Brian May: ‘Freddie Mercury will appear in ‘We Will Rock You’ but not as a hologram’ | News | NME.COM: “Brian May of Queen has said that the band’s late frontman Freddie Mercury will appear as an ‘optical illusion’ in a special 10th anniversary performance of the band’s own musical We Will Rock You.”
I don’t know how I feel about this.
What Does Ashton Kutcher’s Popchips Gaffe Have to Do With the Tech Bubble? Plenty – Forbes: “Is Kutcher ‘brilliant’? I have no idea. If he is, it only goes to show that being really smart at knowing which start-ups to invest in and how to get people to follow you on Twitter (hint: being famous and being married to someone else who’s famous doesn’t hurt) doesn’t automatically translate to being smart in other areas.”
I have to wonder if Jeff Bercovici or anyone else who thinks Kutcher’s PopChips video was a “gaffe” have ever seen an episode of the Tracey Ullman show? And that’s hardly the only example.
What I saw was a comic actor testing his chops, able to indulge himself in a way that’s smart and technically savvy, even if his characters were sometimes wince-inducing. Certainly sounds like someone with a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in modern culture, “brilliant” appellations aside.
Let me say at the outset that I’m peculiarly brand-loyal to Gillette. Perhaps no other company has evoked in me such strong loyalty save Apple. I’ve been using their men’s care products for most of my adult life.
Gillette, of course, tries to find new ways to get people to buy their products every few years. Along with Schick they add new blades to their disposable razor refills, lubricating gel-strips, even powering up their razors using AAA batteries. For the most part, this stuff passes me by – I’m just interested in a simple shave, both my face (away from my beard) and my head. And to that end for several years I’ve stuck with Gillette’s Fusion products. Because that’s what’s worked best for me and I don’t see a need to change.
I have to admit that I’ve been strongly tempted to start doing business with Dollar Shave Club, however. Their clever promotional video went viral on the Internet and their fair pricing for razor refills seemed like a much better alternative than the Gillette refills I’ve been buying. I’ve heard from several Dollar Shave Club customers who are perfectly satisfied.
Then something happened. Gillette started advertising a new device called the Fusion ProGlide Styler. TV ad spots feature Adrian Brody, Andre 3000 and Gael Garcia Bernal, using the device to trim their beards and goatees.
I’m not black and don’t have Brody or Bernal’s coloring, but I’ve worn a goat for years. I’ve been through my share of products from Remington, Norelco, Schick and others designed for beard-wearers, so I was actually a bit excited to see Gillette produce a device specifically for this purpose.
About a week ago I was in the local pharmacy and I saw the Styler on sale for $5 off its regular price of $20. Figuring that’s the best deal I’m likely to get for a while, I snagged one. I haven’t been disappointed.
The Fusion ProGlide Styler is a battery-powered beard trimmer that comes with four attachments. All four are plastic, and clip on and snap off with a button on one side of the Styler. Three of them are designed to trim beards to different lengths. One is equipped with a Fusion ProGlide disposable blade, for shaving the rest of the face.
When beard-trimming, you use the power button to activate a Braun-designed “Power Trimmer.” With the razor attachment, the power trimmer vibrates the Styler with “micro pulses” similar to Gillette’s Fusion Power razor – Gillette claims these pulses make the blades glide more smoothly across the skin with less irritation.
The Styler is watertight, so you can use it in the shower and immerse it if you need to. The trimmer door opens so you can rinse any hair that’s collected under the faucet.
The Styler is edged with black rubber to make it easy to grip when it’s wet, and it has a solid feel that’s chunkier than a regular razor but not unpleasant to hold.
So far, the Gillette ProGlide Styler has replaced two products that used to sit on my bathroom sink – a rechargeable Norelco hair trimmer with no less than a half dozen attachments, and a Gillette Fusion razor. But perhaps more importantly for Gillette, it continues my loyalty to their products at a time when it’s easier than ever to stray.
Finding Goatse: The Mystery Man Behind the Most Disturbing Internet Meme in History: “Sometime in the late 20th century a naked man bent over, spread his ass and took a picture. Eventually that picture, known as Goatse, became one of the most venerable memes in internet history. Who is this man, and how did his ass take over the internet?”
Having inflicted Goatse on more than my share of victims friends over the years and generally finding mirth in the indescribably vile underbelly of the Internet, I have to give Adrian Chen props for going this deep (pardon the pun) to find out the backstory behind the Goatse guy. It’s more than that, though – if you’ve been on the Internet for a long time and you’ve ever wondered how weird, horrible pictures get spread and memes get started, this is worth a read.
Back in 2010 I bought a pair of Monster “Beats by Dr. Dre” Studio headphones. I splurged a bit, admittedly – I wanted a pair of good over-the-ear headphones, and I liked the noise canceling and rich bass sound of the Studios model.
They’ve worked fine, up until a month or two ago, when I noticed they were developing a problem in one ear – depending on how I shifted my head, I could hear a crackling sound that may be a bad connection.
I tried a different cable and a few other things to troubleshoot, but ran out of steam pretty quickly, so I consulted their Web site. Couldn’t get anywhere, so I decided to ping Monster about getting them fixed.
My request went into a black hole. A week went by and there was no response.
Last night I finally heard back from them:
We do apologize for the delay in response, this is our busiest time of the year and we are experiencing a large amount of emails daily. Unfortunately, we do not have any repair centers nor do we know of any place that offers servicing on our products.
Welp, so much for that. Please consider that if you’re planning on buying headphones or anything else with Monster on the label.
Not Andy Partridge (no, not THAT Andy Partridge) offered up his own take on Depeche Mode’s dark synth pop classic “Behind the Wheel.” Instrumental. Lots of fun to listen to.
Lately I’ve been having trouble getting the TiVo to do things like season passes without doing what a Twitter follower of mine calls the “spinning blue wheel of doing fuck-all.” The only solution I’ve found is to shut off the HD menus on my Premiere box – the problem doesn’t happen in SD menus, which lack picture-in-picture and use a different UI.
Really frustrating because this box has been working fine since the latest major software update. Looks like I’m going to have to call TiVo customer service to figure it out.
I hate going straight to the punchline, but Charles Arthur distinctly encapsulates a pervasive phenomenon in today’s tech startup culture.
OH HAI SEXISM · charlesarthur · Storify: “Seriously, though: this whole thread – which might be atypical; Katz and Sanz may be the most anti-sexist people ever to walk the earth – typifies a form of thinking that in itself answers the question “why are there so few women in technology?”
You realise that perhaps part of the answer might be: because there are so many men.”
My problems with major appliances this past week have left one of my Twitter followers to suggest that maybe the house is build on an old Indian burial mound. In the space of two months, the Kenmore refrigerator has died twice, the Samsung television needed repair and, most recently, the Whirlpool dryer crapped out.
The dryer is a six-year-old gas-heated model. Not under warranty any longer; not the newest but not old enough to replace, either. So I called Whirlpool to find out about servicing the unit.
After stepping me through the likely repair costs – $129 plus the cost of parts, the customer service rep suggested a different flat-rate plan that would cover me for 12 months for $259. And if the cost of repair were less than that, I could call the company to refund the difference. Seeing as how I didn’t have anything to lose, I decided to fork over the $259.
“OK, the soonest we can get someone out is…the 30th.”
A week from tomorrow. In the meantime, I have wet clothes mouldering in the basement.
I told her I wanted to cancel the contract – I’ll just call someone local who can do the repair more quickly. For that, she told me, I’d have to call another number.
The transaction was barely a minute before, but she lacked the ability to cancel it. Once it was done, that was it.
So I called, waited, and talked with someone. After I was put on hold and transferred, I was told I had called the wrong number and was given a third number to try.
Which I did. By this point I was steaming. But after I explained the situation, the rep told me the contract would be “same-day cancelled.”
Nearly an hour after I started, I was temporarily $259 poorer, much more frustrated and no closer to having my dryer fixed than before.
I ended up calling a local repair service which told me they’ll be out to fix the dryer tomorrow. In the interim we’ll run what we need to at the dryers at the nearby laundromat.
Look, I’m not unreasonable. I understand logistics for large-volume consumer-facing companies. Obviously there’s no sense in giving someone the ability to schedule a service call until the call has been paid for.
But for Whirlpool to make me jump through the additional hoops of having to call a different department (and giving me the wrong number on top of it) is inexcusably poor customer service.
I’m glad, in retrospect, that the fourth person I spoke with was able to at least cancel the transaction. I just wish it hadn’t gotten that far.
I’ve used Whirlpool appliances for most of my adult life – my wife’s insisted on them. When we needed to replace our washing machine last year, it was with another Whirlpool unit. And our dishwasher is a Whirlpool model as well. But I’m having serious misgivings about ever giving the company another dime of my money. Getting their products fixed shouldn’t be this much of a hassle.
It is, perhaps, a bit unfair of me to throw in my two cents’ worth about WordCamp Boston 2011, since I didn’t go to either the Saturday night reception at the Microsoft NERD Center or the Sunday sessions. But I got a lot out of it anyway, so I’ll do it.
Second year for WordCamp in Boston. The organization and the venue – the George Sherman Hall at BU – were better than last year by a long shot. Parking was a bit sketchy. Having to walk a few blocks in blasting July heat was unpleasant.
Sessions, overall, were good. 45 minutes isn’t a lot of time to impart knowledge and wisdom to a mixed crowd with many different levels of experience and interest, and I give credit to all the presenters for even trying.
Overall, my absolute favorite session was Chris Penn’s, entitled “How to Market Your Blog (okay, Mom’s reading, now what)?” Penn’s enthusiasm for the subject is unparalleled, and he managed to compress a huge amount of information down to a very short period without making it feel like he’d cheated the audience at all by glossing over stuff. I’d happily pay to see him again. (I bought his Kindle book.)
I was, however, disappointed with several speakers who made dismissive, limp recommendations for specific plug-ins. “Well, there are many to choose from” was a common refrain. That’s a bullshit excuse. One of the things I’m paying for, as an attendee, is curation – I want someone who’s experienced with the platform to tell me what to do and how to get the most out of it.
All told, there were two periods during the day where I had to make difficult decisions about which session I would attend, since there were overlapping ones that both interested me. I consider that a sign of a good show – if there’s too much to do, then that’s good. There was one spot towards the end of the day where nothing interested me, so there’s some room for improvement there.
The main problem I had was logistics. Since it was a two-day event, I had to commute in from Cape Cod both days; on Sunday, Bonnie and I got up late, and I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle of fighting through off-Cape traffic and back up to Boston to go back up. I regret that, but it may give me an incentive next year to book a nearby hotel overnight.
That need to go back and forth is also the reason we begged off the reception. I don’t quite understand why the reception was held at the NERD Center – requiring us to vacate our parking space, travel across the Charles River and pay for parking again – instead of a venue closer to BU. But whatever. Sounds like many of those who made it had a great time.