Portrait of a hard workin' man:

"Most private-equity firms are about hard work, not just financial engineering."
—David Rubenstein, founding partner of the Carlyle Group, interviewed in the Wall Street Journal, Aug. 24

Dear Diary:

Whatever possessed me to go into private equity? I was so naive. I thought it was just about financial engineering. That certainly is the impression they give you in the media. But turns out that it's actually about hard work! Who'd a thunk it? Here we are in the last week of summer, and everybody is in the Hamptons or in some villa in Tuscany. Everyone, that is, except for me, Private-Equity Man. I'm working hard. In fact, I'm here in a coal mine. It's about 110 down here, you can't see a darned thing, and everything from my lungs to my blue pinstripe suit is drenched in sweat and covered with coal dust. [...]

Clowns versus the Ku Klux Klan:

"White Power!" the Nazis shouted, "White Flour?" the clowns yelled back running in circles throwing flour in the air and raising separate letters which spelt "White Flour".

"White Power!" the Nazis angrily shouted once more, "White flowers?" the clowns cheers and threw white flowers in the air and danced about merrily.

"White Power!" the Nazis tried once again in a doomed and somewhat funny attempt to clarify their message, "ohhhhhh!" the clowns yelled "Tight Shower!" and held a solar shower in the air and all tried to crowd under to get clean as per the Klan's directions.

Bravo!

[Via GromBlog]

Tom Coates posted the other day about his dislike of attempts by PR agencies trying to persuade him to post about their products on his weblog.

Yesterday he got a response that sums up so much that's wrong with the world today:

Our job is to get even "challenging" people like you to write, say and/or do what our clients and companies want — of your own volition — and not even realize that you're doing it. If you are telling us that you only want information from people whose views you like and trust, then we'll just reach you through them and you'll never be the wiser.

Is it any wonder Bill Hicks felt the way he did about the advertising business?¹ It's the sense of entitlement: the notion that it doesn't matter what Tom wants, he will act as a conduit for their paymaster's message.

¹ I'm well aware that professionals in the field argue that there are clear dividing lines between marketing, public relations and advertising. It's not an especially relevant distinction from the point of view of those of us who are lined up in their crosshairs: the aim is the same in each case, it's only the tactics and weaponry that differ.

What Wikipedia would look like if on paper, broken down. No comment required, I think.

Fred Clark takes on The Gang That Can't Pray Straight:

It seems that Dr. Wiley S. Drake, pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church of Buena Park, Calif., issued a political endorsement (Huckabee in '08!) on church letterhead. That's something that tax-exempt churches are not allowed to do, which the watchdog group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State pointed out in a complaint to the IRS.

Drake responded by asking his followers to pray for the deaths of the leaders of Americans United.

[...]

And that's just the start: it gets even sillier as you read on.

Joel Spolsky is not a fan of the Office 2007 packaging:

It's a hard plastic case, sealed in two different places by plastic stickies. It represents a complete failure of industrial design; an utter F in the school of Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. To be technical about it, it has no true affordances and actually has some false affordances: visual clues as to how to open it that turn out to be wrong.

Nick White over at Microsoft seems proud of the novel design, but from the comments on the web it seems I'm not the only one who couldn't figure out how to open it. It seems like even rudimentary usability testing would have revealed the problem. A box that many people can't figure out how to open without a Google search is an unusually pathetic failure of design. As the line goes from Billy Madison: "I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

Neal Ascherson on Scotophobia:

The London-based media make three assumptions. One is that English resentment against the Scots is on the rapid increase. A second is that a waning sense of British nationhood and British values must be restored. A third, involving the state we still call the United Kingdom, is a gathering expectation that the Scots will march out of it. All three propositions, as I see it, are misunderstandings: some of them wilful deceptions, others defects of political imagination.

Dating 2.0.

As if naming a baby wasn't hard enough:

Besides leaving the hospital with a birth certificate and a clean bill of health, baby Mila Belle Howells got something she won't likely use herself for several years: her very own Internet domain name.

Likewise newborn Bennett Pankow joined his four older siblings in getting his own Internet moniker. In fact, before naming his child, Mark Pankow checked to make sure "BennettPankow.com" hadn't already been claimed.

"One of the criteria was, if we liked the name, the domain had to be available," Pankow said. [...]

A viable strategy if your surname or your preferred forename is fairly uncommon – like Pankow – but not so useful for those of us with more commonplace family names unless we're willing to saddle our offspring with distinctive forenames or extra middle names.

Just a thought: if you're so keen on preserving your family's online identity, wouldn't it have been more efficient to register the pankowfamily.com domain¹ and hand out subdomains to family members as required? I suppose a problem arises when the kid rebels against their parents and wants their own home online, but that same issue could just as easily arise when the kid wants to do something online that their parents won't find out about. Would any self-respecting teenager want their parents to be able to track their online activity via a simple search for their very own domain name?

¹ I note that someone has registered that very domain; I wonder if they're related to little Bennett Pankow?

[Via Techdirt]

The Josh Workaround:

A few years back, Brian T took a position in the "Installations and Upgrades" department at a certain enterprise software company. Being that they were an enterprise software provider, installation and upgrades of their software could only be performed by highly-paid technicians. It was Brian's job to support the technicians and provide them with scripts to help them do their job.

To get accustomed to the tools he'd be working with, Brian opened up the primary upgrade script. He was surprised to see the following at the top…

#/usr/bin/perl

$ActivateJoshsWorkarounds = 0;

As we've all seen, such variable names are rarely a good sign. Brian asked around to try to figure out who this Josh fellow was and why he had a variable.

[...]

So, is Josh the villain of the piece? Read on…

Metaphors is an advert for a New Zealand TV channel that's simultaneously Safe For Work¹ and thoroughly smutty.

If you catch every innuendo on a first watch then you can be proud of your filthy mind.

¹ IMHO. Don't blame me if your boss thinks otherwise.

[Via GromBlog]

Press button: receive bacon.

If only it were so…

[Via Monoscope]

These Random Photos from Russian Weddings are marvellous.

I particularly like this one, this one and this one.

I'd really like a chip desk.

It'd be even better if all those CPU chips were actually up and running: you'd get a ton of computing power for the five minutes it took until the desk went up in flames.

[Via Needcoffee.com]

If the iPhone "tantalizes" and "frustrates" criminal forensics experts, perhaps it's because they've got lazy:

The iPhone's web, e-mail and phone functionality — combined with its 4- or 8-GB storage capacity — means it can serve as a window into the personality, lifestyle, social circle and actions of the user. "Even though there might not be a smoking gun right in there," explains Donnelly, "a lot of these smaller pieces could add up to a bigger piece that could lead you to further evidence."

But not every forensics expert is convinced. "The iPhone is evil," says Amber Schroader, CEO of Utah-based Paraben, a leader in digital-forensics software development. "It's Mac OS X, and it's a completely closed system." [...]

As far as I can tell from the article, what this boils down to is that "experts" who are used to knowing how to preserve data on current mass market systems are peeved that they'll have to learn about MacOS file formats and get up to speed on where the iPhone stores system information, what files are changed at startup and so on. In other words, it's not a "closed" system – or at any rate, no more so than any smartphone – just an unfamiliar one.

[Via Dan Sandler]

This video demonstration of Content-Aware Image Sizing is astonishing: basically, the software being demonstrated automates the process of working out how best to re-scale an image so as to preserve the content whilst omitting the bits (in more than one sense of the word) that the viewer won't miss. That may sound quite dull, but if you watch the video you'll see that it works tremendously well. Then there's the bit at the end of the video where they start tagging people then the software seamlessly removes them from the picture.

Within six months someone will have produced a Photoshop plugin to bring this feature to the masses, and there'll be even less reason to trust any photograph you ever see again. I just hope that someone can figure out an algorithm allowing programs to spot the traces of this sort of manipulation on images, so that it'll be possible for your computer to warn you that the image shows signs of automated adjustment.

[Via MetaFilter]

Teen nearly kills himself trying to fix overheating Xbox 360:

Local media reports suggest that the teenager took the power supply, wrapped it in plastic and tape, and submerged it into a bowl of water while it was still plugged in. This caused an electrical shock and knocked the boy unconscious.

A place on the Darwin Award shortlist awaits.

[Via GromBlog]

Lore Sjöberg on Life-Hacking:

You may have heard of something called "life hacking." This may have disoriented and frightened you, just like that soda they used to make with little balls of tapioca floating in it. That's OK — we're here to clear up your blemished psyche with a generous, oleaginous dose of information.

[...]

Does life hacking have any uses unrelated to the freshness of my appliances?
Oh, sure. You can apply the term "life hacking" to nearly anything to make it sound clever and hypermodern! In fact, that last sentence was itself a life hack! You know how sometimes you just eat the ramen out of the pan instead of pouring it into a bowl? Using the same fork you stirred it with? You're life hacking, bunky!

[Via Found]

On the other hand, there's some good news from Hollywood:

Via Coming Soon Movie News, we learn that Michael Davis' high-energy, surreal spoof on action films, Shoot 'Em Up, hasn’t even been released yet and is already generating talk of multiple sequels. (Any movie starring nebbishy Paul Giamatti as a ruthless hitman is worthy of a sequel in our good graces.) But in even better news for comics fans, Davis' production company, Angry Films, is in talks to produce a movie version of Grant Morrison's universally acclaimed mini-series WE3. Morrison, one of the best writers in the business, turned in the script himself, and Davis promised that "it's the most insane mash-up in the history of movies if we pull it off."

If Hollywood could just put out a halfway decent adaptation of We3 then I could forgive it for the big-screen version of Todd McFarlane's vision of Oz.

Heck, if Hollywood will give us a decent We3 I might even forgive it for every godawful Alan Moore adaptation we've suffered over the last decade or so. Except for the botched attempt to adapt The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, which was just beyond the pale…

Me, two years ago¹:

I'm just guessing, but I don’t see Hollywood turning this character into the heroine of a big-budget summer movie any time soon.

Hollywood, today:

Warner Brothers and Village Roadshow Pictures have decided to team up and re-make children's classic movie The Wizard of Oz, but make it a grittier and nastier version.

Josh Olson, the screenwriter for A History of Violence, pitched the idea for the new film and teamed up with producer Todd McFarlane to make it more like a PG certificate rather than a U.

McFarlane told Variety: "How do we get people who went to The Lord of the Rings to embrace this?

"You've still got Dorothy trapped in an odd place, but she's much closer to Ripley from Alien than a helpless singing girl."

Todd McFarlane and Oz. I just know this isn't going to end well…

¹ The image linked to in the quote that follows is almost certainly NSFW.