Friday, April 16, 2010

Only at the Apple Online Store: Terrible Grammar


One of my biggest pet peeves (as far as grammar) is when people put modifiers on the word unique. It happens all the time in casual conversation, and I've been guilty of it myself when speaking, but whenever I see it in a written document or in advertising I cringe.

The guilty party this time is Apple, a company that frankly should have enough money and talent to know better.

This was greeting me when I logged into a friend's computer today, the "most unique gift ever" - perhaps Apple should give itself the gift of the ALA or Chicago Manual of Style instead of worrying about what I'm going to give my mother.

Below, the larger page screen capture.




Saturday, February 20, 2010

The Olympics: Low Tech Vs. Hi Tech

I was writing for my company blog this afternoon about how social sites such as Twitter and Facebook have changed the Olympic games for the athletes and for the spectators. We can now get first hand commentary and pictures from those participating, which is really cool if you are a television spectator, but not as cool if you are a coach trying to get your team to focus, or someone on the international olympic committee trying to figure out where to draw the boundaries between information that is fine for publication, and that that you want kept to those at the games (the verdict there seems to be that anything during an event or the opening or closing ceremonies is off limits, but that behind the scenes stuff is fine).

Also, I noticed that during the snowboarding events the other night some of the boarders were listening to ipods during competition (or at least were listening to their ipods during the waiting time before competition, but it really seemed like they still had the ear buds in when they started to compete), and I remember that Phelps did a bit of ipod listening to get himself geared up for a swim. I think that being able to sort of zone out and listen to your music before or during competition would give you and edge over olympians from days of ol' because getting psyched out by the crowd, by the other competitors, by the sheer pressure of the games is all part of the competition.

And I read somewhere (wish I could remember where) that some olympians were playing video games during the olympics, which seems like an extremely weird and sedentary thing for a bunch of world class athletes to do, but seems par for the course for anyone from this video-game-crazed generation.

Anyone who saw any or part of the opening ceremonies (or at least who saw the awesome whale part) would have been at least a bit impressed by all of the projected motion graphics they are using these days. And anyone who's ever watched swimming in the last few years and noticed those crazy full-body swimsuits that supposedly make you faster, or read about the speed given to some athletes by their prosthetic legs would no doubt be amazed by those feats of technology and engineering. And you sort of begin to wonder when will it stop? When will we reach the peak of technological innovation for improved performance, or the fastest mode of communication, or the social tool that will give the most direct and constant level of access to the athletes even after competition, and will we want all of that?

So there I was, thinking about how much technology has pretty much taken over the sports of the Games and hard it would be to be a super tech savvy athlete and how the pressure must be greater these days because now you not only have to be amazing during competition because you've been given all this specially formulated gear and training, but you have to find witty 140-limit things to say to your fans, and I was about to decide that I didn't want to be an Olympian at all with all that pressure ... but then I watched the curling competition between Denmark and Canada.

Now at first glance this sport is just as overrun with technology as any other, a few of team USA's Olympic curlers have twitter accounts from which you can hear all about the sport (and maybe even ask them what the exact rules are). But the Danish team also had something incredible low-tech, a 3-D model of the curling rink. It was more like a clipboard of the curling rink, something like what a football coach might draw out a play on, with little moveable curling rocks so that the coach could show the curlers exactly where she wanted them to direct their next rock. Watching the Danish team take a time out and use that model, then go back and execute a near perfect curl made me realize that even with all the twitter, all the fancy uniforms or equipment, that sometimes the old ways of doing things (like the drawn out game plan - they'd never tweet that to each other) are really the best ways of doing things.

I doubt we'll get to a point where competitors can telecommute to the olympics (I really hope we don't get to that point), and I have a feeling that we'll reach a point where we've gotten as much direct access to the every thought of the athletes, and I know that we'll always be working on some uniform, some method of training, or some something else to help break records, but when all athletes have access to all of that the basic principals will remain the same - and the best competitor on that day will win.