Entries from May 2008 ↓

Most people who go to a lot of conferences or are in anyway involved in the purchasing department of a company know all about the kind of promotional items that come with product launches. Now, most of this stuff is garbage that gets tossed in the garbage can immediately. However, occasionally something so cool comes along, like some awesome shoes or imprinted electronic products, that you just decide to keep and cherish them.

A perfect example of this is The Simpsons movie launch last year. They did a promotional deal with Vans and ended up releasing some pretty awesome Simpsons shoes:

Another great example of awesome promotional computer and tech gifts are all of the promo, specially engraved iPods that have been making their rounds over the last few years. Though they are a higher end promotional product, who is going to throw away an iPod?

There have been many other cool, promotional items over the years. We’ve seen a lot of frisbees with really cool designs, beer can sleeves, and water bottles that people really seem to enjoy and keep around. One of the best parts about these promotional items is that they don’t only promote to the people who get them, they promote to everyone who sees them.

Many of you know that Alejandro Jodorowsky was an amazing film director. You may have seen Holy Mountain or El Topo recently, as they both have been finally released on high quality DVD. What you may not know, and what may bring you some insight into his works, is that Alejandro is also one of the foremost knowledgeable individuals on tarot and making tarot readings. While this staff of humemes is unsure of the veracity of any of Jodorowsky’s claims of synchronicity and psychic readings having profound effects on his movie-making abilities, the inclusion of the mythos of such happenings certainly can have an effect on the way one watches his movies.

As you can see, the aesthetic link is obvious, but to Jodorowsky, this connection means so much more. He has integrated this ancient process, among others, into his art and the outcome is something that is so surreal and so other-worldly that the uninitiated are often left confused. The “deep psychological search” that Jodorowsky speaks of in this video is, we believe, the precise value of such spiritual practices as tarot. It forces one to look into a mirror of their personality and figure out what lays before them, behind them, and with them right there.

As we’re sure you know, we here at humemes know a bit about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO.) In fact, it’s how we keep the lights on, food on the table, and the server’s humming. Over the past few years that we’ve been doing this professionally, we’ve come to understand a few key things about SEO. The first is that not every person who claims to offer it as a service knows what they’re doing. The second is that quality is still king on the Internet.

This second issue, that of Quality, is what we’d like to discuss today. When many new website owners are approaching the Internet, they’re often tempted to avoid paying money for a developer and instead choose to do their website, website copy, and SEO themselves. When they realize that their site is still getting no hits, they tend to look in the direction of Pay-Per-Click advertising companies, such as Google’s Adwords. However, what they don’t understand, is that since the quality of both their site and their copy is so poor, they will end up paying a far higher premium than a competitor who has a website that is better designed and has better copy.

Without a doubt, many millions of dollars a year are lost by small, new, or un-hip companies due to poor design, poor copy, and poor SEO. We’d personally like to see that change. This has been your yearly public service announcement. Thank you.

There is a very interesting and well-written post over at dive into mark about what is going to happen when Microsoft stops supporting the MSN Music DRM.

I’ll let Mark Pilgrim do the talking:

So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter “the victims”) will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.

In a cameo in the 1965 film “Pierrot le fou” directed by Jean-Luc Godard, American filmmaker and writer Samuel Fuller, acting as himself, gives a candid appraisal of what makes a movie, a movie: