Author: Chris Barrus

Take it to The Man

Victoria mentions a cool party idea that she and Johnzo are doing so in the interesting of meme propagation, I’m reposting here:

This Sunday evening, Johnzo and I are throwing a letter-writing party. Come on over and do your part to shame County Executive Sims into doing the right thing by the people who got him elected! Letter-writing for other causes is, of course, most welcome. Whether you want to get married, finally, after all these years; to urge stronger penalties for people involved in dog-fighting; to save the Hubble; or just to tell your local sewer commissioner that she’s doing a bang-up job, come on over and work that democracy-mojo. We commence at 7:00. Postage, envelopes, the internet, and stationery will all be available. If you don’t know where we live and want to come, respond to this and I’ll clue you in. I expect that most of you will be getting a redundant e-mail invite tomorrow. Bring friends, s.o.’s, parents, you name it. We want to pack the house.

The movie posters of Bob Peak

I’ve ranted about the sorry state of movie and DVD packaging before, and this collection of movie posters painted by Bob Peak in the 1970s and 1980s only highlights how crappy things are right now. Why can’t all movie posters look like this instead of some airbrushed gibbering celebrity head? I absolutely love this gonzo poster for Harry And Tonto:

peak-harryandtonto
[via MetaFilter]

Loop Feedback Loop at CLUI

clui-inductorloopAs a fan of both urban infrastructure and secret knowledge, I cannot recommend the current “Loop Feedback Loop” exhibit at the Center for Land Use Interpretation highly enough. The Los Angeles street and freeway network is such a complex system that it’s unmanageable without automated assistance and intervention which in turn feedback into the system by controlling traffic signals, etc. All the data from the surveillance cameras, embedded induction loops, and monitoring devices are transmitted to the LA Department of Transportation’s Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control (ATSAC) System – an underground “traffic war room” (all data centers need to have a Dr. Strangelove-sized “war room” where the central brain for the system is located.

The CLUI exhibit details all this plus you get to view real-time data and laugh at the one photo of the ATSAC center which shows one of the screens tuned to The People’s Court. And you’re also right next to the best specialized bookstore in Los Angeles.

Orange County battles the dihydrogen monoxide menace

Ladies and gentlemen, the Orange County education system at work:

City officials were so concerned about the potentially dangerous properties of dihydrogen monoxide that they considered banning foam cups after they learned the chemical was used in their production.

Then they learned, to their chagrin, that dihydrogen monoxide – H2O for short – is the scientific term for water.

“It’s embarrassing,” said City Manager David J. Norman. “We had a paralegal who did bad research.”

The paralegal apparently fell victim to one of the many official looking Web sites that have been put up by pranksters to describe dihydrogen monoxide as “an odorless, tasteless chemical” that can be deadly if accidentally inhaled.

Real Arrogant, Obnoxious, and occasionally Playing

Everyone’s been linking to Jogin’s spot-on rant on RealPlayer, but the follow-ups including a forwarded internal memo from Real and an email from a consultant who used to work for Real are a must read.

All of the issues you mention with regard to ease-of-use (or the lack thereof), super commercialism, and downright misleading customers were things that we addressed during this design program.

Real spent $2.5M in design fees and over a year and a half with my company. When the relationship ended we had produced detailed design documents that were about a foot high when stacked on top of one another. While we had designed solutions to all of these problems, Real ultimately chose to ignore them. Only some of the graphic design changes we recommended ever saw the light of day.

In my experience with Real, I found a company that had absolutely no respect for the user, that was supremely arrogant, and completely mismanaged by Rob Glazer and his team.

Though I have to smugly admit that the Mac OS X version of RealPlayer has no ads and has been very stable. Still, gimmie QuickTime though.

Brainless Reserve

I originally stumbled into Laura’s NYC Tales from MetaFilter’s story on the fallout of what happens when you get a celebrity’s old cell phone number (a potential Curb Your Enthusiam episode in the making). However I’m also a sucker for true-life tales of workplace dysfunction and her story of what happens when you work for a “futurist marketing consultancy and AmericaÂ’s foremost Trend expert” is horrifyingly priceless.