Pelanne.Com

Another excellent ad, this one came out a few months ago for Honda.

To me, it’s a television commercial example of what the internet seems to sprout just about every day - that good entertainment is SO not about how gargantuan your special effects budget is, or what celeb identity you are throwing into the mix. It’s all about the great (and even better, simple - and even BETTER, lightly absurd) idea.

Behold, a crab and a car conversing:

Hopefully, it makes you say “I pinch” the rest of the day.

This has got to be one of my favorite commercials of all time. I think it came out a couple of superbowls ago - kudos to whomever EDS used as their creative team for this commercial. Literally - a pile of the snack bars on a silver platter - they deserve it.

Feel like a cat herder sometimes? Ah well, that’s what vacations are for, no?

Ah, David Attenborough. His nature films both thrilled and terrified me as a youth. Even today, my hand twitches involuntarily towards the remote when I see footage of a peacefully grazing wildebeast which then pans to a creeping lioness.

Here, a slightly more weathered and grizzled David Attenborough introduces us to an amazing Australian bird which imitates what it hears even better than the overworked and underpaid parrots you might find relaxing in the local pet store.

Speaking of Australia, if you haven’t read In A Sunburnt Country by Bill Bryson, you should definitely pick it up - his writing is very entertaining.

Hehe….this is an alternate take on the ole Mac vs PC commercials that have been airing lately. I’ve never quite understood the “you have to reboot it less” argument. I think I probably reboot for performace or to fix some app screwup once every few weeks at most - there’s no need to shut a computer down anyways, that’s what hibernate mode is for!

Click to view the movie clip as served up by the ever entertaining Break.com:

Performed the installation of an Axis webcam at the local airport this week. If you’re looking for a (relatively) cheap webcam which works nicely and is very configurable, I can certainly recommend the 207W (wireless).

Unlike most webcams, which blindly push video to a viewer application, the Axis is one of a breed of IP webcams, which means that they essentially have a small web server (Apache, running on embedded Linux) running on them, and can be assigned an IP address. THIS means that it can be easily placed on a network, and it’s address can be passed out (usually via inclusion of the image in a web page) with no muss or fuss.

It handles ten concurrent users right out of the box, and is happy to stream its video over wireless, which means you’re only limited by the range of your wireless network and the location of power. Multicasting can get your image stream out to tons more, if needed.

Finally, it offers the choice of motion jpeg (I’d never heard of that before, but it’s copmpletely awesome - think animated image that never stops loading) for Firefox, and Java Applet, or ActiveX (bleah) for anyone else, as well as scheduled FTP of the image if you don’t want to stream. Cost is in the mid $200’s. If you want to see an axis stream which can support lots of people, check out the VT Drillfield Camera, right down the road.

At the company I work for, we’ve always had the “parts and people within 4 hours, 24/7″ service for our production servers, but have never had to use it. In the last several weeks, we had to use it three times for one server that was being particularly ornery.

While that in itself may not speak so well as to the parts, which seem to tend toward the realm of refurbs, the SERVICE that they contract (in this case through Unisys) is absolutely top notch, as well as the shipping policy. We had parts arrive within 5 minutes of the technicians, having just been driven 180 miles by a courier, to be there at a time of my choosing.

The technicians were able to replace motherboards, riser cards, vram, RAM, and multiple CPUs in 20 minutes. AND they waited around to make sure the software ran on top of it. Amazing.