Is Topher Grace the new Michael J. Fox?

• Kellogg’s Vector cereal lists vitamin B12 prominently on the back of the box implying (indirectly) that it is a source of B12. A closer look reveals that the cereal itself contains no B12, but if you have it with milk, your milk will have B12 in it.
• When you log into Hotmail the first page you see is a page full of other Microsoft services with a small link to your Inbox. The Inbox should be the first page.
• Car salesmen. I know this is a tired cliché, but the jackass at the local Mazda dealership was so bad my sister almost bought a car she knew wasn’t as good just to avoid giving him the business.
• Another tired cliché: sensational journalism. In the last week I have seen two CNN on-air personalities desperately trying to extract exaggeration from a medical specialist and computer specialist on the West Nile Virus and the Code Red virus, respectively.
• Matt in Montreal to see Radiohead.

Thank you for humouring me.

Assaults on nurses are at an all time high.

What kind of prick would assault a nurse (regardless of gender)? I mean, I understand if the nurse was asking for it (they’re still people, and people suck) but if that was all that was going on, it wouldn’t be at an all time high!

I can also understand if the patient wasn’t in control of his faculties and thought the nurse was a bear or something. But some of these people are getting smacked around by ‘stressed out’ friends and family.

That is bullshit. How are these patients expected to survive with no nurses? Nurses give meds, feed, wash, test, and do countless other things to keep patients alive and comfortable. And when they have to do something unpleasant they don’t exactly enjoy it, but it’s for your own good.

I am starting to rant, and at the risk of becoming an angsty blog* I’ll finish up by saying nurses deserve more money.

* Sorry Will, but you totally asked for it buddy. 🙂

Oh yea!

It’s reasons like
these that the Internet exists and is so cool.

Where else could you find such enormous quantities of great merchandise? I wonder if people buy more crap now than they did before. I know I do, but coincidentally I only started making enough money to buy crap when all this crap became available.

In related news, my forth Spacehog shirt arrived in the mail today. That makes me a collector! I have a hobby!

I’m not sure what category you would file this “news” item under. Human Interest maybe? Regardless, MSNBC bring us the hard-hitting infotainment* piece Clearer Pictures: The coming high-defenition TV revolution.

The interactive feature fails in its aim of selling HDTV to the masses and points our a few humorous points along the way. First, that the term “High Definition” is relative and as a result meaningless. Second, illustrated through their handy TV-Resolution-through-the-years Flash presentation, they show that TV quality, including the “upcoming revolution” of HDTV, has stayed remarkably similar since 1936.

Anyone who has a 5 year old $3000-turned-$150 computer will not be impressed by 10% improvements over decades. We demand yearly improvements in order of magnitude.

Working hard today with my good people Nick and Isaac, the heat and humidity swayed the discussion away from our work and towards the great topic of animal movies. The discussion started with my bad impersonation of Hank Azaria’s hilarious Spanish accent in American Sweethearts (a terrible movie, btw, oddly full of Home Alone-style crotch injury humour).

So it began: Speaking of bad movies… Nick claims to have once watched MVP: Most Valuable Primate and House Party featuring Kid ‘n Play in one night. A debate ensued over which sport the athletic primate in MVP played; baseball or hockey. A trip to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) proved Nick to be correct, it was an ice-bound chimp who, according to the cover image “…Skates a little faster… Shoots a little harder… And is driving everyone Bananas!“

Isaac and I, sure we had seem that monkey playing baseball, were perplexed. I was convinced that Charlie Sheen had starred opposite a sporting primate.
Nick claimed I was thinking of Emilio Estevez. This lead to a theory that Emilio Estevez was a clone of Charlie Sheen produced for the comedy classic Men At Work, which nick claims to have seen twice.

Isaac assured me that it wasn’t Sheen (or his clone), but the guy from Friends. Back to the IMDB where a search for Friends points us to Matt LeBlanc, whose resume includes Ed, a monkey baseball movie which boasts “Minor league. Major Friendship.“

Other amazing facts learned from IMDB:

• There was a three sequels to Air Bud (the basketball-dog movie): Air Bud: The Golden Reciever, Air Bud: World Pup, and Air Bud IV: Seventh Inning Fetch.
• There is an MVP II.
• Kid ‘n Play is actually Christopher Reid and Christopher Martin, respectively.
• 
  Animals don’t get listed in the credits (so we can’t tell if the Ed is actually the same monkey as the Most Valuable Primate).

Aside from hysteria caused by photos of monkeys in sports uniforms, this little conversational aside brought a few other issues to light. First, that the IMDB is a fantastic website. You can search by actor, director, producer, movie, etc. More importantly, it became clear that instead of ‘building powerful web based solutions’ as we do so well, we should be a think-tank, paid to play Mario Cart and extract humour from the mundane.

I thought that ThinkGeek had cool geek stuff, and they still do, and since I’ve run Linux in the past, I justified buying a ‘Chicks Dig Unix‘ shirt.

However, I just discovered The Apple Stuff Store and every ounce of poser in my body wants that unjustifiable original Apple Lapel Pin.

A link found on MetaFilter pointed me to MSNBC’s The Week in Pictures. There are some interesting photos and they have an archive that goes back three years. Unfortunately, their JavaScript-based navigation makes it difficult to link to individual photos.

A couple of photos that caught my eye: 1 & 2.

I know we try to keep AOV a bit less personal so we don’t become an angsty blog, but I’d like fire off a quick note all the same.

Mad props go out to all my pals that threw me a birthday thing at the JunkYard. Also thanks to Kris for buying me a tasty coffee-like-thing afterwards at Cafe Diem.

The crew at design portal k10k.net (aka Kaliber10000) are taking the summer off. Good for them and thanks for the fine animated jakob nielsen.