Day: December 6, 2006

Lenovo blog number two is rolling

Inside the Box » Blog Archive » The Most Useless Feature on a ThinkPad?

This has been a good day. We launched the second “official” Lenovo Blog — Inside the Box — with Matt Kohut, our worldwide competitive analyst at the helm. This marks the debut of the corporate blog template and the debut of our corporate blog aggregator at http://www.lenovoblogs.com.

OgilvyPR — John Bell and Veronica Oleynik — made the design and hosting happen. Without them …. we’d be using Blogger or WordPress.com and not living in the slick world we do.

Guess who figured out how to embed YouTube videos today?

Kind of cool. You register the blog with YouTube, provide the WordPress API and YouTube takes care of the rest. Duh.

I had been pasting the embed code into the WordPress write box — and that wasn’t working too great.

My brush with greatness

Milli Vanilli – Girl I’m Gonna Miss You
Okay. Thank god for YouTube. In in the early 90s I was asked to “sail” a boat in a music video for some band I had never heard of.The producer had chartered a sailboat so the singer could sail away at the end of the love song with a broken heart. That boat, being chartered, was insured and needed to be captained by a responsible individual who was insured to sail boats (that was me due to a brief career in yacht delivery). So, for $500, I sailed the sailboat to a dock in Cotuit, where these dudes in bicycle shorts and dreadlocks were lipsynching to a song and camera people and makeup people were climbing all over the dunes. Why they picked Cotuit for the shoot is beyond me, but the video is unique for two reasons.
1. It shows a Cotuit Skiff — the kind of sailboat I own three of, and which my grandfather built in the 1940s.
2. I am on the big boat during the shoot and barely if impossibly visible at the end when the love stricken star sails into the sunset.You see his back. I am sitting to his left, ducked down, with a hand on the wheel because he was utterly unable to understand the notion of steering.Nor, apparently, singing, for less than a year later, Milli
Vanilli was ostracized for lip synching their act and having utterly no music talent.

[I hosed the video trying to put a normal title on this post. Will try to revive. YouTube embedding is not for the stupid]

Burger King’s Pocketbike Racer for Xbox 360
http://youtube.com/v/AFDOD98Kv0U
So I am half-watching the boob tube last night and there is this ad with the Burger King Subservient Chicken and the King. The King is on a little motorcycle, robes flapping, roars through a crowd and over a plywood ramp — Evel Knievalling with some serious hang time and smashes into the ground with definite internal organ damage.

A chicken wearing a garter belt, a demonic King with the creepiest smile in the world, a motorcycle stunt gone wrong …..

Okay, you have my attention.

Then the green Xbox logo comes on screen and I realize I just saw an ad for game and not a sandwich?

WTF? Then came the deal — I can buy the Xbox game and make the king fly off a ramp and waste himself at ….

Burger King.

Amazing. I am not worthy.

Inflight advertising

I need to read the SkyMall catalogue in the seatback pouch more often. Where else could I learn that there is a massive aftermarket for iPod docking stations, including one ingenious wonder that also holds toilet paper?

Here it is, courtesy of Akihabara.com:

Anyway — SkyMall is also testament to the fact that we live in strange times. This is like the Ripley’s Believe it or Not of junk and impulse shopping disorder.

But I digress — what I am really interested in is inflight advertising. You get hammered with impressions from the second you arrive in the terminal to the moment you escape at the other end. Out of home, light boxes, overhead banners …. the inflight magazines are the haunts of Negotiation seminars, expense management software, the stuff the modern Willy Loman must think about after blowing the big deal in Cleveland.

On USAirways yesterday I opened the tray table for the first time in a long time and saw this ad for Panasonic Toughbooks. I liked it.

And then I covered it up with my tougher ThinkPad and got some work done.

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