen lights in the dining room…
Potential house buyer: I’ll say that the design’s very good, but do you have anything that I could actually live in?
Builder: Erm…yes. Right this way; it’s just next door.
Potential house buyer: You’ve got to be joking! This house is just a living room!
Builder: Actually, it a living room and front hallway. And the bathroom’s mostly done…
Potential house buyer: The living room is missing one wall!
Builder: Well, we would’ve gotten the rest of the house done, but we ran out of drywall. And two-by-fours. And, um…bricks.
Potential house buyer: I think I’ve seen enough. Thank you very much, Mr. Builder, and I look forward to seeing you in whatever new career you eventually follow.
Builder: Wait! You haven’t seen my cottage design! I have sketches!
I’ve managed to snag a little contract work, so in about a month or so, I may actually have some recent examples of actual paying work to show to potential employers and clients. However, where portfolios are concerned, more is better, and here’s where you come in.
I need ideas for Palm applications. If you’re an avid user of a PDA that runs the PalmOS — which means a Palm handheld, a Handspring Visor, or Sony Clie, and if there’s some program you wish existed for it, maybe I can help you. I’ll write the application and give it to you — for free. I’ll also make it available for download off this site, and credit you with the concept. It’s win-win: I get a fatter portfolio, and you get software you want.
Why a handheld application? Well, it’s an area which is still wide-open, and it’s one of the two “big directions” in which computing is travelling (the two directions being mobile computing and wireless networks). The limited memory and screen of a PDA also sets certain limits of the scope of a programming project, hopefully guaranteeing that I can finish the project in a reasonable amount of time and that it won’t grow into a Herculean task.
(Yes, I do have my own ideas for Palm software that I could write, but I figured that it might be better to write software that someone out there wants. Who knows — your ideas might be better than mine.)
If you’ve got an idea, drop me a line or leave a note in the comments.