John Lagomarsino
Video · Photography · Music · Motion Graphics

Well, I’m back from vacation.  I’ll probably have some anecdotes, pictures, and movies soon, but right now I’m just too tired to face all that.

And of course, a massive, massive thank-you to Brian for his impeccable wit and intelligence while I was gone.  He’s inadvertently raised the bar for this site.  So, you know, prepare to be disappointed.

I would, however, like to point out an ad that just went by on a site I was browsing:

And then it links to an “experiment” in which they showed 120 people an OS they claimed was the next Windows, but it was really Vista.  I imagine the results showed that these people loved the software when they didn’t know it was Vista, but I can’t be sure, since the site won’t even load under Firefox or Safari, and I won’t touch IE with a 10-foot pole.

But that’s not even the point.  What’s alarming here is that Microsoft apparently deems Vista’s image enough of a problem and enough of a public laughingstock to all but acknowledge its poor reputation in its own advertising.  “If you pretend to know nothing about what the experts claim, you REALLY WILL LIKE IT!  We promise!”  So slap on a blindfold, and maybe it’s not so bad.

Personally, I think that instead of wasting time on these “experiments” they should just hurry up at that drawing board they’re getting back to.  It doesn’t matter to me, though, since it’s too late–they’ve already lost a Windows customer in me.

Charming, really, what an introduction: “…If nothing else, it will be funny.”  Thanks a ton, John.

Oh, hi there, didn’t see you reading, sorry for the snark.  Please, let me introduce myself.  My name’s Brian and I’ll be stopping by here to fill in while JT is gone.  John and I go way, way back.  We’re also frequently incorrectly assumed brothers — it’s pretty strange.  In any case, my usual musings over at my own little corner of the web tend to gravitate towards classical music and the classical guitar, though like John I sometimes take the occasional peep in to the ridiculousness of the media.  I’m also, however, a closet musical theatre sometimes lover and sometimes hater, and I suppose in John’s absence I’ll do some thinking about that neighborhood of the musical world in this space.  I’ll be back with something of real substance soon, I promise.  And to make JT happy I guess I’ll work on making it funny, too.

You should all go and subscribe to Brian Barone’s blog. When you mouse over his link to my site, the tooltip reads:

My hilariously funny, blisteringly insightful, and remarkably similar looking friend JT dissects the world around him with characteristic charm, wit, and zippy syntax.

This is why we like him.

So, I’m kind of bummed. Brian and I were psyched to audition for Mark Burnett’s new reality show ‘Jingles.’ The basic premise is that teams compete to write commercial jingles for ad companies. The idea behind the show is to revive the art of the jingle.

You can imagine why Brian and I were so excited about this. Well, it turns out that we’d have to be available for six weeks this summer/fall. It would be kind of hard to justify taking a semester off to be on a reality show about commercial jingles. Maybe next season, after it becomes the most successful television venture in the history of the medium.

Also, all you web designers out there: can anyone figure out what’s wrong with my navbar? The lightup buttons display too high on Macs. I have neither a Mac nor the knowhow to fix this issue, so any help would be much appreciated.