figby.com » Humor

Best of April Fools 2009

Michael Moncur — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:43:03 +0000

Every year on April 1st, sites all over the Web take a break from serious business to post believable, yet strange, announcements. Here are a few of my favorites this year:

Palm announced that the all-new Pre will run old PalmOS software.
Microsoft hinted that they’re making a version of Office for the iPhone.
Blackberry opened their own “App store”.
The Texas State Senate added a provision to the state’s budget to prevent purchases of Windows Vista.
CNET spent four months warning Windows users about a virus that turned out to have no impact at all.
The Onion won a Peabody award.
Twitter pretended that they waited three years after they launched to add a Search feature to their home page. Calling it “The Discovery Engine” was delightfully droll.

Keep it up, guys! While these were pretty funny, none of them quite beats Google’s big announcement five years ago. Hopefully next year they’ll all come up with some better comedy.

Quotes of the Day

Michael Moncur — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 04:53:26 +0000

From Microsoft’s MSN Search Weblog today:

On a related note, a lot of you were alarmed to see that we had removed the Apple headquarters off our map. Our full plan is to of course remove each of our competitor’s headquarters from the map, but we just didn’t have time to get to this in the beta. By the time we get to our final release, we’ll have this feature nailed down. ;-)

…and on a completely unrelated note, from today’s Mozilla press release:

The Mozilla Corporation was established to support the Mozilla Foundation’s mission to ensure choice and innovation on the Internet by leveraging the economic value of Firefox which has resulted from its growing marketshare.

Mozilla is talking like a big business and Microsoft is talking like a small one… Interesting times.

Sorry, your photos aren’t amateur enough.

Michael Moncur — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 16:02:27 +0000

A few years ago, I walked into Kinko’s with 300 pages of galley proofs for a book I was working on. I ended up arguing with them for half an hour and walking out without copies—they refused to copy them because it looked like “copyrighted material”, and the idea that I was the copyright holder (and the book wasn’t even published or copyrighted yet) meant nothing to them.

Now the same thing is happening to a few “amateur photographers” (or professional ones, presumably) who try to get prints at Walmart and other retail shops.

I have no problem with the enforcement of copyright law, but assigning the employees of a supermarket photo lab to determine whether photos can be printed or whether they look “too professional” is ludicrous.

I suppose I’ll consider myself a success as a photographer when nobody will print my photos…

[via]

10 tech terms of 2004

Michael Moncur — Tue, 28 Dec 2004 19:16:44 +0000

The end-of-year lists continue. ITworld.com has an entertaining article by James Lewin on 10 new tech terms for 2004:

2004 has been an especially rich year for new techno-jargon. So, in the spirit of full disclosure, here’s a guide to some of the terms that made it big this year.

While the list includes such obvious memes as “phish”, “offshored”, and “podcasting”, some are a bit more obscure. The word “gatesed” (meaning affected negatively by microsoft) only appears a few times in Google, the word “mouselexia” appears only once, and the word “netlag” means something else to us geeks. But it’s fun nonetheless.

[via PaidContent]

The Google ABC

Michael Moncur — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 05:30:58 +0000

Google loves to create beta products, as Jeremy points out. The latest is Google Suggest, a demo of what Google looks like with a dynamic autocomplete feature. I’ll be writing about the JavaScript aspects of this elsewhere, but the first thing I noticed is that you get a suggestion as soon as you type a letter—presumably the most common search term for that letter. So here, for your entertainment, I present The Google ABCs:

A is for amazon
B is for best buy
C is for cnn
D is for dictionary
E is for ebay
F is for firefox
G is for games
H is for hotmail
I is for ikea
J is for jokes
K is for kazaa
L is for lyrics
M is for mapquest (surprise, not Microsoft.)
N is for news
O is for online dictionary (weird one.)
P is for paris hilton (the Internet should be ashamed of itself.)
Q is for quotes (yay!)
R is for recipes
S is for spybot (not spam?)
T is for tara reid (who?)
U is for ups
V is for verizon
W is for weather
X is for xbox
Y is for yahoo
Z is for zip codes

If this new feature goes out of beta, I expect some serious competition for some of the letters, and a whole new kind of misspelling-based spam.

Official Digital Camera of the Internet?

Michael Moncur — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 15:23:31 +0000

Someone in one of the Digital Photography Review forums pointed out this press release in which Pentax USA proudly proclaims that its cameras are "The Official Digital Camera of the Internet." It’s brilliant, really–they would have had to pay to be "The Official Digital Camera of Major League Baseball," but since the Internet belongs to everybody and nobody, they can claim whatever they want.

This is the most ridiculous bit of dot-com silliness I’ve seen in years, and I don’t think it will take long for Pentax to become The Official Laughing-Stock of the Internet.

In other news, taking Pentax’s lead, I’m officially declaring Figby.com "The Official Weblog of the Internet." I was first, nobody else can do it.

Imminent death of everything predicted

Michael Moncur — Fri, 17 Oct 2003 09:04:57 +0000

The net media seems to enjoy declaring things dead prematurely, and there are some prime examples this week: Gates fortells death of spam. Bluetooth is dead. Death of a Meta tag. The PDA is Dead. Microprocessors are dead.

But don’t worry, death isn’t always permanent. Witness the rebirth of assembly language and Napster’s rebirth. Meanwhile, Bucking the trend of life-and-death cliches, Fortune magazine says the IT industry "is starting to emerge from its torpor."

Exploding Cellular Phones

Michael Moncur — Fri, 10 Oct 2003 11:36:21 +0000

Robert X. Cringely once said “If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.” It is now very clear that cellular phones are following the same development cycle as the computer.

Dave Barry Do-not-call followup

Michael Moncur — Mon, 06 Oct 2003 10:23:06 +0000

Dave Barry’s Sunday column is an entertaining followup on his previous article in which he published the American Teleservices Association’s phone number, forcing them to disconnect it shortly thereafter. Need the new number? It’s at the end of Barry’s column. I suspect legal action will follow, but Dave can probably afford it. (via Metafilter)

World’s most expensive cat toy

Michael Moncur — Sun, 30 Mar 2003 10:22:52 +0000

(Wired News)- The probable winner of the “less practical than segway” award, the Sony SDR-4X is going to be heavy competition for Honda’s ASIMO in the “2-foot-tall humanoid robots that cost as much as a Mercedes” category. Is there really a market for these or is this just a game they’re both playing to inflate stock prices?