Look at this blog entry. Now look at your blog. Now look back here. Is your blog as well written as this one? No. Can it at least be written in the same language? Yes. And if you haven't enjoyed the Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like spots, you should. Last week, a new one came out and it is as clever and well done as the "I'm on a horse" spot.

After the fifth or sixth viewing, I started wondering how the hell did they do that? It looks like most of it is real, meaning non-CG. The beach background and sky in the beginning were composited, but the dock, towel and prosthetic legs look real. Is the background real or on a soundstage? Probably real, but who knows? The sawdust kicking up on the circular saw looks CG to me, but it might be a rig. In any case, it's a fake, because this required more than one take to get it right, and you're not going to have your actor keep sawing planks off your set every take.

The "swan dive" is either real or they took a lot of trouble to make the move look fake (that would be going pretty deep, but considering the creative, not out of the realm of possibilities). The real mind blower is the transition at the end from shorts and barefoot to jeans and shoes.

Here's what I think: The camera is on a computer controlled track. The splashing water is CG. You can see between 22:08 and 22:09 he abruptly, but ever so slightly, changes position without motion blur, meaning there is a cut there. They probably stopped action shortly after he landed from the swan dive, then they placed the motorcycle on his mark, refilled the tank, then used a still from the take they wanted and positioned his body to make the transition as smooth as possible, then used the CG water to obscure the cut. The trees and rocks are blocking the sky, so you don't have to worry about the cloud continuity.

Either way, it is so skillfully done, that I applaud you, Old Spice. Your attention to detail is refreshing and astounding. But I'm still not going to buy your body wash. See the rest of the spots here.

Back before there was an Internet, back before there were even computers, people used to have mechanical writing machines called "typewriters." Typewriters were a very popular and efficient way to quickly write letters, papers or news stories, and although correcting mistakes was a tedious and laborious process, typewriters added a satisfying physicality to the process of writing. Later, when the home computer became ubiquitous, the typewriter faded away into obsolescence to the dismay of those of us lucky enough to have worked on these brilliant machines. Until now.

Behold, the USBTypewriter™, created by Jack Zylkin. The USBTypewriter™ uses the open source Arduino microcontroller platform to add a circuit board to the undercarriage of any mechanical typewriter, turning it into a USB Keyboard that will work with Windows and Mac computers, as well as the iPad. No doubt inspired by Terry Gilliam's 1985 Orwellian Masterpiece Brazil, the USBTypewriter™ brings a much needed Future We Were Promised edge to modern technology. Although a little pricey to purchase an already retrofitted model ($450 at the Etsy online store), you can also purchase a kit for $75 and do it yourself, provided you already have a manual typewriter.

So now you can say goodbye to the pathetic plastic clicks of the modern keyboard and make some real noise with the USBTypewriter™. Not to mention get a great workout for your forearms. And the best part is that the typewriter remains fully functional, so you can create a hard copy of everything you input to your computer, which may prove extremely handy in the post-apocalypse era.

Adobe recently released the latest version of its Creative Suite, amid much hoopla. The hoopla I read was centered largely around speed improvements and the new Rotobrush tool in After Effects, which is what I use for creating motion graphics and animations. The rotobrush tool basically allows you to define and remove the background of a moving image with a few strokes of the mouse. It is an ingenious and intriguing looking tool and one that I could certainly use in a TV campaign that I am currently posting. So after a brief consultation with our Ultimate Principal - which consisted of the following exchange:

"Well, the CS5 suite has a new tool that allows you to define and remove a background with a few mouse strokes, so we could take this guy out of one shot and composite him onto this background shot fairly easily...maybe..."

"Why don't we have it yet?"

"Uh...because I haven't talked to you yet? And it just came out last Friday?"

"Just get it, please."

I ordered the CS5 Production Premium suite directly from Adobe, with the option to download rather than pay the shipping and environmental cost of the packaging and media. First thing I noticed, which should have warned me away, was that the Adobe store uses a Flash interface for its e-commerce. Flash for e-commerce? Seriously? Was there a great clamor from the Internetizens that e-commerce applications are lacking the crucial factor of superfluous animation to make the online shopping experience complete? After ordering the software, I was prompted to download the software, from a page that looked and behaved just like html...but in Flash. For a company that makes such excellent software, they really don't have a clue about User Experience. Or Customer Relations, as you will soon see.

In order to download software from the Adobe Store, you have to use the Akamai Downloader, which I believe uses a P2P protocol to speed the download process. I mean, it's an 8Gb download, so that sounds appealing. I checked and my computer meets Akamia's minimum requirements (although I didn't see a prompt to check for that before I ordered the software with the download option, which is another example of poor UX.) Anyway, so I tried to install their downloader app, and I received a prompt that said "An irrecoverable error has occurred." That sounded serious! Further attempts to download were met with a blank page. Seriously. That and their downloader link kept resizing my browser, which was extremely annoying. I tried it on Safari next, with the same result.

So, finally I called customer service to get a direct link that bypasses the annoying Akamai Downloader, with its poor error feedback and terrible User Experience, and reached Manesh.

Manesh is clearly not a native English speaker, nor does he possess adequate communication skills that often compensate for the lack of linguistic mastery. Manesh spoke over me when I tried to explain what was happening, and apparently wasn't listening when he wasn't interrupting me. He asked me three different times what software I bought, then asked me if I was trying the trial software, then expressed surprise that I had bought the software, then suggested that I try to reinstall the software that he had forgotten that I couldn't download. Finally, he put me on hold for 10 minutes, then came back on the line with a supervisor directing him. I know this, because I could hear the supervisor prompting him. He had me install Acrobat Connect and initiate a session that gave him access to my desktop. He then started closing all my windows and tried to quit out of programs that I needed open.

"NO NO NO NO NO NO NO! Do NOT do that!" I shouted in exasperation.

"You can save them!" he exclaimed.

I quickly terminated the session.

"Can you reconnect me please?"

"No. Let me speak to the guy you're talking to."

"There is no one here. Can you reconnect me please?"

"What do you mean? Dude, I can hear him talking to you right now, telling you what to say!"

Pregnant pause while Manesh nimbly comes up with an alibi.

"No, that is another man at the desk beside me. Can you reconnect me please? I won't close your windows."

After a full hour of this shenaniganizing, Manesh took me painfully step by step through the process of downloading the trial software. The trial software! That was the end of this shaggy dog story - when the Akamai Download Manager gives you the irrecoverable error, get the trial software instead. It's a full version and allows you to enter in your serial number. Or better yet, don't buy directly from Adobe.

I received a notice in my email this morning that Yahoo! Music is changing. Really? I wasn't aware that there WAS a Yahoo! Music. Apparently so. Why they are sending me a notice to my GMail account I don't know. I've never signed up for their service, and it isn't a phishing attack (I checked).

This is what Yahoo! had to say:

We currently are in the process of evolving Yahoo! Music to further meet the needs of our users and give music fans more of what they want.

Awesome! They're going to start giving away DRM-free music? They're going to feature only good music? They're going to stop foisting Brittany Spears on us? I read the next paragraph.

Therefore, on the 15th of December, Yahoo! Music UK and Ireland will be reducing the number of radio stations available to the most popular radio stations on the service. In late January both our radio and video services plus our artists pages will be discontinued entirely.

Huh? This is giving the music fans more of what they want? OK, I can take this one of two ways. Either music fans were clamoring for Yahoo! Music to be discontinued, or people don't want to download music. I'm skeptical of both propositions. They closed the email with this:

Our revamped news and blog pages will continue to function until we launch the new-look Yahoo! Music before the summer.

Please click here for more information.

So apparently they are going to relaunch. Maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that if you're going to relaunch your service in a totally different direction, and you want to alert your users, you might want to lead with that straight off. Something like "Hey, we're going to expand our listings and make more information and music available to you! Coming Summer 2009!" You also might think about developing the new service in parallel with the existing one to keep the more than 25 users of Yahoo! Music from switching to Limewire in the intervening months.

Overall communications score: C- (Had they not included the link, they would've gotten an F).

With the ever unfolding of the interactive marketplace, there are multiple trends developing on multiple platforms, presenting interactive marketers a landscape that daily becomes exponentially more complex. It used to be easy. When creating an interactive project, you picked a platform (Mac, PC or both), you picked a common 256 color palette that would display all of your art correctly, you set your audio to 16bit 22k, and you made it all fit on a CD-ROM. Now you have to pick desktop, web or mobile, then make it cross-browser and test on multiple configurations. And that's just the technical considerations.

We here at Louisville's Leading Interactive Agency incorporate mobile development in our media strategies, from texting campaigns to creating apps that run on the mobile platform. The question is, though, how to decide which platform to develop for? iPhone, Android devices or the Blackberry? If only there were some way to take one piece of code, and deliver it to all three platforms in a neat package.

It turns out, there is: PhoneGap. PhoneGap is "a device independent framework for web applications", according to the site. What it does is allow you to port a web based application to the iPhone, Blackberry and Android device, giving you a quick start guide in their wiki pages (except for the Blackberry; the documentation on that is yet to come). I have a timecode calculator that I wrote in javascript a few years ago, that I have half a mind to convert over to an iPhone app. I will post the results later.

While gearing up to watch the Daily Show, my wife and I occasionally flip the TV over to the CW, to watch a locally produced show Secrets of Louisville Chefs. I love the idea of this show. Louisville has a lot of great restaurants, and there seem to be more every year. I have several friends who are chefs and who deserve the recognition of one my favorite arts, but somehow, Secrets of Louisville Chefs manage to make every dish look as unappetizing as possible. I don't know what camera they use, but the picture is always bluish, suggesting mortification or mold, and the food is always shiny, making it look greasy.

It's amazing. They go to so much trouble to showcase local chefs, but seem to forget that the at-home audience can't taste the food - we have to rely on the visuals. I have a few suggestions for the producers of this show:

1. Get a better camera. It looks like you're shooting this on Beta or DV. That is so 20th century! The Panasonic HVX200A can be purchased at B&H for $5,200. It'll shoot in 1080p, and not only will your food look like it was shot on film, but you'll also build a small library of HD footage ready for when they throw the switch in 2012.

2. Get a couple of softboxes. You want to mute that light to reduce the shine. Seriously, that food looks like it was dipped in the second tank of my veggie car! Digustipating!

3. Color correct your footage. It doesn't take long and it's pretty easy. You'd be amazed at the difference in the picture if you would pull some of the blues out and actually make it look like food.

Make the investment. You won't regret it.

The week before Hurricane Ike came traipsing through our city and took out our power here at CurrentMarketing, I was in a quandary. I deal with a lot of data, in the form of video and audio files mostly, and I have resisted buying a RAID storage system as being too expensive and complicated for my needs. When we first started editing video, all of our footage was delivered via tape. If I ever lost my digitized video due to hardware failure, I would just recapture from the physical media and order would be restored. About four years ago, however, we began shooting everything in HD, and the majority of our footage came to us via hard drives. Since we work primarily with compressed HD (DVC-Pro HD 720p), we can store our footage on external drives and work with the files over the firewire bus. So the more cost-effective solution was to purchase external drives and use them as if they were physical tape.

The only problem with that solution is that hard drives fail. So the digital assets need to be stored on at least two different drives, one of which should be in semi-active use. Eventually, I acquired an array of desktop hard drives that increased my storage capacity to more than 4 Tb, but became increasingly unwieldy to manage. Which footage was on which drive? At first, there was a plan, and certainly good intentions, but with a heavy workload, quick decisions had to be made and organization went out the window.

A few weeks I received an email touting a device called the Drobo, an appliance that was essentially a RAID storage system that needed no management, which appealed to me, because my head is so full already, I didn't want to learn about RAID management. What the Drobo does is give me a storage device with multiple drives that automatically backs up my data. If I need more storage, I just purchase larger drives and put them in the Drobo, and voila! No more worries.

So we purchased a 4 Tb Drobo, and I began to fill it with all my digital-only assets. Two days later the power went out. Fortunately, I had no pressing deadlines at the time, so I decided to wait until the power came back on. I got to take the kids to the zoo, I got to spend time with my wife, I occasionally had to come down to the office and help make plans for accommodating the workflow. But as the days dragged on, it became more apparent that I would eventually have to find a way to power up the computer and get some stuff done. Almost everything I do is digital. Without a computer, I'm idle, and I had projects that were beginning to nag for my attention.

I carefully weighed my options. I could run my rig off of a generator, but that would eat gas, be environmentally unfriendly and would act like a countdown clock - gotta finish before the gas runs out! I could harness the energy of all these kids and dogs that tend to lope around here, put them all on a big hamster wheel, hook that up to a turbine that turns a generator... but that's too much effort to set up. At last, facing deadlines, I hauled my CPU, extra-big monitor and almost all of my hard drives home. It took me about 2 hours to break down, pack up, transport and set up in the bowels of my house, but by dinnertime, I was ready.

36 hours later the power came on. I had only got one solid day of work done in my basement, and I came down to make sure the power was on in my office before hauling everything back down to Bakery Square. By 11am, I was back in business and ready to check my Facebook page again.

So lessons learned: electricity is a good thing; it's worth the time and money to buy a storage solution that is compact and self-saving; and when the infrastructure collapses, I may still be able to make a living lifting heavy things.

One of the myriad reasons that Firefox is superior to Internet Explorer is the ability to extend the browser with Add-Ons. Add-Ons take the form of extensions, themes or plug-ins. You can add a GMail notifier, a Facebook toolbar, an extension that allows you to save any video embedded in a page to your hard drive. You can get developer extensions that allow you to debug, test the load-time of a page, or write scripts that are loaded on specific pages, allowing you to customize any web site. In short, Add-Ons are right on (Power to the People).

Today, I saw a mention on Webmonkey of an a new extension from Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity. I don't generally get excited about extensions, unless we're talking about hair extensions, because my sister-in-law is a hairderesser and I just think they are FABULOUS, but Ubiquity is really stinking cool. What Ubiquity does is give you a key command that pulls up a command line type interface where you can type in simple english language commands to return information from the web. For example, if you type in google hillbilly hercules, Ubiquity returns a thumbnail and description of one of the greatest films of all time. Type in "map okinawa health club louisville" and Ubiquity returns a map for each location of the famed Oriental health spa and Gentleman's club (bet you didn't know there were two locations did you? Neither did I - thanks Google!).

The thing that makes this so cool is the speed with which it executes. You don't have to go to a website and load all the javascripts and the flash files, not to mention the superfluous graphics - you can do things quickly. Of course this won't preclude you from actually visiting a site. If I'm looking for something very specific, like a Doctor's office phone number, I can get it quickly without leaving the page I'm on. Not such a great time-saver, but damned convenient.

It is still in beta, and so is a little buggy. Some of the text is hard to read as well, but all in all, this is my new favorite extension. There are already a bunch of commands and Mozilla Labs has an editor where you can create your own. Download it and try it out. It may not change your life, but it will change the way you surf the web.

Last night I had the misfortune of walking into a TV switchback in my living room. By TV switchback, I mean one of those situations when someone else has the remote and is watching 2 programs simultaneously, switching back and forth at the most inopportune moments. Normally, around our house, the programs are usually something like "85 kids with Old Testament Names and Counting" and "Medical Mysteries: The Baby Who Was Born Inside Out", but last night the switchback was ping-ponging between the Colbert Report and something called "20/20 on We". 20/20 Ennui? I sat up straight for that one, because I was intrigued by a show about dissipation with unusual clarity.

Apparently, however, ABC has taken a cue from Dick Wolfe and is merely franchising one of its top brands. Just like the 31 flavors of "Law & Order" we see sprinkled across the TV universe on any given night, 20/20 is starting to syndicate and expand its brand's reach and frequency by broadcasting stories aimed at specific market segments. Niche broadcasting. Which seems like a lot of extra work, generating content for these new shows. As I understand it, 20/20 is a journalistic TV news magazine, so they can't really show reruns, because that isn't news. Right?

Last night, they were showing a 4 year old story about a teenager who was torn between giving her baby up to a childless couple for adoption and keeping it. Now, on other news magazine shows, they feature new stories about things that happened several years back, but this story was first aired 4 years ago. So, I'm thinking, this should be interesting; they're going to follow up with the subjects of this piece and see where they are now. Except they didn't. They slapped an awkward intro/outro on the piece and ran it as is. At least when Law & Order and CSI have spin-offs, they get different casts and storylines - they create new content.

I imagine that "20/20 on We" has a deliberate double meaning: it is 20/20 on the We network, and it is also programming for when you are so bored, you'll watch anything. Personally, I'll be watching "Dateline Insouciance".

I visited my parents' house a few weeks ago and smashed my toe on a piece of furniture. I really crunched it and pretty much broke my little toe. I'm not much of a complainer when infirm and it was fairly painful to walk on, even after I taped it up, so I basically tried to sit quietly as much as possible.

Looking on their coffee table, I noticed a thin book that looked interesting, entitled "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss. The book starts out with a joke:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

I was hooked immediately, because I'm a bit of a punctuation stickler. Bad writing drives me crazy. Bad punctuation makes me homicidal. One of my biggest pet peeves is the contraction of the word "little." Most often you see it as Lil'. Now ask yourself: What word is being contracted here? Lily? Lillith? Lilliput? The right way - wait, let me re-phrase that - the only way to contract little is to write it as li'l. Lil' Kim, Lil' Bush, Lil' Bow Wow? You're officially on notice.

I'm no expert, but I do try to correctly make use of punctuation and grammar as much as possible. I make mistakes all the time, and I'm always happy to stand corrected (as Francine the Flower Child once told me, "Mistakes are lessons to be learned; you'll keep making the same mistakes until you learn that lesson"). Punctuation, grammar and spelling are not just for snobs and smartasses. They're the means by which we communicate clearly and effectively. For too long, we've allowed our culture to devolve into a celebration of ignorance and mediocrity. Lynne Truss has struck a blow for humanity, and I encourage everyone who reads this to pick up a copy, read it over and do your small part to save civilization from the barbarians. It's also funny and the covers aren't too far apart.