Take this quiz and see if you can tell the difference. It’s tougher than it looks. Link via b3ta.
If you’re going to make fun of a large corporation…
…make sure you at least have the fonts they use for their logos.
Fun with the airport staff
From the site:
We’d go and sit on the balcony at Terminal 3 at Heathrow Airport, directly under one of the PA speakers where we put a tape machine in a bag with the microphone poking out of the top. Then we’d look for a flight that had arrived in the last 40 minutes from somewhere where you’d expect people with unpronounceable names i.e. Saudi Arabia.
We would then go to the Airport Help Desk with a pre-written note containing the names of fictitious passengers and ask them to read out the names over the PA system.
The passenger’s names looked innocent enough on paper but they sounded like something else when read out loud.
For example: Looks like: Makollig Jezvahted and Levdaroum DeBahzted. Reads Like: My colleague just farted, and left the room, the bastard. The site has sound files as well. Good stuff.
If you’re looking for a custom license plate idea
See what other people have done first. I’m amazed the things people have come up with with such little amount of letters and characters to work with.
Does this link work for you?
OK, I’m having trouble with a server here at work, and I’m 90% sure it’s a problem with the secure certificate on the server and not the firewall (like the guy at InstantSSL keeps saying it is). Head to this link. You’ll probably get SSL certificate errors, if it lets you through, but please post a comment and let me know if it lets you through and you see some standard disclaimer text. Please post with what browser and operating system (and versions) you are using so I can verify the problem. Thanks!
Update: If you can’t get to the above address (and you’ve tried a few browsers), try this one.
Trillian 2.0 Beta Released
Thanks to Neil for pointing this out (and I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner, as I’ve been checking their site daily for about a month). Trillian is a project I’ve supported since v0.5. It’s great chunk of software that allows me to get on all the IM networks in one program (see my handles here). And they’ve finally released a 2.0 Beta (for Pro members only). I’ll be installing it later, and I just hope my favorite skin decides to update to take advantage of some new features of the beta (but I can’t really talk about them too much because of an NDA imposed on beta folks). Now if I can just remember my Jabber username and password…
The history of Internet awards, and specifics for newspapers
Mark Glaser writes great online media commentary, and this column is no different. If you’ve ever worked for a newspaper or other major media outlet, you’ll understand what he’s talking about: Newspapers, like many other industries, have tons of industry awards. If you enter all the contests, you’re bound to win something. The same holds true for Web sites. Like Glaser, I too remember when everybody was a Lycos Top 5% site.
Basically, what’s happening is that the value of awards is going down. The other problem, writes Glaser, is that newspaper awards more about “bells & whistles” on online-news sites rather than excellent writing for the medium.
I agree and disagree. While writing for the online medium is generally shovel-ware from the print addition, I agree with Steve Outing on this one: online writing is important, but I think I’d give the awards to the folks who take advantage of the medium to its fullest — from the writing, but also the multimedia aspects that are possible. Extra writing for the Web is not what’s going to attract and keep readers on your site, but a good video or interactive presentation will.
If you’re going to pirate and e-mail a book, don’t use MS Word
Because it tracks its users pretty well. From the story:
As you may know, Jamie Oliver bills himself as the “Naked Chef”. Quite the thing among those to like TV cooking shows.
There’s a Word document floating around the Internet that claims to be a copy of Jamie’s next book. The Times reports that it’s a hoax, and the Word doc contains previously-published recipes from Jamie’s earlier books. Jamie’s publishers aren’t amused. They stand to lose a considerable amount of money if people think that they already have a copy of Jamie’s latest cookbook. Who assembled this rip-off?
He goes on to examine the document, looking at the hidden fields in Word documents, and provides some interesting insight as to what a MS Word document really holds, other than your document.