In two decades we'll know what they've done

The Disney company has had to eat some considerable amount of crow with regard to the Baby Einstein product line they acquired a while back, which seems not to do what it was touted as doing. All this infant video watching might have some other effect however, perhaps inspiring some to craft tightly-written family dramas, others to spectacular documentaries, and still others to agonizing historical montages we can only dream of now. Or they could grow to like CGI the way I have not.

Meet you at the food court

Greedy turtles swarming from Ivan Kwan on Vimeo.

This is what it feels like to go to a shopping mall around here on a Saturday, recession or no recession. Except for the water, which the mall management replaces with cold air.

Unreal pennyloafer edition

Attention Flash game developers: Please create a first person hurler game in which one's goal is to toss footwear at various major world leaders, earning points if you score a solid hit. In easy mode, you just throw and try to hit stationary heads of state, in medium they will dodge and try to take cover behind furniture, and in hard there should be aides and allies attempting to shield their commanders.

As you go up in level, maybe you might progress from sandals to sneakers to espadrilles to pumps to stilettos. Not sure where steel-toed boots would fit into the sequence, but I would guess that clogs would require some sort of cheat code.

I am sure someone who's written these kinds of things in the past could hack something out in an afternoon's worth of work.

Let's help you get one of these babies

I found a YouTube item on an advanced artificial heart. Do you notice anything unusual about the ad next to it?

A post for the informed customer

When considering a major purchase such as a router, it is important to consider the pluses and minuses of the different offerings. So as a public service, here's a rundown of two major manufacturers' offerings.

Cisco ASE 1000 series	Festool OF 1010, OF 1400, OF 2200, MFK700
Processing power in 1U format	Dust collection
High availability	Depth adjustment
Scalable service intelligence	Guide rail compatibility
Granular real-time policy and traffic management	Tool-less changes
Quantum Flow Processor	Ratcheting collet
Scalable and flexible packet processing	MMC electronics
Unified firewall	Engineering & Design

I was a little disappointed that neither vendor addressed the really important questions posed by average consumers: Does it come in teal or in burgundy? What kinds of questions will you get from TSA when you try to bring on onto an airplane? Which one would reach the ground first when dropped from a second-storey window?

Caution, military-grade earworms ahead

I would love to be able to do a mashup of a 1970's sitcom

with a stately funeral march

just so that it could be titled Marcia Marcia Marcia Funebre.

My rebus won!

David of Ironic Sans had two Joost invitations to give away, so he set up a two part contest for his readers. I posted my movie-themed rebus and won part II! (Mouseover the link if you need a hint on what it means.)

Have a rebus to share? Post a link to it in the comments. Maybe I'll do the same. Just don't put anything up that looks like you're sending encoded messages to a terrorist cell which might attract unwanted attention by the authorities. (Hmmm.)

I shall give Joost video-on-demand beta a whirl and post something here about my impressions. You can find out a little more about Joost over at Ironic Sans or by doing a search. And if I need to give away any invitations, you'll find out about it here on the blog.

They smile in your face

The TSA's new backscatter X-ray scanning system might be much more popular if they put out some TV spots with a fabulous vintage background audio track.

As long as people don't listen to the words, that is. Let's see the mashup, people.

Vroom vroom

More along the lines of things stop working: my 2 year old electric toothbrush started acting weird the night before last.

So it's not just a matter of a short, which would have it running all of the time, or a broken wire, which might make it run none of the time. Instead, it's decided it wants to run all the time whenever it's away from its charger. How does that happen?

So now I pull the tip off while the thing is docked, smush a tiny amount of toothpaste on the brush part, then in one motion pick up the toothbrush and apply it to my teeth before the toothpaste starts flying all over. It still does that little pulse thing at the two minute mark, so the control electronics aren't completely fried. Then I've got to put the thing back on the charger so it'll shut down, pull the tip off for washing, then reassemble it. Or sometimes to avoid the hassle I go into the other bathroom and use my plain old non-electric brush (which would make my hygienist unhappy if she knew).

I was trying to think of some aspect whereby this new behavior might be an advantage, and the only thing I could come up with is that it would be considerably harder for a burglar to steal my toothbrush undetected. Otherwise, nothing.

Shaving without commitment

I like my own hair just fine, but I don't have a problem with the idea of parting with it should the occasion arise. But what would be the most prudent way to proceed?
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I saw a HeadBlade in the store the other day and thought to myself, "I might try that if I knew that I could change back if I didn't like the way my head looked." That's when I came up with the idea of a razor with undo.

The way it would work would be to mate an electric or non-electric razor with a can of spray-on hair in the color of your existing hair. If you make a mistake and take off more than you actually want, you would flip a switch on the thing so that you could reforest the bad spot with a bit of spray-on. To go even higher-tech, one could imagine a gadget that collects and cleans the little hairs being shaved off, so that when you hit the undo button they could be stuck back on, assuring an absolutely perfect color match to what you had before. Assuming that that was what you wanted (think bad dye jobs). It would be like having CTRL-Z for your head! (Geeks know what I mean by that.)

It would also be great for persons undergoing sudden hair loss (such as during chemotherapy), to get rid of the weak hair and replace it with something more durable.

I think it might also work in the case of shaving one's face, though am somewhat dubious about how convincing the spray-on stuff would be in emulating a beard, let alone a mustache. It might be good in combating the problem of uneven sideburns, perhaps.

I know that there are women who shave their heads also, but I think it might be a savvier marketing idea to go after the much larger segment which shave their legs. I find it unlikely that they would have much reason to restore the hair, but I understand that some people have problems with cuts during this procedure, so I think the obvious choice would be to mate a razor with antiseptic and spray-on skin. As soon as one felt or saw a little nick, a spritz of this and a spritz of that should set you right.

Also would be nice to have: software to let you know what your bald head would look like beforehand. But that would be the subject of a different post altogether.

Attention, Gnarls Barkley

How about a latte art remix of Crazy? I think it should be possible.