If you’ve ever wanted to go nuts on a rude customer, read “John Mayer, John Lennon And A Good Old-Fashioned Fistfight At 7 am In The Morning” (via @robertbruce). It’s a story about a man at Starbucks, waiting in line, and what he does to the incredibly rude customer in front of him.
Archive for the 'The Sphere' Category
Wednesday, March 19, 2008I love Facebook, but it will never not weird me out when I found out about people dating/engaging/marrying via notification/news update on the site.
Plus, I like breaking the news on my blog.
Walter just finished up a major refresh of Just An Alias and also put up a new show “Special Edition - Flip the Switch” featuring a variety of electronica music. It’s got some good grooves and is well worth checking out.
If you purchase digital music at all (oh, I know some of you are pirates, don’t try to hide it from me), let me point out the newly born Amazon MP3 (beta). All of the songs are straight MP3s (no DRM) so they’ll work just fine on iPods or any MP3 player or can be burned to CD without any difficulty. The site doesn’t have as much selection as iTunes (at least not yet), but they’ve snagged content from major labels Universal and EMI. So you can enjoy artists such as Kanye West, Coldplay, and David Bowie.
You don’t listen to Bowie? Ok, that’s fair, neither do I.
Another advantage over iTunes: price. The top 100 songs are $.89/each and the top $100 albums are $8.99. In general though, song costs start at $.89 and depend on length.
via Daring Fireball:
Amazon’s single pricing is based on track length. Songs that are more than seven minutes long cost $1.94, songs more than 14 minutes cost even more. This isn’t necessarily a bad deal compared to iTunes — Apple makes many of these tracks album-only.
Oh, and for a sweet taste of irony… have you seen the new Apple nano advertisement? You know, this one:
iPod nano featuring Feist - 1234
The irony is that this song is the #1 (album version) and #4 (single) most purchased song on Amazon MP3, it costs 10 cents less than on iTunes, and there’s no copy restrictions.
A Harmonica’s Grandest Moment (Breaking Social Conventions)
Good Times, Life, Photographs, The Sphere 1 Comment »Time: 8:15amAfter a few minutes a very tall girl with long brown hair who I would later learn was a Parsons design student, broke social convention, turned to her fellow benchmates, and said, “My God, wasn’t today beautiful.” At first she just got a few quiet affirmations,”yeah, gorgeous”, “best day yet” etc, but then a young woman in a business suit again broke social convention and revealed personal information: “It was so nice, when I woke up I decided I didn’t want to feel miserable about anything, and broke up with my boyfriend. I ditched him at 7:30 in the morning. He didn’t know what hit him.”
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the unspoken walls that prohibit conversation between individuals in public. I’ve experienced this in many places in America, but it’s become more noticeable to me in Seattle particularly with the daily hour-long bus riders to and from work. Unless you speak to a person first or have previously established a rapport, people are hesitant to speak to you. The omnipresence of cell phones and iPods doesn’t make this any easier.
On the bus, I must have a presence of unapproachability (as stated, the iPod doesn’t make this easier). I find myself oftentimes being one of the last bus seats to acquire a second person when the ride gets full. Do I look like a big (overweight) scary (frowning) white guy?
(Insert pause for a runaway train: I originally found the Heading East post from Raul via Kottke. I started browsing through some of the art and photos on Heading East and got distracted by this photo. It’s one of the best I’ve seen.
I ended up browsing through Eliot Shephard’s other photos on Flickr also. Additionally, I ran across an interesting art project called 20×200.
This is as close as the internet can get to ______________. IM, IRC, forums, and Digg don’t count. Try listening to The Album Leaf while you’re on the train.)
Return to the tracks: Martin has been working on talking to women lately. During his brief period of unemployment while he’s waiting for his new job to begin, he set a goal for himself of talking to three women a day. He took to the internet in search for advise.
Now, I probably wouldn’t do it this way, but he found some advice columns from various male resources. Apparently some of these tricks work:
• talk to the woman within three seconds of making contact (eye-contact, arriving next to each other, whatever)
• say something funny (sarcasm doesn’t count… sorry, guys)
• say something belittling — now, this is one step I wouldn’t be likely to use myself, but I guess some girls respond well to this. e.g. “I like your outfit, that’s pretty cool. Although, I think blue would be a better color on you.” (I would never try to give out fashion advice.)
Apparently the idea is to get them to want to earn your interest instead of vice versa.
Instead of just trying to pick up girls or get their attention, I’ve made a few general attempts of spurring conversation the last few days. I managed to discuss the weather and daylight savings time with one of the men who waits for the same bus I do when heading downtown.
While actually on the bus, I’m still working on it.
One man who rides the bus apparently isn’t afraid of breaking taboos. He sits in his seat talking on his cell phone no matter who is around or what’s going on carrying on lengthy conversations. At the end of one of the phone calls, he wished the other person a happy birthday. While holding the phone in his left hand a few inches from his face, he took out his harmonica, held it to his mouth, and played a rendition of the Happy Birthday song.
But I’ve never seen harmonica-man talk with anyone on the bus.