Archive for smile

Snowing in Florida? Let’s investigate

Jan 9 | by Sam Deeks | WOW!, smile
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Has it really snowed in Florida? Or is this just another ‘wildfire’ Google trend gone mad?

Lets investigate.

First, there’s this picture which I’m told is of a man sunbathing in the snow on Daytona Beach.  Suspicious.

Second, there are several blog reports here, here, here, here, here (lols), and here as well as Flickr photosets that seem to show that it has, indeed, been snowing in the Sunshine State.

It could just be a moment of madness showing up as a Google trend.  Mind you, I’ve just been for a walk with my cat in the thick snow in the UK, so anything’s possible I suppose.

Personally, I believe the Daytona Beach News Journal.  If anyone should know, they should.

Snow in Florida.  Who would have believed it?

Monster Tuna picture? Nope. Just a bit of photoShop, Tokyo style

Jan 5 | by Sam Deeks | critical approach to online media, media, smile
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Someone caught the worlds’ biggest tuna – and forgot to take a picture? Huh?

Can you believe it?

I saw this news item on BBC website and immediately clicked, expecting (not unreasonably) to see a monster tuna.  All I got was some stock photography of a tuna processing plant.  I went to Google but couldn’t find any pictures, anywhere.  Just more text reports and fishery shots – like this.  What??  A story without a picture?  What’s that worth?  Like, er, nothing?  According to the BBC, their fish weighed ‘nearly four times as much as the average Japanese man’ so, in the absence of any real pictures, I thought I’d help out with my mock-up.

The whole thing smells fishy to me.  I mean, you wouldn’t believe your mate if he came back from fishing with a story about the 232kg fish that got away, would you?

So imagine my surprise to Google this – a 268kg tuna, pictured next to a small kid.  Hang on BBC – that’s 36kg bigger than your ‘record breaking’, invisible, monster.

I know which story I believe.

“hp computers are racist” – this is very funny and interesting

Dec 25 | by Sam Deeks | smile, what do you think?
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HP computer’s webcam ‘prefers’ white people to black people. Does that make it racist?

This is going viral on YouTube – and no surprise. The fact that the software / hardware can’t identify Black Desi but happily tracks and follows White Wanda is quite amazing. In the video, Desi is good humoured (if a little surprised).

In the wider world, however, this of course raises some big questions about the unchallenged assumptions that are what we mean when we say ‘institutionalised racism’. Whether or not it’s the truth, it’s all too easy to imagine a cluster of young, white geeky guys developing this technology. If it is true, then it gives us a glimpse of an unconscious aspect of racism: that if we’re white, we just don’t just think about being black.

In terms of online reputation, how HP handles this from here on in will be telling – and hugely important. All I can say is that I hope they deal with it with the same mixture of lightness, seriousness and openness as Desi and Wanda did.

On first investigation, I can’t find much response from HP.  There is this… and Mashable goes into more detail here….  Mashable seems to just want to write it off as a technological failing.  I disagree. I think it’s more revealing than that.

And is anyone else surprised that HP didn’t respond in the same medium (YouTube) the way that Domino’s did over that infamous YouTube video?

Adressbuch-Schwindler. Couldn’t have put it better myself

Dec 7 | by Sam Deeks | smile
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Expo Guide, World Business Directory et al – you’re a bunch of ‘Adressbuch-Schwindleren’ :-)

I love German, don’t you?  A real ’say-it-like-it-is’ construction kit of a language.  They don’t piss about with euphemisms and veiled descriptions for things.  They just bolt together enough words to get the job done (in the order that they think of them).

Business directory scams? “Address book swindlers” more like!

Fantastiche!

Swine Flu Kills Healthy People!

Jul 23 | by Sam Deeks | media, news, smile
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Look out Healthy People, swine flu wants to Kill You!

So says the Evening Standard headline I spotted at Paddington tonight. I love headlines – especially when they’re so deliciously over the top.

‘Swine flu kills healthy people’ is ’stating the bleedin’ obvious’ as Basil Fawlty might have said. It’s also the journalistic equivalent of ‘Defcon 4′. Logjcally, there’s only one place to go after that headline. “Official: End Of World”.

But it’s not just the apocalyptic that amuses me but those damn headlines that catch your eye like a virus you can never quite get rid of. Ones like the surreal and inexplicably pleasing “Fish Spillage”.

Years later, I still find myself trying to picture that event. ;-)

Skype Spam: top marks for politeness

Jun 7 | by Sam Deeks | smile
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skypespamSkype Spammer exhibits manners and sense of humour

I got interrupted with a Skype IM spammer earlier today.  You know, one of those guys who happens to be holding the countless millions of dollars left to you by the brother you never knew you had?

I thought I’d send a quick response summarising my feelings.  So I did – and got a chirpy reply back.  How nice.  Who said these scammers don’t have at least a sense of humour!

And that name rings a bell, too.

Keeping an eye on space rocks (and how they’re spelled)

Mar 31 | by Sam Deeks | smile
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I’m keeping an eye on how hard it is to spell ‘meteorite’.  Maybe that’s why NASA calls them ’space rocks’?

I picked this piece up on the NASA site via Twitter (following Astronautics).


Moral of this story is: don’t give up, you’ll get there eventually.

When Alan Shepard was asked what was going through his mind sitting on the launch pad at the Cape in his Mercury capsule, his answer was ‘The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.’ (Interestingly, John Glenn also said the same thing many years later after his return to space aboard the Shuttle).

What would be going through my mind?  That my spaceship’s been put together by people who can’t spell meteorite. :-)

The Credit Crunch – explained brilliantly in pictures

Mar 10 | by Sam Deeks | WOW!, business insight, smile
1 Comment

Jonathan Jarvis makes sense of the credit crunch – awesome.  This should be compulsory viewing


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

This animation is one of the best things I’ve seen online.  Brilliant.  A spellbinding way to show the greedy, self-destructive madness of selling risk onwards for bigger an bigger profit.

There are parts of this animation that I think might be slightly inaccurate but I don’t think it detracts from the power of the piece. I’m not a financier, but when he talks about leverage, I think he misses the point that leverage isn’t just about getting the same level of profit from more volume but using volume to achieve a better buying price – and hence making more profit.

Details aside, the animation still hits the issue right between the eyes.  Watch it and tell me you didn’t go “Yesss!!!” at some point. :-)

SiliconGranny: watch out young techno twerps

Feb 17 | by Sam Deeks | news, smile
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Here comes The Silicon Granny

Take one talented 65 year-old woman (my mum) and point her in a different direction where her skills can make a difference.  Result? The Silicon Granny.  She’s web-savvy, digitally-equipped and mad as hell that older people don’t get to enjoy all that technology has to offer.  Yet.

We’re going to have some fun with this site. We might as well.  Life’s too short.  Given her age – and I don’t mean to be insensitive about this – SiliconGranny is something of a time-limited proposition :-)

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