I don’t care how you spent your Saturday night, because my Saturday night was clearly much more entertaining. I saw an Elvis impersonator in a pastry shop in Astoria, Queens. What did you do?

This is an actual cake that was spotted in Chinatown last weekend. I shot it from two different angles so people wouldn’t think it was Photoshopped. Anyone care to guess what it is?

I hope this doesn’t offend anyone, but if you like wine and have never been to snooth.com you’re a fucking idiot.

Full disclosure – my roommate Mark is the CTO of the website. But that doesn’t make it any less awesome, and I’m certainly not getting anything in return for pimping their site. It’s just a really well-done website for learning about the wines you like and the wines you don’t. They have a pretty nifty way of suggesting wines you’ll appreciate based off of how you’ve rated other wines in the past. For example, tonight I’m cozying up with a Salmon Run Pinot Noir even though I just discovered I’m not particularly jazzed about it. So I rated it a 1.5 out of 5 (and wrote the following helpful review) and snooth’s nifty algorithm will suggest for me wines that I won’t think suck in the future. It’s both simple and brilliantly complex. Here’s the review I wrote – care of their “blog it” button that appears after every review you write.

Dr. Frank`s Vinifera Wine Cellars Salmon Run Pinot Noir 2007 (SnoothRank: 0/5)
(April 2008)
Not sure if I'm crazy about this one. It's very light, almost effervescent, but it doesn't do anything. The flavor just sits on my tongue and doesn't go anywhere or blossom into anything. Every sip would be forgettable – although that's not much help given the flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. myRating 1.5/5

DCF Advertising’s Marie Anti-Smoking Campaign

Today marks the launch of our “Marie from the Bronx” anti-smoking campaign for the New York City Health Department. If you’re a New Yorker, in the coming weeks you’ll be seeing a lot of the ads which feature Marie talking about how complications from smoking resulted in her having many of her fingers and her leg amputated. It’s a pretty amazing story, and working with Marie over the last year has been really cool, to say the least.

We just finished creating the DCF Advertising Blog where you can read up on this and some other campaigns we’ve been working on lately. Fun stuff. Now give me a cigarette.

Kidding…

Why does the site look ugly(er than usual)?

I’ve stripped away all my site’s CSS styles in honor of CSS Naked Day. It’s a silly attempt to make web designers feel more appreciated, but in all honestly I do think it’s a pretty creative idea. Plus, I’m naked right now so it just feels right.

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.