Silberbauer Says:

AMAGER LAST NIGHT: An empty building just across the street from my apartment (Oliebladsgade) was last night taken over by squatters (‘autonome’ in Danish). Here are the pictures and a small summary.

This is the building that were occupied by squatters. Notice the red banner hanging from the 2nd floor window. A few squatters were walking around outside the building at this moment.

Squatters outside the building.

The police is setting up the perimeter.

More police arrived and began clearing the area around the building.

The squatters brought their own press. Notice the two guys carrying a camera.

Sorry about the poor quality of the picture, but the squatters tried to make a quick run for it but the police had them surrounded and arrested around 6 or 7.

To policemen with yet another squatter who weren’t running fast enough.

They were put in strips (handcuffs) and placed in a line on the ground (fut-tog in Danish).

After night fall, the police went in to search the building. Notice the red banner still hangs from the window.

The search team went going through the bulding. One cop standing on 2nd floor balcony.

“4th. floor – secured!”

Top floor reached.

The search went through the entire building.

The police came out of the building carrying the red banner.

A small crowd showed up to show some support to the arrested squatters.

The police in riot gear going towards the crowd.

A smoke grenade or fireworks were used (not teargas as one of my neighbours thought) and it was all over.

This should have been an e-mail to Sterling Airlines but as Sterling is so discount that they don’t accept e-mail – it’s going on the blog instead. Well, you asked for it.

This morning I found a parking ticket in the front window of my car. I spotted it from my apartment (4th floor) and as I knew that my car was legally parked and that my residential parking permit is paid for until January 2008 I got pretty pissed. Danish parking fines are at almost $100, so it’s a real pain to get one, and I’ve been fined before without reason.

I ran down the stairs to my car, just to find that this was no parking ticket. It was a flyer from Danish low-cost, low-end airline Sterling Airlines made to look exactly like a parking ticket. I mean: You really have to read it closely to find out that it isn’t.

Some fuck up at Sterling’s agency somehow had the great idea that to get more people to fly Sterling, we must piss them off. ‘Give them a real rotten morning, then they fly with us, just to extend that rotten feeling’, they thought. It might have seemed real funny during the creative brainstorm but guess what: It isn’t in real life.

I have flown Sterling twice: The service is appalling. If your loose your luggage they couldn’t care less (my parents tried that and Sterling pretty much told them to fuck off). If you want to move to a free seat with better leg room, that’s ok – if you pay for it in cash. Their planes are very often delayed … Sterling just sucks.

Now, Sterling feels it’s ok to fondle my car to place their ridiculous flyer under the wiper and fuck up my morning. The ad even tells me to place it on my neighbour’s car ‘just to tease’. Hell I won’t! I hold no grudge against my neighbor – why should I tease him?

I really don’t need Sterling to make my day more stressful. So fuck you too, Sterling Airways – and keep you goddamn hands off my car the next time.

Be afraid, be very afraid. If this was footage from a Soviet young pioneer organisation camp in the 1980′ies, just imagine what Reagan would have said – something about an evil empire, I guess.

But no: It’s a trailer for the documentary Jesus Camp showing American children being brain washed by raving maniacs to be true soldiers of god.

Notice the camouflage paint and the pledge to lay down your life for Jesus. This is beyond sick…

Just another proof that religion of any kind can and will be exploited by fanatics. Kids: Stay clear of it. Source: www.kirstensanford.com

Thanks to This Week in Science, the radio show that fights for reason and science, the Unicorn Museum is now online at www.unicornmuseum.org. The goal of the Unicorn Museum is to raise the money for a big billboard across the street from the home of absolute ignorance: The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The billboard is to feature an ad for the (non-existing, really) Unicorn Museum. The hope is to make visitors to the Creation Museum think twice… I wonder if that’s gonna happen, but still: A worthy cause!

Now that I got your attention: Go grab the This Week In Science podcast at Apple Music Store, it’s free. It’s hosted by Justin Jackson and Ph.d. Kirsten Sanford. Besides being smart Kirsten is one of the absolute lookers of the science community. As the podcast is still audio only, I here bring you a photo of Kirsten Sanford for you to look at when listening and getting smarter. Consider it a multimedia experience. Oh, read her blog too.

Shout outs to This Week In Science for fighting for a little less dumb world.

IE Tab. Brilliant! It runs IE inside a tab in Firefox. Excellent if your internet bank (and too much other stuff) only works for real in IE. Simply compile a list over alle the sites that you want to run in an IE context, and you never have to start IE again – manually that is. IE Tab will embed IE into Firefox when needed.

One of those tools that just makes your life that little bit easier.

Stupidity and media fascism know no limit. ABC suggests to implement a technology that would disable the fast-forward button on DVR’s (Digital Video Recorders such as TiVO, KiSS and other set top boxes) so that the consumers cannot fast forward through the commercials.

I’m sick of old media fascists trying to rule the world. Haven’t ABC learned anything from the way the record companies totally failed to cope with the mp3 revolution?

ABC HAS HELD DISCUSSIONS ON the use of technology that would disable the fast-forward button on DVRs, according to ABC President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw, with the primary goal to allow TV commercials to run as intended.

“I would love it if the MSOs, during the deployment of the new DVRs they’re putting out there, would disable the fast-forward [button],” Shaw said.

While MSOs risk losing some of their DVR customers if fast-forwarding were blocked, Shaw said the cable operators–who are beefing up their own local ad sales operations–”are in the same business we’re in.” “They’ve got to sell ads too,” he said. “So if everybody’s skipping everybody’s ads, that’s not a long-term business model for them either.”

Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping–and consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial viewing.

Source: Boing Boing

Get real, Mike Shaw – you can’t fight the digital revolution. Broadcast commercials are dead anyway, narrowcasting and 1-to-1 is the way to go.

The market for tv-commercials is moving still closer to the consumer. A few years ago, Discovery Channel showed English commercials in Denmark Now local commercials are switched in during the commercial break. The next logical step is to switch in the commercials as close to the consumer as possible as a tailor made ad stream with maximum effect.

So instead of fighting the future why don’t ABC offer free ad-supported DVRs that stream 5 minutes of targeted commercials from the net every 60 minutes or so? Program each free DVR with the geographic and demographic profile of the consumer and combine this with polls and automatic usage data collection and you’ll have a marketing monster machine placed in every home. And it’ll be owned by ABC – or who ever gets there first.

Congrats NASA. Beautiful launch and a very nice transmission on NASA TV.

Hope that the landing goes smoothly too.

This is an interesting interview with Eric Reiss on his 10 dogmas on web design.

http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/dogmas_are_mean

Just got home from an exquisite holiday in Italy. The food, the wine, the beaches of Liguria, the coffee… yummy.

And speaking of coffee: On our way home we visited our good friends in Switzerland. After the delicious lamb chops (brilliant!) Marianne and Søren served a very nice cup of espresso and to my surprise it was made on a Nestlé invention: The Nespresso machine. Small coffee capsules (sold on the net) go into a machine manufactured on license by Siemens, Jura, Köenig or some other espresso machine manufacturer and out comes pretty good espresso indeed. The capsules are of course of proprietary design and the concept is a bit too… conceptish – but the coffee is good and that’s what counts. So I’m considering buying such a Nespresso thingy.

As soon as I got home I started my Firefox browser and went to www.nespresso.com to check out the availability for Denmark. This is what met me:

Yes – an almost empty page. It was supposed to be a large Flash animation, but for some odd reason the Flash object didn’t work. It may be my browser, it may be the page, I don’t know – and I don’t care. Why on earth does Nestlé risk loosing the customer on the frontpage just to make the page flashy? My guess: Some jerkoff executive at Nestlé said: Make it flashy, make it noisy – and the designers went ahead, blew their brains out and did this site. It’s not great- have a look for yourself. I think I’ll do a more thorough review of it later on, but right now I need sleep – I’m still seeing fast approaching Audis for my eyes after 12 hours on the Autobahn.

So guys, You’re ready to launch your new fantastic ubiquitous cross-media cutting-edge Web 3.0 software solution which, without any doubt, will bring you instant succes, fame and fortune.
All there’s left to do, is to launch a major marketing campaign in the Big Apple. If you can make it here, you can make it everywhere.. remember??

Here are the numbers:

The “Noobie” Campaign (no guarantee of instant succes, fame and fortune)
- Starbucks coffee sleeves: estimated 12 to 14 cents each.
- Street hawking with megaphones: $36 per hour.
- Ads on urinals and on the back of stall doors: $100 to $125.

The Medium Campaign (no guarantee of succes, but you will have a lot of fun)
- Airplanes: $8,500 per flight for skywriting; $1,000 per flight for flying a banner.
- Spotlight or projection on a building: $4,500 and up per night.
- Mobile billboard trucks: $5,000 per 50-hour week.

The “Big Spender” Campaign (guarantee of some buzz)
- Digital subway-entrance ads: $274,000 for six ten-second spots every minute on each of New York’s 80 digital displays.
- New York Marathon naming rights: About $2-3 million per year.
- Naming rights to the new Jets-Giants stadium: at least a $12 million onetime cost.

What are you waiting for? Go for it! (and remember to invite me to the big opening at the New Stadium).

Read the full article by Brooke Kosofsky Glassberg

What a cool title for a great album. Elvis Costello and The Metropole Orkest. Grab it now if you like Elvis.