Can't Stop Geeking

Indie band Arcade Fire recently put out a fantastic album called The Suburbs. If you haven’t heard it, go buy it now. It’s one of the the best I’ve heard in quite some time. To promote it they’ve done some TV appearances on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, some summer festival appearances, and an awesome live concert on YouTube (directed by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python!) However, they’ve saved the coolest bit of promotion for last. They’ve made a music video for We Used To Wait, but it’s not conventional at all: it’s a dynamically created experience that ties in with real life. Go to thewildernessdowntown.com (using Chrome), type in an address, and it will create a unique music video based on what you enter. To get the best effect, it should be the address you grow up, but since it makes heavy use of Google Earth and Street View, that may not work best. If that’s the case, then enter your home address or somewhere you know very well. Once you do that, just sit back and enjoy the show! A word of caution though, this does make extensive use of HTML5 and was designed to work best in Chrome. During the video, it will ask you to write a postcard to your younger self. Why? The band will take that postcard out on their North American tour this fall and give them out. If you get one, you’re supposed to plant it and a tree will grow. This is possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever seen on the internet. I have the feeling more bands are going to do this in the future because having something spread viral on the internet is far more effective than trying to get on the radio these days, especially for a band like Arcade Fire. They have a devoted fanbase, but they just don’t get a ton of mainstream exposure. So yeah, definitely try it out. You won’t regret it.

Source: Pitchfork.

You’ve all heard of ChatRoulette right? It’s that website that matches you up with a random stranger and you chat via webcam. Well, LionsGate has found an awesome use for the site that doesn’t involve horny 20 year olds showing you their raging boners or hoping to jack off to naked chicks that might be on there. To promote their upcoming film, The Last Exorcism, LionsGate has set up a couple videos which play to unsuspecting visitors. It shows a girl looking all sexy and capturing your attention. Then, out of nowhere her eyes roll into the back of her head and she attacks the camera while screaming. Then a card that says www.thelastexorcism.com shows at the end. To show off their work, the movie studio has compiled a clip of real people reacting to what they think is a girl that’s going to take it off (warning: contains NSFW language).

Anybody remember Google Wave? You don’t? Oh, well then, apparently you aren’t alone. Google announced that they are going to stop development on Wave. They are going to keep the service maintained until the end of the year and eventually release tools to get your content from Wave off the service. Kinda sad that Wave didn’t catch on because it was a pretty neat tool with some nice potential. If you don’t know, Wave is like a sort of mashup between a message board, a chat room, email, and Facebook. It was pretty ambitious and a lot of people didn’t really dig into it and look into all the neat extensions that were made for it. Oh well, hopefully they take some lessons learned from Wave and put it to use in the future.

Source: Engadget

Congratulations to Google for reaching a huge milestone on the Android Market! The billionth app was downloaded today, a little more than a year and a half after launch. Not bad considering how Droid was slow to start off compared to the iPhone, which took only 9 months to reach a billion app downloads. This number continues to grow at a very fast rate, since Android OS is catching on pretty well now. Now I just wonder when they’ll reach the 2 billion mark.

Source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/handheld/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225800262

A future when this is reality must be avoided at all costs.

That was unexpected. The first beta of Mozilla’s Firefox 4 beta has just came out! I just started using it so I can’t really comment on the specifics of it, but I must say that I like it so far. It feels very fast and Chrome-like. Check out the list of features here or go on over to the Mozilla site to download it! Be sure to keep it in a different directory than your current Firefox 3 install because some of the addons don’t work with it yet.

For those iPad users who suffered a security breach of email addresses, AT&T is pointing the finger at a group of malicious hackers who found a loophole created by AT&T trying to speed up the process of logging in to the website. So, Apple, this is the company you place your exclusive trust in to carry your iPhone and provide service for your iPad.

As someone who likes technology and sees the benefits of it, I have to say that there are sometimes when it’s ok to be away from the internet for a while. Take, for instance, the iLoo. This was designed by Microsoft’s UK branch for public access. It’s a public toilet with internet access. That’s right; you can download while you offload, or stream whichever you need to do. Why was this considered a bad idea? From a sanitation standpoint, public restrooms like this get notoriously abused. People do business in these things other than for its intended use. Second, even with a vacuum suction technology, there is still a chance for microscopic bacteria to get onto the console. I don’t know about you, but if my computer is going to get bacteria on it, its going to be from me only.

Here’s the bigger issue for me. As a global culture, it seems we spend more time on the internet than doing almost anything else. I’m not knocking the internet, I love all the information I have access to, but I don’t need it every waking minute of the day. When I’m in the restroom, I should really be able to survive without the internet for the time it takes me to do my business.

Not exactly.

If you still need powerful computers for designing graphics or other coding issues, you’ll still one of those. But if you want to surf the internet, it appears that you will soon be doing that with your TV. Google is offering software to be integrated into certain TVs as well as some satellite TV services. This will help some people who want to surf the internet but have vision issues or can’t get really fast internet access. This should be an interesting development to watch. Google seems to be innovating to grab some of the market away from Apple. And you know what the best part is? We as consumers are going to benefit the most from this.

If you thought your personal life and your professional life could be separate, you may want to rethink that. There’s a waitress down in North Carolina who is looking for another job because of it. She waited on a couple who kept her past her clock out time and compensated her with a $5 tip. She went home and griped about it on Facebook, mentioning her job by name, and was summarily fired. There’s a couple of things to keep in mind when reading this. First, we’re assuming the $5 tip was less than the customary %10-%15 gratuity that we have adopted culturally. Second, businesses have taken to Facebook for advertising and promotional purposes, so brand protection on a social networking site is critical to success in today’s business. Third, you have to realize that you are a representative of where you work, and if you project yourself in an area that is a marketing hotbed for your job, people are going to notice, customers and employers. That being said, my question is how did this comment come to light? Was a manager or the business owner looking at their employees on Facebook to keep tabs on them? If that’s the case, then the real story is more about who is monitoring employees like this, which makes it slightly creepier.