In response to the Headline of the Day, which was Head, Liver Mistakenly Mailed to Horrified Michigan Couple, “Nancy G.” replied in a comment:
Hm, shipping company was DHL, eh?
This doesn’t surprise me at all.
Heh.
In honour of this story, here’s one of my favourite lines from The Simpsons: Apu saying “Ooh! A head bag! Those are chock full of…heady goodness.” (from the Rosebud episode).
A couple of people have asked me if there are any rock bands with accordion players worth listening to. I usually point them to the darlings of the Montreal indie rock scene (although really, how “indie” can you be after an appearance not only as the musical guest, but also in a skit on Saturday Night Live?), the Arcade Fire. Their new album, Neon Bible, comes out tomorrow, and from their SNL performance and from listening to (ahem, cough) an advance copy, I can tell you that it sounds great.
In honour of the album’s release tomorrow, this week’s Song of the Week is one of their signature tunes, the catchy, stick-in-your-head, yell-“Hey!”-along-with-the-band tune No Cars Go. It first appeared on their eponymous debut EP and re-appears in a more lush, more heavily-produced version on Neon Bible. If the first version reminds you of Joy Division (with some wheezy pawn-shop accordion backup), the new version should remind you of its descendant band, New Order.
I’m definitely buying this album.
As with other songs of the week, these will evaporate after a week. Enjoy!
Some articles on Global Nerdy the tech news blog I share with my good buddy George (now featuring new and improved design!)…
[This post also appears on the Tucows Blog.]
First, let me show you a video titled Web 2.0, a reading that distills countless “Web 2.0” articles over a montage of associated images. It runs for 5 minutes, 17 seconds, but watching more than a minute of it is a waste of your time:
In response to the video above, Michael Wesch, an associate professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, made the following video titled The Machine is Us/ing Us. Go ahead and watch it, it’ll be 4 minutes and 31 seconds of well-spent time:
Both videos cover the same topic and make use of the same “video on the web” format, but they’re worlds apart.
If the way Web 2.0 presented its information seemed old and moldy yet oddly familiar, that’s because it’s simply yet another one those old educational films you saw back in high school, but dressed up in online video clothes. It’s rich in information, but it might as well be every other bad PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever had to endure. New technology, old thinking.
The Machine is Us/ing Us is a different creature. It says more with less. Although it has background music like Web 2.0, it skips the narration entirely, using the structures, forms, features and conventions of its subject matter. It uses the web to explain the web. It was made using the same technologies as those used to make Web 2.0, but it makes much better use of the medium and the technology and conveys its message more effectively.
Over the past little while, there’s been a noticeable change here at the Tucows office. There a sense of “we need to take a better approach” around here. It’s in the reports I’ve read and the meetings I’ve attended. As the tech evangelist, I deal with almost every department in the building and I can see people all over working on better processes, better ways to build things and better ways to work with our customers, trying out new things and new ideas. Although you can’t see the end result of all this internal change just yet, from where I sit, the difference looks like the difference between the two videos above.
The snow started falling around noon and kept falling for hours. By the end of the work day, the streets were very slow going and the bus stops were packed solid. I lucked out and found a cab and took it to the subway, which wasn’t affected by the weather. The bus stop at the subway was packed with people who’d been waiting for a while:
There are more photos of the snow at BlogTO.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you — direct from Brookline, Massachusetts — the garage band Tunnel of Love!
Click the photo to visit their MySpace page.