Author: Joey deVilla

If you ever meet someone who’s not sure of the difference, you can always use this picture as a visual aid:

Click the chart to see a larger version.
Chart courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Last night, I attended a presentation where the latest beta version of the upcoming Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer 8, was shown to us. At the end of the dinner, we attendees were presented with USB keys containing installers for the browser so we could take it for a spin:

Over at Global Nerdy, I review its most-snickered-about feature, InPrivate Browsing, which lets you surf the web without leaving a trail on your own computer. For obvious reasons, the tech press — and let’s face it, me — like to refer to it by the colloquial name of “Porn Mode”.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, go check out my article!

If you’re ever in Tokyo, you need to observe the scramble crossing in Shibuya. It’s pretty fascinating.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m., the intersection at Yonge and Dundas streets will become a scramble crossing (or as some of you urban and traffic engineer types might call it, a Barnes Dance or “exclusive pedestrian phase”). That means that at a certain point in the traffic light cycle, all vehicular traffic in any direction must stop, and pedestrians can use the entire intersection to cross it any way they like, including diagonally. I work a short bike ride away from this intersection and might pop by to take some photos.

For more on scramble crossings, see the Wikipedia entry for “Pedestrian Scramble”.

Rendering the word “treason” meaningless, one stupid sign at a time:

b5media, the company where I work and hold the title of “Nerd Wrangler”, is one of the finalists in Red Herring Canada’s “Top 50” Awards, which is described as…

…celebrating the most innovative and promising companies in Canada. Adding to the success of our yearly North America 100, Europe 100 and Global 100 events, Red Herring Canada will provide an opportunity for the nation’s Top 50 companies to deliver their message to the top VCs and other participants throughout North America and abroad.

The Top 50 will be announced at the Red Herring Canada ’08 event in Mont Tremblant (near Montreal), which takes place from September 15th through 17th.

On Friday, Jon Gordon from the radio show Future Tense interviewed me about my recent posting in Global Nerdy titled Seinfeld and Celebrity Computer Endorsements, which features my comments on Microsoft’s hiring of Jerry Seinfeld as a pitchman and a collection of celebrity computer endorsements. In the interview, which is being broadcast tonight, we talk about whether celebrity endorsements for computers work, as well as some of our favorite celebrity computer advertisements.

Future Tense is broadcast on American Public Media stations. For a schedule of when it’s on, click here.