As an Apple fan boy it is my duty to make sure that i keep tabs on everything that Microsoft and Apple do in their advertising. I absolutely hated the ads recently that had Seinfeld and Bill Gates being retarted in a shoe store. The new ads are somewhat better although if they are meant to counter Apple ads then I think that they missed their mark.

Sure you can argue success for the campaign simply because so many people are talking about it but here is my round up.

The Apple ads are successful because they are specific and point out flaws or stereotypes (for those of you still part of the dark side) with the competing product and then point out how the Apple product does it better. Easy to understand and has a purpose, ie our product is better than theirs.

The Microsoft ads really are just saying, all kinds of people use our Windows product, certainly a billion people cannot be wrong. Really? That is the best offense that you can muster up? Choose ours because lots of other people do? I think that is lame.

This is the ad that I think MS should have run. It might be a little more accurate…

So the question of who do we actually write for was posed by Mark Artrip in a comment this morning. Also there is Jason Rice’s most recent post that addresses the issue of bringing out your own personality in a blog and deciding how much to really care. Really, I do not have any answer to the questions yet but maybe I can work through it quickly and for your own amusement. I think there are a couple of scenarios that I will explore before I define this whole blogging thing for myself.

1. I write this for other tech nerds. Sure there is the discussion about who should be called nerd or geek or whatever, or even if the nerd label has gotten “too cool” as was mentioned in this last issue of Wired magazine. I think that the problem with writing for tech nerds would be that tech people already dominate the internet in almost every way imaginable so what do I really have to add that is not somewhere else? Any foray into making this an actual tech blog would result in 200 links to sources in every post and that is way too much work for my level of dedication to this blogging endeavor.
2. I write this for general consumption. This is a strong contender because I do consider myself at least semi-well rounded in a lot of different areas. Over enough time I think that I will have probably covered a very broad spectrum of categories and part of my hope would be that I could offer some small additional insight or perspective to whatever it is that I am talking about at that moment. Maybe I am not really cool enough or have enough “experience” or whatever to have anybody listen to me but I don’t care. Whatever.
3. I write this for my friends. I subscribe to several different blogs of close friends and I find it interesting to keep in touch this way. I do not have to feel bad about not calling and really when you think about it, blogging is just long-hand multi-media capable texting. I think a primary purpose is to let my friends, especially long distance ones, know how things are going in my life.
4. I write this for myself. Maybe this is the acceptable nerdy way of keeping a diary, or at least fulfilling the same purpose in a physiological sense that writing in a diary would meet. Does that mean that I am going to spew forth my thoughts unfiltered to the whole world? Certainly not. Does it mean that I can use this place as a space to quickly post my thoughts on a subject for quick reference at a later point? Absolutely.

Ok so first and foremost for today I wanted to show this watch which was featured over at Uncrate and actually looks totally hot. Nothing says Dick Tracy quite like making and receiving calls on your really cool looking watch. Throw in the bluetooth and it really becomes pretty slick. My only problem with it is that the name pretty much sucks like a Hoover. Come up with something better than Watch Phone.

Now you may be wondering why I put a whole screen grab into my own post and that would be a good question. I think that they said everything really well. So you can read what they said without another click and I can make my life easier by just referencing what they said in the same place. All this to say I may do this more in the future so don’t freak out. Unless of course this is against all blogging rules because I am eliminating a click back for them. I am new to this so if this is un-kosher let me know.

Anywho…this watch not only looks sick but who of you reading that was alive in the 80s didn’t want to be able to make phone calls from their watch? To bad that it took so long to come out and look good because I am kind of at a point in my life where a watch is an unnecessary luxury item. Seth Nash might jump on it but for me I will just be content to know that some dreams really do come true eventually and with no effort on my own part.

I am a big fan of video games and even though I didn’t have my own proper system until the N64 I am fully aware of most of the older games even if I do not have as many hours as some of the hardcore fanboys out there. I stumbled upon this list of the most worthless powerups over at 1up and I find it to be totally awesome and hilarious. If you spent any time growing up with a NES or a Genesis then you should take a peek at this list. I laughed audibly…well actually snickered. Just wanted to say snickered.

So i was bumming around reading some of the different blogs that I subscribe to and came across a link through Uncrate that led me to ThinkGeek and one of the coolest nerdiest things of all time. This shirt has a built in speaker with a wired remote and pre-programmed music that comes with it. The first thing that I thought of when I saw it was the Family Guy episode where Peter got three wishes and one of them was to have his own personal soundtrack.

This shirt was all originally intended as an April Fools joke but apparently the geeks out there wanted it so bad that ThinkGeek is actually working on putting one into production. If nothing else at least watch the video that they made.

Ok so I was browsing around the internet today I was on digg and found some articles that lit my imagination on fire. The first one was so popular that the first server crashed and it is hosted on a mirror set up to alleviate the “digg effect” that is common especially to WordPress.

The list is about futuristic materials and I have to say that three really catch my mind. I have to be up front and say that the excerpts below are straight up copies from the list so go and support those guys who wrote it originally if they can get their server back up.

Aerogel - holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, more than any other material. Sometimes called “frozen smoke”, aerogel is made by the supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It’s 99.8% empty space, which makes it look semi-transparent. Aerogel is a fantastic insulator — if you had a shield of aerogel, you could easily defend yourself from a flamethrower. It stops cold, it stops heat. You could build a warm dome on the Moon. Aerogels have unbelievable surface area in their internal fractal structures — cubes of aerogel just an inch on a side may have an internal surface area equivalent to a football field. Despite its low density, aerogel has been looked into as a component of military armor because of its insulating properties.

Transparent Alumina – Three times stronger than steel and transparent. The number of applications for this are huge. Imagine an entire skyscraper or arcology made largely of transparent steel. The skylines of the future could look more like a series of floating black dots (opaque private rooms) rather than the monoliths of today. A huge space station made of transparent alumina could cruise in low Earth orbit without being a creepy black dot when it passes overhead. And hey… transparent swords!

Bulk Diamonds - We’re starting to lay down thick layers of diamond in CVD machines, hinting towards a future of bulk diamond machinery. Diamond is an ideal construction material — it’s immensely strong, light, made out of the widely available element carbon, nearly complete thermal conductivity, and has among the highest melting and boiling points of all materials. By introducing trace impurities, you can make a diamond practically any color you want. Imagine a jet, with hundreds of thousands of moving parts made of fine-tuned diamond machinery. Such a craft would be more powerful than today’s best fighter planes in the way an F-22 is better than the Red Baron’s Fokker Dr.I.

Also there is an article here about a system to think speech into a computer. It is in its early stages of development and can only detect about 150 words right now but this could explain all of those aliens in scifi movies that can seem to communicate with each other by thinking it is really just a cell phone for your brain and an appropriate receiver in you ear…totally sick.

So I was at a meeting over at our building from 9:00am until 11:45am. Yikes! We talked about so much stuff it was ridiculous but hooray for two things: My MacBook Pro and Mind Node. Most of you will know about the first one because we all know that Apple rocks my socks but less well known is this software called Mind Node.
I think that I might actually live up to my promise of including some or all of the little free add ons that I have that make my life so much easier on my mac. There are a lot and i will include links on the side bar so that they will always be there.