Exhibit #1, May 2006:

Exhibit #2, August 2007:

Exhibit #3, May 2008:

A psychoanalyst would have hours of analysis pleasure on these beauties. The mammary image in the first picture clearly links forklift trucks (which is what they sell, by the way) to a homely feeling. There is also an element of surprise: forklifts can’t lift boobs?? Who would have thought? The second demonstrates your basic castration fear (Freud turns in his grave and shouts: “I thought of that one”) and the last one assures you that asian efficiency will be used to service … whatever (insert misogynist joke with ’screw’ and ’shaft’).

A look at TVH’s who’s-who indicates that the responsible person for the campaigns would be sales & marketing director L. Maertens. Keep excercising that innuendo muscle, Mr Maertens!

Nokia Trends Lab is a cutting-edge event which combines mobile phone technology with creative and experimental art. Shameboy will look for local talent to remix their single, ‘Splend It’ from their Heartcore album. As an exclusive to Nokia Trends Lab, Shameboy has allowed samples of ‘Splend It’ to be temporarily featured online. The participant who creates the most memorable and original remix will be invited by Shameboy to record the track in the studio on 4 May. The remix will debute at the Nokia Trends Lab event which takes place on Friday 9 May at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels. The music video for the remix will be shot during the event, by young talents using Nokia N95 8GB. These young talents will also be selected through a Film Lab on the Nokia Trends Lab website. The music video will then be aired on JIM.

If you still want free duo-tickets: send an email to info@nokiatrendslab.be with as subject “Shameboy tickets”. It’s also on Facebook!

Test your dudeness, too. I’m an Estro Dude.

Here are all the commercials. I specifically like the Vegas one.

The ReadyNAS is a 4-bay network-attached storage device with a nice set of features. Yes, it does storage, but it also has an FTP server, an iTunes streaming server and uPnP (Universal Plug-and-Play: works with Microsoft products like Windows XP and Xbox). I’ve been able to use one for over a month and in short: I’m probably going to buy one.

PRO:

• it’s big: 4 bays gives you a max size of 4TB. That should do for a while.
• it’s silent. It ran in my living room, and the noise was hardly noticeable.
• it’s fast (when connected to a 100Mbps client, I reached speeds between 7.3 MB/s and 8 MB/s - the theoretical max for 100Mbps is 12.5 MB/s)
• it’s robust: I experienced no downtime, but then again, 1 month is only a month.
• it’s full-featured: the streaming protocols and in the latest firmware, the BitTorrent client, make it very flexible.
• it’s scalable: the X-RAID technology lets you pop in new disks and scale automatically (without reformatting)

CON:

• price: it’s not the cheapest NAS on the market (e.g. LaCie has a comparbale device, but it does not support all the streaming/torrent protocols that ReadyNAS has)
• proprietary: I’m not sure how easy it is to recover data from an X-RAID formatted disk set. I don’t think you can mount them in a Linux system and recover the data.

I also received the latest Storage Central (successor of the SC101) to test, but I never opened the box. The trauma of the previous one was still too big.

In any case, it seems Netgear finally made a good choice by buying Infrant, with the ReadyNAS product line.