Creating a progressive and abstract print ad can be a good thing. But creating an ad that’s so abstract that the dude putting them up can’t tell the damn thing is upside down? Not so good.

Has anyone else noticed that the displays on the new NYC subways seem to use Apple’s Keynote presentation software? If you’ve ever used Keynote, pay attention to the transitions and you’ll recognize all your favorites – Cube, Dissolve, Pop – they’re all there!

Does anyone know if they actually have a little Mac running the show inside every subway, or if it’s just a video file looping?

One of the scariest things in the world.

One of the funniest things in the world.

Hey everyone – miss me? I don’t know how you survived yesterday without a new caption contest, but I’m back from a little vacation (Anna and I went to Mexico) so it’s onward with the caption contests, shit jokes, and other useless diversions.

Case in point – I just discovered another nifty use of Apple’s Time Machine. Ever launch Photoshop and suddenly all the pallets and preferences are set to the default (ie, moron) settings? It happens to me about once every few months. For some reason the preferences file (~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Photoshop CS3 Settings) occasionally gets corrupted and reset to the factory default. But with Time Machine, just browse back to a time when you knew everything was peachy, and restore that sucker. Just worked fine for me.

I noticed something pretty annoying while cleaning up my desktop today. The icons for SWFs and PDFs look very similar, and as a result are hard to quickly identify when viewed as thumbnails. This is probably the worst thing in the world.

I found this weird shopping list on a dollar in my pocket today. Any insights you can offer, my clever readers, are much appreciated.

Well, I can scratch off another item on my life’s to-do list. Our latest anti-smoking commercials we created at DCF Advertising for the New York City Health Department have pissed of the New York Post’s one-and-only Andrea Peyser.

Not too shabby, although it’s hard to take criticism too seriously from someone who’s job is to get pissed off about something else completely different every day.

(It’s also hard to take criticism from a website with urls ending in .htm. What is this, 2003? Take THAT, The New York Post!)

I noticed something extremely creepy in the West Village last night. I gazed into an upscale townhouse and was shocked to see a giant 1980s era photo/portrait hanging over the mantle featuring a Ron Jeremy lookalike and his seeming Russian mail order bride. Some close-ups are here and here. It’s such a dated portrait that I have to imagine it’s been hanging up there since the 80s. But what’s baffling to me is that they haven’t gotten sick of it since then. Maybe the couple just died, and the portrait is up for the memorial service? That’s the most comforting explanation I can think of. Any others are welcome in the comments.

Another reason why I love my Mac. This weekend I needed to edit some video in a pinch. The project was going to take about 20 gigs of hard drive space but I was away from my external hard drive and only had about 10 gigs of free space on my laptop. So what did I do? I did what any Mac user would do – I deleted my entire iTunes music folder. It cleared up about 65 gigs of space, and I was able to edit the video and all was well. Then when I got back home I restored all the files with Time Machine, which had automatically backed everything up. That’s how badass I am.

Some sweet sweet irony here. Security camera footage of a man falling off a ladder while adjusting that same security camera.

A sign of the times.

I spotted this customized Wet Paint sign last night on 14th and 6th. Can anyone offer any insight into just what the hell it means?

I spent yesterday in Buck’s Country PA and was very impressed the town’s old fashioned flair. It was perfectly summed up by the sign on this Bank’s alarm box. Click here for a close-up.

I spotted this Fandango ticket machine sporting a Windows dialogue box a few weeks ago and my fancy was, as is to be expected, tickled. I’m obviously not the first person to document these types of amusing Windows error messages before (a few examples are here, here, and here).

Common reactions to these error messages usually revolve around how much Windows sucks. While I do agree with that statement, it’s not a fair explanation of the ubiquity of these error messages. Instead, I think it’s just a numbers game. Since Windows computers are cheaper and easier to configure for kiosks/billboards than Macs, you’re more likely to see more error messages on them.

But what about UNIX? I’m no expert, but my understanding is that it’s just as cheap, if not cheaper, to put together a small and portable UNIX machine that would be perfect for a billboard or kiosk. So why haven’t we seen any UNIX error messages?

Got an image of a UNIX or a Mac error message on a billboard or a kiosk? Hook it up in the comments. And to help fan the flames… Windows sucks. Macs rule. And UNIX is confusing.

Check out Macenstein’s blush-inducing review of my Apple Soundtrack video here. Thanks Macenstein! Let me know if you don’t get my bribe check by Tuesday and I’ll cancel it and send you a new one.

I don’t know what they’re selling at bodegas on the Upper East Side these days, but I’m a little hesitant to put it in my mouth.

Ok, thanks for everyone’s input on the caption contests. I’ve given it some thought, and here’s the deal.

Caption contests will now last seven days. After a caption has been posted for seven days, I’ll turn off the ability to add new captions and I’ll declare a winner and a loser based on the votes. (Since I can’t disable the voting feature on certain caption contests without disabling it across the entire site, you’ll still technically be able to vote for completed caption contests, even though a winner has already been declared and your votes will mean nothing. Nothing!)

As an example, I just closed an older caption contest and declared a winner and a loser. Check it out to see what I mean.

Winners will receive a link to their website (if they provided it when submitting their caption) and losers will receive nothing (although I don’t want to rule out the possibility of putting a piece of shit on them.)

I just installed this cool little image viewing thingy called FancyZoom throughout the site. It’s not perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot nicer than just seeing an empty JPG when you click to view an image. It works with thumbnails (as you can see on the left) or with text links too.

Technology. Ain’t that some shit.™

Quick informal survey: How many keys are on your keychain? And of those, how many have you used in the past seven days? Be honest – you don’t have to use your real name (as if anyone here does anyway…). If you’re reading this, you’re obliged to participate. I know where you sleep, Alexandr.

I’ll go first. To the comments!

UPDATE: Here’s some infoporn on the results so far. Last update 2/7, 5:30PM EST

Hopefully you’ll notice that the site is much faster now. It seems the problem was the Kimili Flash Embed WordPress Plugin, which for the record, blows. I just switched to the Flashifier Plugin, and everything seems much snappier now.