David Ely lives in Alexandria, VA, is left-handed, doesn't eat meat, wears corrective lenses, is a father, posts photos on Time lapse video of the snowfall DC got this weekend.
davextreme
It's Tumbelievable.
I Love the Whole World
- The World is Just Awesome, an ad by the Discovery Channel
- XKCD Loves the Discovery Channel
- The animated version
- Celebrity live action version by Elaine Doyle and Olga Nunes
Saturday Night Live: Burn Notice Game Show
I don’t know what precisely I like about this sketch, but I find it damn hilarious.
The Cult of Mexican Coca-Cola
Taqueria Nacional, on N. Capital Street, sells Coke from Mexico. The difference between corn syrup and sugar isn’t huge, but I prefer the sugary variety.
The Coca-Cola Company is by now quite familiar with the Mexican Coke cult. It is true, acknowledges a Coke spokesman, Scott Williamson, that different sweeteners are used by the company’s bottling partners in different parts of the world, for reasons having to do with price and availability. But, he says, “all of our consumer research indicates that from a taste standpoint, the difference is imperceptible.”
Photo by cnix
I got a case Heritage Dr. Pepper this weekend, and quite like it. I’d be happy if they switched the whole line to use sugar instead of corn syrup. I have no idea if the overall campaign, along with Pepsi’s “Throwback” drinks, has been successful, but I wonder if they’d have the guts to do it. Some people certainly prefer the corn syrup taste. Would they have a “New Coke” calibre fiasco on their hands if they changed their formula?
From the Soda Can Library, here’s what Dr. Pepper cans looked like in the 50s:
If you were wondering what the numbers “10”, “2”, and “4” on the can mean:
The 10-2-4 times as suggested above were indeed times to drink Dr. Pepper. This advertising campaign was based on research done by Dr. Eddy in the 1920’s that showed that a persons energy levels were at their lowest points during the day at 10:30am, 2:30pm, and 4:30pm. So drinking a Pepper and getting all that sugar just prior to those times would pep one up.
One last factoid: the Dr. Pepper logo doesn’t have a period after the “Dr”. (I use one because I’m not a cretin, of course.)
Biggest Snowstorms on Record for Mid-Atlantic US
This chart doesn’t have December 19, 2009’s 16.4″, which would take seventh place. The trend seems to be a major snowstorm every 5-8 years or so.
Getting Past "Good Enough" eBooks
“If you expect readers to pay $12.99 or more for an ebook, you must give them the same high-quality product they expect in the printed world.”
As with music and movies, the trick with converting to ebooks (and e-magazines, and e-newspapers) is not in developing the technology to read them, but in securing the rights for them (dealing with corporations and lawyers) and in getting the formatting just right (dealing with editors and designers used to the old way). See also Ben Hammersley’s “E-Books, the Bigger Problem”.
If you want to know the five “real” nominees, match them up with the five Best Director nominations. That gives you “Avatar,” “Hurt Locker,” “Inglourious Basterds,” “Precious” and “Up in the Air.
Roger Ebert (though I’d argue Cameron’s directing of Avatar is better than it is as a film).
Marco Arment Wonders About the Timing of iPad App Release
I was thinking about third-party iPad apps over the weekend. When I’d pictured using an iPad, I assumed I’d have NetNewsWire, Instapaper, and a Twitter client installed. But this assumes that they’ll all release iPad apps, and that they’ll be ready right away. The prospect of having an iPad that only runs Apple’s stock apps is much less attractive. Then again, It’s possible that the browsing experience on the larger screen will be good enough that using each service’s real website will be fine.
Bill Watterson, Creator of Beloved 'Calvin and Hobbes' Comic Strip Looks Back with No Regrets
Today is the 15th anniversary of the last Calvin & Hobbes strip. The Plain Dealer scores a short interview with creator Bill Watterson.
The End of Dollhouse
Well, Dollhouse is over, and I loved its crazy ending. The storytelling over the last half of the second season reminded me somewhat of Final Crisis’s “channel-zapping” approach: take out all the filler and just give us the action. Viewers can infer what happened in between. Geoff Klock on the final episodes:
But these guys did something I feel like I have never seen before — they went for goddamn broke. They took out the show bible, with all their best ideas for like the next five or six years or more — and ran ALL OF THEM in the last 5 episodes. Every episode became like a different season finale.
[…]
Dollhouse is a total mess, but I don’t think I have ever seen a TV show just go INSANE like that before and it was pretty awesome to watch.
Comics on the iPad
The iPad, as rumored, looks like it could be a great device for reading comics. But having a computer in the right size and form factor is only part of the battle. Someone has to develop an app for reading comics and negotiate deals with the publishers. Here, then, is my unsolicited advice to would-be digital comics providers.
- Use a standard format, if possible. Give us or ePub files so that they can be useful in other apps and easily backed up.
- Don’t try anything too fancy with flashy panel zooms. Just give us the full page and let us pinch and pan around using the iPad’s native gestures. And please, no animated motion comics.
- If held portrait, the iPad should give one page at a time. Landscape, we should see two pages at once, for double-page spreads.
- Offer individual issues for sale, and offer subscriptions to titles. I should be able to buy, say, just Green Lantern 50, or subscribe to it and be notified & charged whenever a new issue comes out.
- Ideally, if I have all my subscriptions set up, all I have to do is launch the app and start reading. It will automatically download and sync any new books.
- Charge whatever you want, as long as it’s cheaper than the print editions, and provide a discount for subscriptions. A comic that’s $3.99 in print needn’t be 99¢, but it shouldn’t be $3.75.
- Let me download any book I’ve purchased from any machine I log in from. If my iPad breaks, I shouldn’t have to worry about losing all my comics. File management should basically not exist, the app should just appear to have all of my comics on it. Maybe it really has only the unread and recent issues in local memory, but it downloads older books without me noticing.
- Publishers: don’t make your own app. No one wants to have to buy a DC app and a Marvel app and a Dark Horse app and an Image app.
- But avoid signing exclusive deals with a particular provider, unless, after a time, a true market leader in iPad apps emerges and it makes sense for everyone to use that one.
Right now, in order to buy a monthly comic, one has to go out and find a comic book store and make a special trip once a month. Generally this means that the only people reading comics are serious fans who read 10, 20, or 30 titles a month. Digital distribution combined with a handy device means that casual readers can dip in. Kids who can’t get their parents to drive them to a comic book store could use an iPad to read just Amazing Spider-Man with their allowance. Joss Whedon fans could read Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Season Eight, even if they have no interest in reading anything else. (Though by all means, suggest they read his Astonishing X-Men, and from there Grant Morrison’s New X-Men, his current Batman & Robin, etc.) There’s a huge difference, and thus opportunity, between someone having to go out and find a store vs. them already holding on in their hands. Whoever makes the most comprehensive, least flashy comic reader app will get my vote.
