6ix Passions

How Mr. Q Manufactured Emotion

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:24:09 -0500

“The last thing I would have guessed was that this wrinkly 81-year-old played an instrumental role in the development of the modern theme park. Mr. Q was Disney’s audio experience engineer, and he designed the original ambient music system for Disney World in 1968. We started discussing his career, and I was struck by the intense passion he still has for his former occupation. He felt it necessary to assure me multiple times that ambient sound was one of the most important parts of the park”

David Curtis met this incredible man behind the ambient sound system at Disney during a flight.

Great encounters are what make life so enjoyable. Passionated people cannot be replaced in this world. They are the soul of the innovation and are pushing us at doing more with little.

(via Instapaper)

The Power of Irrational

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:06:17 -0500

The Power of Irrational:

“Mark Kandarski is terrified. Sweat is dripping down his face. Both of his hands are clenched tightly to the arm rests. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was having a heart attack. As the airplane’s engines slowly rev up, his hands turn white. The plane takes off. A few minutes later, he looks over at me. I smile slightly. “I kind of hate flying,” he says.”

A good post by David Curtis (as always).

(via Instapaper)

Augmented Reality Issue of Esquire Nice! Would be great to see...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:50:14 -0500

Augmented Reality Issue of Esquire

Nice!

Would be great to see this on a ink paper magazine in a near future, or the upcoming Apple iTablet.

Verizon New Android Mobile TV Ad Poor phone, but good ad. (via...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:43:07 -0500

Verizon New Android Mobile TV Ad

Poor phone, but good ad.

(via ledebugger)

Videogioco Loop Experiment Unusual drawing stop-animation. Just...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:08:17 -0500

Videogioco Loop Experiment

Unusual drawing stop-animation. Just amazing!

Instapaper Updates

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:15:00 -0500

Instapaper:

Modified the container-selection algorithm to increase accuracy, especially to reduce the chances of stripping legitimate content. A bit more extraneous content may now be permitted on certain sites. Still optimizing.

Fixed minor bugs.

Added multipage detection to more popular sites.

Fixed character-encoding issue that would show up as missing apostrophes or dashes on pages such as Chicago Sun-Times and New York Times.

Fixed issues with Reuters, Bloomberg, Blogger, BoingBoing, LA Times, New York Times, Times Online UK, Touch Arcade, and Huffington Post.

This is still very much in beta, but it’s getting there. Thanks, everyone.

Instapaper is the best single man-made Web service/iPhone app I ever used. I don’t know how I could live without it (oh yes I know… I barely read anything online before).

It is I who thank you Marco.

Before she was a year old, Aimee Mullins had both legs amputated...

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:09:00 -0500

Before she was a year old, Aimee Mullins had both legs amputated below the knee. Her family doctor said she’d never learn to walk. At the age of 19, she set world records in the 100-meter dash and long jump.

Dear Every Site That Paginates Articles

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:18:00 -0500

marco:

I’m sure you split stories like this into two pages for a good reason: to save my bandwidth. After all, the remaining 3,126 characters of the story’s body (1,530 bytes as transferred with gzip compression) would have increased the page’s total size by 0.32%.

No, I’m just yanking your chain. I know you’re double-charging your advertisers for the same story by artificially inflating your pageview count. It’s just like the old auto-frame-refresh trick, but this one’s better because most of the ad networks haven’t banned it yet. That’s their problem, right? Why should you leave money on the table? You’re a business.

But it doesn’t really work as well as you had hoped because only a tiny percentage of viewers will actually read page two. You know that, but you don’t care, because you won’t give up a chance to make a few extra cents. Who cares if it annoys the crap out of that tiny slice of your audience? Who are they, anyway? The people who actually read your content thoroughly instead of skimming the headline and moving on? That can’t possibly be your most important audience segment — they’re just the most involved and attentive. Repeat customers. You already have their “eyeballs” that you can sell to your real customers. And these dupes get their eyeballs double-counted. What a steal!

Keep up the great work, publishers.

I had to reprint Marco’s full post here, as it is just way to good to not passing along.

I felt this way about paging since the Web exists. Users don’t have any problem at scrolling and the ones who read the full article don’t even see the conventional banner ads anymore, they are blind to it. But publishers are from old school, and have a hard time finding ways of added value for their most precious readers, they prefer to hide their heads in the sand and keep going as it is. The easy way. After all, innovation is not given to all.

As Marco said: please, keep up the great work, publishers.

Alexi Murdoch - All My Days I just finish watching the feel...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:23:00 -0500

Alexi Murdoch - All My Days

I just finish watching the feel good road movie Away We Go. The soundtracks of the movie are exclusively by the singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch. The movie is good and Alex’s songs really enhance the emotions and feelings you get through the movie.

I have since all his albums and I think can listen to his voice for eternity, and yes without even understanding what he is saying. His voice is so calming. Maybe I would find peace through his voice…

Geek Depuis 1994 Since yesterday we have launched the new...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:35:00 -0500

Geek Depuis 1994

Since yesterday we have launched the new campaign “Geek since 1994” for the Infopresse Boomerang 2009 15th year anniversary. The Boomerang is awarding each year the best marketing interaction pieces in Quebec (at least among the ones that have been submitted).

I like that campaign and specially the Geek Joke Builder we did. I knew from the start it would be a success. Something like this for our little community could not stay unnoticed.

We still have a couple of fixes to do, but the site is up and running. Go create your best geek jokes.

Here’s some other geek jokes I did while doing the insurance quality on the site:

A special thanks to Edmund who has created all the amazing illustrations and design for the site. And also a big thanks to the small team at La Grange who has integrated our concept and added of their own ideas for a better final product.

Also there is a little surprise on the way.. so stay tuned and keep looking at the site in the upcoming days.

"Still fumbling toward extasy"

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:11:40 -0500

“Still fumbling toward extasy”

- Our company next year goal.

Itchy

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:41:00 -0500

Jipé: Thane, how are you?
Thane: My balls are itchy.
... few hours after having print those two lines ...
Thane: JP, you need to remove this, you make me look like a looser.
JiPé: But, you are a looser! *smiles*
Thane: It may not sounds like a joke to people.
JiPé: Do you really wish me to remove it?
Thane: No it's ok, but people may think I don't shower.

Apple iTunes Affiliated Page Hacked You can easily hack iTunes...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:19:00 -0500

Apple iTunes Affiliated Page Hacked

You can easily hack iTunes affiliate page by injecting your own image and text in the URL, like this fun hacker did here (will work until Apple decide to change the way the page is program). More funny than anything else.

World Fastest Snow Cat - Subaru Impreza WRX STI The latest toy...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:14:35 -0500

World Fastest Snow Cat - Subaru Impreza WRX STI

The latest toy of Ken Block (see my other posts)

And I thought that car was only existing for the movie Taxi 3

(via Etienne)

Jeremy Jones’ Deeper Trailer - A Snowboard Film When was...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:22:38 -0500

Jeremy Jones’ Deeper Trailer - A Snowboard Film

When was the last time you did some ice climbing in the middle of the night to get down in snow?

(thx Etienne)

What Do You Want In A Car? AUDI TV Commercial Too strong! (thx...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:02:32 -0500

What Do You Want In A Car? AUDI TV Commercial

Too strong!

(thx Sasha)

Apple iTunes Pitch: TV for $30 Per Month

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:00:24 -0500

Apple iTunes Pitch: TV for $30 Per Month:

To rule them all. Prepare your credit card.

8 Days Later Here’s an excellent short on Zombies for the...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:25:04 -0500

8 Days Later

Here’s an excellent short on Zombies for the Halloween.

The Droids We’re Looking For (Google Search) This is...

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:31:33 -0500

The Droids We’re Looking For (Google Search)

This is awesommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmme.

(via Chartier)

How GeoCities Invented the Internet

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:28:00 -0400

How GeoCities Invented the Internet:

A garish collection of home pages paved the way for blogging, social networks, and the rest of Web 2.0

(via GiveMeSomethingToRead)