Thursday, March 22, 2007
Banner ads-UPDATED!
I decided to share some of my most loathed banner ads with you that I encounter on an almost daily basis. Most of them are from checking my yahoo account. If any of you use yahoo mail, they might be familiar.
1) This is a video of a woman dancing by her work computer who is "surprised" to see the camera sneak up on her from the behind. I only hate this one because she does such a poor job at acting surprised. It is also pretty obvious that this company didn't want to shell out the dough to get a advertising company, so they asked Shelly down the hall to do the acting.
I also hate it because of the dancing. This is an ad for an online educational do-hickey, and dancing has nothing to do with it. They clearly just put in the dancing to lure the eye. I hate that.
If I were an banner-ad advertiser I would probably push the envelope and get people's attention by showing guns pointed at them and firing. There also should be some menacing-looking text that says "I am going to fucking kill you".
I might also use flashing signs that claim that their loved ones are being held hostage and show a picture of a person with tied up with a bag over their head.
Sounds far-fetched? Wait a few years.
2) I am not sure what the photographer was going for here in this personals ad. If they wanted it to look like the man in this picture look sadistic and is trying to force himself on this girl, they did a bang-up job. Notice she also is nervously smiling while shying away in an attempt to placate him in order to escape. She has a look of "Please save me".
If I was a woman, this is not the situation I would be looking for. Good work, Yahoo!
3) This add has Jared. I have more hate for Jared than there are stars in the sky.
I don't know who the other guy is but he has earned my hatred by appearing in the same ad.
4) Half of the time I check my email I have to stare at this idiot. I hate his cocky little smirk and that silly leaning stance of his. I would like to see him lean so far that he topples over that railing behind him into a tank of sharks.
I am not sure why Yahoo thought I would want to see him when I checked my email.
5) These dancing silhouette guys are the worst. They pump their fists up and down at about 10 Hertz and are really distracting. 
Not so much "what is that?" curiosity/distraction, but more of a primal-flinching-instinct that goes back to when we lived in caves. It is more of a "My life is in immediate danger"-type-distraction. This is exactly what I don't like to go through when I am checking my email.
After seeing this one I was sure I had seen the worst. Then, recently I saw that they squeezed three of these hand-pumping maniacs into one banner. I like to call it the "Triple Lindy".
!!!!!UPDATE !!!!! : I FOUND A TRIPLE LINDY AD:
FOOFOO
FOO
FOO
FOO
When I tried to find an example of the Triple-Lindy for this blog, I couldn't seem to find it quickly. I guess the company had enough of the death threats. I hunted around on Monster.com and I made sure to search for job postings in true 2nd grade fashion and find some that contain the word "shit". Believe it or not, I found two. One was for a internet clothing store. A link is below in case you decide to shop there or want to avoid it forever.
http://www.karmaloop.com/
There is an exerpt from the job posting in red below . Please form your own opinions. I have none to share.
Isn't it interesting how I always start my blogs on one topic and end up on another? When that happens I call it a Triple-Lindy.
The Karmaloop Story:
Karmaloop was founded in 1999 to battle the evil forces of McFashion. In a world populated by Abercrombie Zombies Karmaloop was created to provide a universally accessible alternative - a boutique to outfit cutting edge culture. Plus, it seemed like it would be fun to start a web site & get free clothes.Against the odds, Karmaloop has weathered the storm & is a dot.com survivor! Karmaloop never received any venture investment and grew solely through the hard work of the Karmaloop staff & the support of the many we consider to be part of the Karmaloop extended family.
Every member of Karmaloop's staff is in their 20's. We don't just work for Karmaloop we live it (& all have closets full of clothes to prove it!).
Karmaloop has been through having one computer, storing clothes in my parents basement, carrying orders in shopping bags on the subway to drop at the post office before going to our paying jobs, working out of a tiny apartment, a crazy landlord at the piano factory, a crazy hosting company, low-money, no money, late pay checks, busted hotels, hundreds of trips on the Fung Wa (chicken run!), chasing a crack head out of the office, sharing an office with crazy people, drinking binges, a flood in the warehouse, and about a million people telling us "the Internet, ha ha ha, you will never make money on the Internet!"But through it all we always new we would make it for one reason: you!
Despite everything we were up against & all the crazy shit we had to go through, we had incredible support from our partner brands & you, our customers. You never doubted us, you spread the word, were patient when we screwed up, & gave us love when we did things right!
Labels: ads
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Here is a picture of alex
Tuesday, March 06, 2007
bottle opener
It is elegant in it’s simplicity. It has many features: keychain hole, beer tab opener, magnet for the fridge, and j-shaped thing for opening bottles. All of this fits unto something 3” long and is a single piece of extruded aluminum, except for the magnet. It probably is made of about 12 cans worth of aluminum. No space is wasted. There is no flashy decoration or gimmicky ergonomic handle. It is all there.
I covet it.
I am serious, I really admire it’s simplicity and functionality. I know a lot of other engineers / tech geeks read this blog. You guys may feel me. Any comments from you dorks?
There is a person in this very room who continuously choughs. It is next to impossible to concentrate when I hear her coughing every 20 seconds. I am about to lose my mind on her. Before lunch I was trying to read a very complicated paper on image reconstruction and it sounds like I am in a TB ward. I have tried passively-aggressively retaliating with counter-choughs and slamming my drawers loudly right after she coughs, but she isn’t catching on. I don’t see myself speaking to her, so I guess this will go on until I quit. She isn’t sick because she has done this for the 2 months I have been at my new desk. Maybe they are sympathy choughs and she wants someone to ask her if she is okay.
BTW, this is the same person who puked in the hall way, who I abandoned without pause. You can read about that in this blog.
When I was in another part of the building about a year ago I was trying to finish up my master’s thesis and I was writing my manuscript and finishing up a model or two. It was all somewhat new to me and difficult. There was a guy up there who also coughed about 2 times a minute. His choughs were about 100 times worse than this girls because it sounded like he was choking when he coughed. There were wet and gagging. You know, like when a small bit of food is resting in your throat and you have to hack it back into your mouth for more mastication? He did that 2-3 times a minute nonstop from morning until 5, when he left. After about 2 months of this I was convinced it was a nervous tick and not a pathological problem with his esophagus. He eventually went back to China, so I didn’t have to assault him after all. He also had his fingers in his nose quite a bit. He went way beyond normal booger extraction and would just kind of dig around in there for minutes at a time. I think he did it when he was deep in thought. I wish I were making that part up. He was a real piece of work.
In that area of the office, the desks were arranged without partition walls. I eventually got so sick of his hacking and fingering of his nose, that I started stacking stuff in between our desks in an attempt to block him from my view and muffle the hacking noise. I used file cabinets, bookshelves, and I even stood some ceiling tiles on end like a shield between us because I thought it would absorb some of the hacking sounds. It extremely obvious what I was doing, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. Other people asked why I was doing that and I openly admitted I thought the coughing guy was a sociopath. Sometimes I did it within ear-shot of the guy, but I STILL don’t think he caught on.
That is all I got for now. Please check back later for a story about how annoyed I get when my pens fall out of my pen holder.
Labels: work stories
