Lap Band Lap Band Lap Band

I had to post about the grossly frequent billboard campaign going on in Southern California by Allergan Inc (the Lap Band). Seems like it gets a lot of attention, not all of it being good. However the techie aspect of it all is that they lack a dominant online campaign, and if they do have a ongoing online campaign, there not doing a great job of it. Cost per impression is relatively cheaper with online than I imagine their billboard campaigns to cost, however you’d want to run them concurrently. An acquaintance of mine is running a really good electronic cigarette campaign, that I have, on more than one occasion, came across banners on the web, and I imagine he is running a smaller budget than Lap Band.

Personally, I get a kick out of seeing the billboards consecutively, and on a recent commute to Marina Del Ray, I counted a total of 34 billboards with Lap Band, that my friends, is advertising at it’s best.

Apple pushes Valentines Day Advertisements

He loves you…He loves you more…

That’s one of several advertisements that Apple is running during the typically slow sales months of February and March (for tech products). He Loves you…pertains to an ipod nano, He loves you more pertains to an ipod touch. To funny. Also in line is the drive to push the movie “Valentines Day” as seen here. Or how about an engraved ipod with free shipping?

It kinda cracks me up, even a techie guy like me, would not want an ipod or a tech gift on Valetines day, give me a beer and a Bj! But hey, kudos to Apple for taking a stab at it!

Crossloop & it’s “teenage” years.

I have been using Crossloop since it was in beta, were talking years here. I love Crossloop, it’s free, it’s simple, it works on my PC ( down to just one of those now lol) and all flavors of my Apples (iMac, Macbook Pro, etc), and it just works, it doesn’t get much better than that. Walking through a grandmother or complete non-techie is simple and within minutes you can be on a computer thousands of miles away helping your friends or family, or clients.

Like every application that doesn’t end up being vaporware, it has it’s stages of growth, and from my point of view, Crossloop has gracefully exited it’s “baby steps” years,  and it now in its critical “teenage” years. These years are critical, because it’s typically when the idea and conceptual designs mature into the general direction of the software, and the company’s goals start to become clear.

I believe that Crossloop will always have a free component, that retains it’s foundational elements and features. Taking any of these away and migrating them into a paid version, obviously would upset it’s free users user base, and detract future customers. I don’t believe Crossloop would do that, they’ve come this far and did such a great job at it, it wouldn’t make sense. However there is a key phrase to play with here when I make that statement, “it wouldn’t make sense” , and that phrase is “it wouldn’t make sense to the users“. From an investor or a corporate ideology, it makes perfect sense to make that retarded (sorry Palin) mistake and take functionality from the existing free users. Why? It’s simple really. The greatest online media business strategy these days is to give your product away for free. Look at Firefox, Facebook, Twitter, hell even Wordpres. They all give their product away for free. The catch? There really isn’t one, it’s more like a internal marketplace to sell other ideas, that do cost money. Let me elaborate, take Myspace for example. At it’s peak, it had somewhere around 65-70 million users. So effectively, that leaves a huge marketplace to sell a product right? How about charge $1 dollar for a lifetime usage of a myspace template editor? If I sold it to only 35% of my users, I’d make $22,750,000.oo, which I could easily do with a taggable campaign or even a simple but effective banner campaign. Next month I just shift it to another cheap, yet logical product.

My point in elaboration here, is that I feel that I have spoken and interacted with the friendly staff at Crossloop on numerous occasions, hell they have even posted back in my blog after I wrote about them on several instances. They are friendly people it appears.

I understand that for a lot of businesses their main goal is to become huge then sell, shit even I practice that technique. But for some, the foundation remains true and the product remains free. Firefox will never charge for a download. Safari , bad choice, ummm, Google will never charge for a search.

In the last year I can honestly say that I’ve developed a rather bad taste towards a large aspect of Crossloop. That’s the “Hire an Expert” aspect. I don’t give a shit if I come off cocky here, but righteously so, the usage of the word expert falls tremendously short for 99% of those individuals on there. They are completely self proclaimed. Let me elaborate. It is a very rare situation when I need to ask someone else for technical help, but a few months ago, a respected friend and colleague of mine were trying to implement a timekill based off a pre-set time being pulled from the us.navy.mil time clock in Excel. Now for those of you not familiar with what I just said, we were basically trying to get an Excel document to automatically “kill” (delete) itself with a pre-defined line of instructions that would compare the current date on the computer to the date on a public government website. It’s just been so damn long since I’ve worked in Excel, that I just forgot the set of instructions. I mean this is simple shit here folks.

Know how many “Experts” that specifically had EXCEL EXPERTS in their profiles I went through? 9… yes NINE…and in the end, I just continued on a more targeted Google search until I got my results and completed the two sentences of instructions in the Excel workbook.

All nine of those individuals fell grossly short of knowing anything remotely close to writing formulas or instructions in Excel. As a matter of fact, they seemed to me, like they were the run of the mill GeekSquad retards, or ITT /Devry guys.

An expert, a guru, means you posses a complete knowledge of the material you claim to know. (Not the actual definition but rather a commonsense presumption) If you say you “know” Macbooks, you should know not only how to use shortcuts, or how to navigate via terminal, you should also know how to disable and enable and re-program the AMS sensor. You should know different networking protocols like AFP, VNC, FTP, and how to network with another Apple or a PC or how to compile and disassemble mpkgs . If you say you know PC’s you should know what services (services.msc) you can and cannot safely turn off in XP, Vista, Win 7, you should completely know your way around the registry and command prompt, and you should definitely know how to extract Viruses and worms without using a third party app. You should also know your hardware, and how to perform vdimm adjustments on your video cards, how to replace broken transistors and heat popped capacitors before telling someone to go fork out $150 for a new motherboard when the fix is only $1.23 for a new capacitor.

Most of these noobs are just out to make a buck. They take advantage of old ladies and people that just want their computers to work, and charge them for it. They spread mis-information and myths about computers, and sadly they are now using Crossloop as a medium to syndicate themselves beyond the reach of their local town or city. Crossloop needs a surefire way to weed out the non-talent, some type of way to provide solid credentials.

I have an account on Crossloop, and the link is to the right, but even though it says something like $20-30 an hour, I will offer help for FREE, so ignore that price-tag. As long as I’m available I will help for free. And I guess I should say, this is a limited time offer, until Crossloop creates a way to seed out the rookies from their great service. So take advantage…

Click “I CAN HELP” to the right. or post a comment to this post and leave a legit contact email.

Google Commercial during 2010 superbowl

It is rumored that an advert that google created back in November called “Parisian Love” will be the commercial airing today during third quarter. You have to admit, if you use Google, that you have done something like this before…it’s very sweet.

Kleen , not so clean, huge explosion in Conneticut

A natural gas energy plant exploded this morning causing shock waves to be felt over 10 miles away, according to estimates, there were around 50 people on location when the explosion occurred around 11:00am  in Middleton.  I’m just posting about it because I was talking to a friend who is on location there when it happened, he’s still alive and ok obviously.

Full story HERE

SuperBowl 2010 times

Kickoff can occur anytime from 6:18 p.m. officially, but will probably occur a little after 6:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time based on previous years.

CBS, which is broadcasting the game, states a 6:18 p.m. starting time on their site, with a “kickoff show” from 6-6:25 p.m. The Super Bowl 2010 hosting committee’s website has a countdown clock counting down to 6:30 p.m.

So for Central and Pacific, that’s 3-3:30pm

Not that I will be watching it, I have work to prepare for tomorrow…

Cheers

Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch

I picked one up today from the Apple store, figured I’d give it a spin. It had been looking at me everytime I walked into the Apple store, so I figured what the hell. I asked the Apple sales peeple (yes I spelled people “peeple”, because there just so cute with there non-knowledge, but there Apple peeple so you love them anyways) if anyone had ever actually used one ‘hands on‘. I was met by a few peeple who took interest and told me that they had both tried it a “while back” but these new pen/pads should be the “real deal”.

I set it up, which of course was simple as prom night, and then I took the much to long tutorial that treats you like a retarded monkey (complete with the “good job, you’ve successfully clicked on an icon“) . I immediately opened up Photoshop CS4 and created a new canvas with 2,000 dpi, and a 3k x 3k workspace. I picked up the pen and started to doodle. It was precise, I give it that. Much better than the old Wacom pens I tried about 7 years ago, a world of a difference. However I had more problems with it than I expected.

While it did work fine with my screen space/size (27″ flickering iMac) , I should have bought the large Bamboo, not the Medium…so head’s up to any future purchasers. Selecting certain icons on the far left and far right were kind of a pain in the ass.

The pen tool is responsive, however the tip is made of plastic (at least I think it’s plastic) and ever so slightly and minuscule-ly sticks. Not anything drastic, but just ever so slightly enough to mess up intricate details when drawing or sketching. It should be made of metal, that would for sure make it completely fluid with no sticking, and the trackpad, which is also a plastic material, should be glass like the iPhone. This imperfection was enough to totally bomb my Picasso drawing of Tiger Woods caught in the moment of heat.

A major annoyance and one I can’t figure out why it was added, was that you don’t have to touch the pen to the pad in order to move the cursor, it works from a half inch away. This is ok when you want to move the cursor around the desktop but it also moves the pointer an inch before hitting the pad and then moving an inch back to start drawing once you actually place the tip on the pad.

I doodled for a good hour in Photoshop CS4 before I became extremely bored and irritated that I couldn’t fluidly move about without tapping a palette button by accident, and couldn’t draw straight lines or sketch well. At times my hand would accidentally touch the (touch responsive) touch pad, moving the pointer or popping a menu up, which drove me completely nuts. I’m sure there is a feature in the settings to turn this off (pen only mode I figure) but whatever.

So next I attempted to mess around with the multi-touch pad feature. Zoom in & out, rotate pictures, browse back and forth through web pages with the flick of one or two fingers, scroll up and down web pages. Then I realized something. My Magic Mouse does all of this (minus the rotating the pictures, which on my Macbook pro it can). It also was not very responsive to my touch (but the ladies tell me that I definitely “have the touch”). Rotating the pictures in preview kinda worked 70% of the time. Same with the two finger zoom in & out, it kinda worked. Nothing as close to the iPhones touch responsiveness.

For a $108 bucks, it’s a great price for what it can do, and if your just using it to sign signatures, or doodle for high school, sure it works just fine. It is a quality constructed device, and it looks damn sexy, but for a professional artist, or a hardcore enthusiast, I’d suggest trying a higher end model, not in the Wacom Bamboo product line (this is a more standard consumer line), but in the professional series instead. The large Bamboo uses the same touch and pen device, just the touch pad area is increased, so expect the same results.

For everyone else, buy a Magic Mouse, and if you already have one, your good to go. I’m taking this back tomorrow.

Adding a scratch drive to Photoshop CS4 problem

Typically I’ve always added a scratch drive to CS4 right off the bat. Tonight while messing around with a new Bamboo pen tablet by Wacom, I attempted to add a scratch drive in CS4 but ran into a problem. I had an external HDD plugged in, I could access the files on it just fine, but for the life of me, it would not appear in CS4 to add it as a scratch drive. I restarted the iMac, I unloaded then loaded the external HDD, but nothing worked.

So I sat back and said to myself, “When it seems like a difficult problem on a computer, it typically is something simple overlooked“. I stared at the external HDD as if I could coerce it to work, but yup as you guessed it, that didn’t work either.

Well the solution was simple, though it took about a good 10 minutes to figure it out. The external HDD was originally formatted in shitty ass FAT32, so it could be pc/mac compatible (with a lame 4gb file transfer size). So I dumped all the files onto the internal HDD, reformatted Mac OS extended, and voila, the bad boy appeared in CS4….

so there it is… in case you didn’t know.

Inspecting Mac mpkg (metapackage) if app fails install

A lot of Mac users don’t know that if your MPKG  (metapackage) app fails  to install (which is very very rarely), you can always right click (oh wait you didn’t know there was a right click as well?? that’s Control + click unless you have the magic mouse, then it’s just right click) shit… anyways like I was saying, just right click the mpkg and select Show Package Contents , this will open up the package, and you can select the individual packages to install. This worked perfectly for Final Draft Pro 8, which kept failing on the install.

In response to some emails, No, right tapping on me and saying “show package contents” will most likely not give you the results you want…lol some people…

Back to your Mac , Free or not to be

Here’s a quickie, and who doesn’t like a quickie every now and then? I was looking for a decent FTP client for Snow Leopard, and I came across this post over at LifeHacker , While I figured this could be easily done, I didn’t connect the dots in myself, but to a simple point, Adam Pash lays out how to remotely access your Mac, without paying for the $100 a year “Back to my mac” (.mac) service. And my readers know I love software & solutions that costs Free-nintey-nine.

I already had dished out the dough, but for those that are reading, learn from others mistakes…

(P.S. It’s super simple to follow it through, don’t feel intimidated)