My weekend project which turned into my multi-weekend project: the nookbook. I took a standard hardback sketchbook from the nearby art store, carved up its guts, used a little Mod Podge, and had myself a pretty nifty (if I do say so myself) protective case for my new nook.

I was hoping to use a Moleskine because I liked the idea of having the built-in rubber band that holds it closed, but the Moleskine dimensions didn’t match up correctly with the size of the nook. So I did the next best thing – found an old Moleskine, tore it to pieces in order to steal the rubber band and the built-in fabric bookmark and re-purposed it for the perfectly sized Cachet sketchbook, et voila:

Immediately after I finished my project, I came across the Book Book which puts my creation to shame. I now have more work to do to up the ante, but that’ll have to wait for another weekend.

Besides, Kurt seems to like mine just fine:

Yahoo! and T-Mobile are both getting all up in your business. Or “you” business, more specifically. Both have recently launched new campaigns that are all about “you” and they’re both getting a lot of attention, mostly because there’s clearly a lot of money behind them – Yahoo!’s money is in the form of a worldwide multimedia campaign and T-Mobile’s is in the form of Whoopi, Phil Jackson and a guy who buys pants for someone 4 inches taller than himself.

The YLou campaign is being panned for pretty obvious reasons. Such as, who is YLou? Or how could they expect offline advertising to drive online traffic? (I guess Bing sort of pulled it off, right?) But most importantly, what is Yahoo! trying to actually say in these ads? What’s the message? According to the commercial, “you’re about to enter a place where time and space collide.” I believe that’s called reality, and it’s a universal constant. Also, it’s a Rush lyric, according to the first result in my search on Yahoo.com. These ads don’t tell me why I should want to go to Yahoo!, but they do make me want to get out and play some soccer and visit India.



While Yahoo! may be “Y!ou”, T-Mobile’s new phone is “100% you”, which I believe is the maximum amount of “you” one can hope to attain. So the My Touch is more “you” than “Y!ou”.


While I’m not positive about what “100% me” really is in the context of a cell phone, I can only infer that the My Touch is the technological embodiment of my personality, which in Phil Jackson’s case means a delicately balanced stack of pebbles….



Or in Whoopi’s case, a deep-seated resentment that she lost out to Eddie Murphy for the role of a lifetime…




The only thing I really know about the My Touch at this point is that I can customize the wallpaper, which really isn’t all that revolutionary, so I think for now I’ll be sticking with my BlackBerry despite the fact that it only feels about 50% me.

What’s more sad, that I got that far or that I didn’t get it all?

In this classic picture from a 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics magazine, scientists from the RAND corporation displayed their model vision of the home computer in the year 2004. According to the caption, due to advances like the teletype interface and the Fortran language, “the computer will be easy to use”. Hindsight is 20/20, and in this case, I’d have to say the scientists hit the nail right on the head. Where would we be right now without Fortran? Lost. Utterly and totally lost.

The scientists who came up with this brilliant concept did offer a few caveats:
1) The needed technology may not be economically feasible for the average home. 2) The computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work. And 3) They have no fucking idea what that giant wheel is going to be used for, but it looks sweet.

I subscribe to a weekly email from Wired magazine. Included was a link to a Gizmodo blog entry about what sounds like an interesting technology for use in digital cameras. Bizarrely, I immediately recognized the picture accompanying the entry:

Not only have I seen that picture before, I’m in it. You may recognize me as the right-most blurry blob.

The picture is from a rugby match I played in with the NU rugby team back in 2002 while we were on tour in Andorra. The original image can be seen here: blurry lineout. I’m the blurry number 6.

The real question is, what in the hell is that picture doing in this Gizmodo entry? How was this picture found by some random Gizmodo editor? I did a google image search on “blurry photo”, and this picture actually came up on the 3rd page, so maybe this is all just a crazy coincidence. Go figure.

[Gizmodo: No More Blurry Pics?]
[NU Rugby]

I imagine their conversation went something like this:

Albert Hubo: (synthesized robot voice) Nice to meet you, Mr. President

Dubya: Well it sure is nice to meet you, too, Einstein, Einey… Can I call you “Einey”? We sure do appreciate you inventing gravity for us. Keep up the good work.

[Yahoo! News Photo]

With the wonders of galvanic vestibular stimulation at our fingertips, soon we’ll be able to pop a headset on someone and control their movements with a remote control…[CNN.com - Japan developing remote control for humans - Oct 25, 2005]