Author: Aaron Weber

The Next Hip Beer

And from the “none of the above” category, Tiger Beer, from Singapore, makes a strong appearance. They have their own soccer team. They sponsor various art and extreme sports events. Their logo has a powerful animal on it. They are unknown and have no baggage. And, when very cold, the beer tastes damn good.

Conference: Windows Vista Notes

I was out at Gartner ITExpo this past week, where I got to see a hands-on preview of the new Windows, due out some time this decade. It was OK. Major points:

They’re using thumbnail images for everything: hover over an item in the taskbar, and instead of a tooltip you get a thumbnail image of the window it represents. Use alt-tab to switch windows and get a thumbnail image of each window you’re switching between, instead of just icons of the apps. Open a file folder and the document icons are thumbnails of the documents (note: Nautilus has had this since 2000; it’s not that helpful, although it’s nice for image browsing).

They are using 3d somewhat effectively: hit Win-Tab instead of Alt-Tab, and all the windows line up and turn on their sides at a 45 degree angle so you can scroll easily among them with the scroll wheel. That’s a nice touch, although something of a gimmick and no more effective than Alt-Tab.

Search is everywhere: this is the really hyped one. Obviously there’s a search bar in every file browser window. But also there’s a search bar in the control center, so if you can’t remember where the parental controls are, you can search for “parent” or “child” or “security” and it will show you the relevant items. All the apps and so forth have metadata assigned to their launchers, apparently. In the file browser (Windows Explorer, I guess), the data columns include things like “Document Author” and there are extensive grouping and sorting options, as well as searching by metadata. I wondered where all this metadata came from. You can apparently assign keywords to files, but do you have to do that to each file for all this new search to be useful? If so, lame. If not, what do they use to magically generate data? I know Office assigns Author keywords to its files… but is that it? Is that the extent of the metadata magic?

Oh, and they have virtual folders (saved searches) in the file browser. That’s nice, although I doubt it’ll get used that much.

One neat thing in Explorer that Nautilus could use is, when you select a file, you get a little extra info about it in the sidebar. A larger thumbnail, some metadata, the “detail” view. That’s a nice feature. Nothing revolutionary though.

IE has been updated: Oooh, tabbed browsing, nice to see they’ve got that finally. One good addition is a tab that shows thumbnails (here they are again!) of all the tabs you have open, so you can switch easily between them. Not a killer feature, but a nice touch. In addition, where Ctrl+ or Ctrl- in Firefox just changes the font size, it handles full-page zooming in IE– including enlarging images, so they whole page remains proportional. That’s clever. Firefox has an image-zoom plugin, but it’s not integrated like that. IE has also added heuristics-based anti-phishing tools to warn you about suspicious sites. That could be helpful, but I’d hate to be the legitimate bank that got tagged by that.

With commuting comes more reading

Now that it’s cooling off and I’m taking the train and bus more, I’m reading more. I’ve just started on The Electric Michelangelo, which begins with a portrait of a downmarket northern-England seaside town, where the protagonist spends his childhood. According to the back of the book, he’s going to grow up to be a tattoo artist in Coney Island. Reviews are good, and Bookdwarf liked it. So far, I like it as well, although the prose is a little overwrought in places. Still, it’s nice to read something and know that the writer has paid a lot of attention to how the words sound and feel together, and tried to make it beautiful rather than just easy to digest.

Advice from… Philosophers

Ask Philosophers, at Amherst: it’s basically an advice column by the philosophy department. Most of the questions are a little more serious than this one, about the ethics of switching allegiance from one sports team to another, but they’re still pretty neat. It’s almost as amusing, and perhaps more useful, than The Non-Expert, whose slogan is “Experts answer what they know; the Non-Expert answers everything.”

Impactful Copywriting

The latest issue of Ad Report Card from Slate covers the most recent Miller High life ad campaign, involving no humor or irony. The critic notes: “It’s always a dangerous game to guess at how ironic (or not) the kids are being these days: Are they drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon to be funny? Do they actually just like it? Are they not even sure anymore?”

And you know, I have no idea. PBR is good for the money, which is to say, it sucks but it’s cheap. I fully expected Miller High Life to battle Schlitz for supremacy as hipster swill, but if it’s going to move upmarket as this article predicts, I’m guessing that means Miller has decided to leave Schlitz and PBR to have the alterna-swill category and want to fight for the mainstream-swill category with Bud.

Side note on market share: Budweiser seems to be stuck in a plight similar to that of Harley-Davidson: they are losing market share at the very high end (custom bikes or microbrews) and at the low end (Hyosung, Kawasaki, Schlitz, Miller). What will they do about the squeeze?

Harley Davidson seems to be expanding into new markets: They’re advertising the Sportster in women’s magazines (women now buy 10% of new bikes, and rising), they bought a sport-bike company (Buell), and they’ve built a line of bikes that don’t look much like their past efforts (V-Rod, etc). Bud is focusing on more niches: they’re the official beer of every sporting event you could possibly imagine (Gay Ultimate Frisbee of Northwest Minnesota? Check.) and are constantly developing more niche products (B-to-the-E, Bud Select… ).

Will it be, as they say in the biz, “impactful”? Hell if I know.

Flyover territory

I’ve always regarded Indiana as a land of homespun wisdom, sweet corn, and eighteen kinds of pie, but with books like Jesusland, about the travails of an interracial family living out there in the 80s, I began to wonder if its friendly reputation concealed some kind of dark underbelly.

Yes it does. Oh, my, yes it does. Apparently, according to several news articles, this is for real: A bill that would ban unmarried people and gays from getting IVF donations. (Apparently doesn’t require this if you’re planning on being the parent of the child– only for donations which would mean that one genetic parent wasn’t involved after the birth). But still– something that would require you to go through a placement agency to adopt a zygote? Something which could deny you that permission if they thought you weren’t religious enough, or didn’t have good taste in flooring, or had too-good taste in flooring and and might like the flooring more than the child and try to return it? Sure, I’ve often said you should need a license to raise one of those things, but I was joking!

Fortunately, the news articles note that “Indiana Lawmakers Seek to Ban, Control Assisted Impregnation”. So unassisted, miraculous impregnation is still in the clear.

Date with Destiny

Well, this Saturday I have a 10:00 AM date with a 1.4 liter (excuse me, 88 cubic inch) twin-cylinder engine attached to a Harley Davidson. They didn’t have the futuristic-looking V-Rod in stock, so we’re going with the Heritage Softail Classic, which is sort of a retro-touring-style bike, and has the advantage of big comfortable passenger seats.

1.4 liters is almost twice as much engine as I have even contemplated wanting. Yes, I’m getting the extra insurance.

It’s interesting when people die

I found out by watching the TV at the gym that Lisa Marie Presley has done a cover version of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry.” It’s practically written about her, and she does a good enough job with it, with the style evoking 80s hair bands and the movie clips evoking 90s media frenzies. On the other hand, the heavy breathing goes way past “sexy” and “creepy stalker on the phone” to “has she got asthma?”

That was one of my favorite songs when I was about ten, but I thought it was actually about laundry.