on the conquest of cool

taking a page from the prescient “conquest of cool”, adbusters is getting into the the shoe business by starting the blackspot sneaker brand. according to their marketing plan, they are accepting “preporders” [ no payment required ] and once they get 5000, they can start a production run at a unionized south korean factory.

of course they are open to cheap shots at using a south korean shop, but i’ll take them at their word that it’s a clean, well-lighted, unionized place at this point. i’ll admit that i haven’t preordered anything yet, because i’m a bit suspicious of a product that is only displayed in fuzzy artistic renderings. adbusters can position the shoes as being a nike killer all they want want, but i’m not going to get suckered into shelling out my money for what could potentially be a pair of crappy, chuck taylor ripoffs [ note that i’m saying they are, i just want more evidence and don’t make the logical error of assuming that i’m endorsing nike; it’s just that if i’m going to spend $60 to make a point then there are better ways to do it thanforking out cake for an adbusters stunt ].

theoretically, i’m all for what adbusters is trying to do. personally, i like how americanapparel going about it, which is similar in spirit on many levels; however, compared to the blunt instrument of blackspot rhetoric, there’s a savviness to americanapparel that i think is more broadly appealing.

up2speed = marketing wonk

in an amusing post the site formerly known as up2speed [ and even more formerly known as marketingfix ], explains why they’re changing their name to marketingwonk mere months after the last change. they forgot to do a trademark search. anyway, best of luck to them. the site, whatever the name, is always informative.

that said, i’m not sure why they just didn’t stick with marktingfix, which i think is less clunky than marketingwonk.

easy and sendmail. in the same sentence.

yes, that’s right. today i had the easiest,
least painful experience with
sendmail

of all things. for reasons too obscure to go into, i needed a local
mail server. normally, i avoid
sendmail

like the plague after discovering the pleasures of
postfix

. but local in this case means
os x

, which comes preloaded with
sendmail

.

great. i’ve either got to fiddle with installing
postfix

which will inevitably have a few speed bumps, but i get the
advantage of being able to configure it quickly; or i go with
sendmail

which is already installed, but which will likely come with it’s
own configuration speed bumps.

but a quick search for

“os x sendmail”

turns up the

“one click sendmain enabler”

, which happens to be heartily

recommended

by
jon udell

, which is good enough for me.

1 minute later i had a functioning mail server running.

i hear that

panther will go with postfix

anyway, so maybe i’ll only need to sully my system with
sendmail

for a short time.

a lydon extravaganza

recently, i downloaded a few of the christopher lydon interviews and put them on my ipod for when i’m running or driving around and sick of npr.

yesterday i rather enjoyed wandering around the home despot, while listening to an interview with the real live preacher. good stuff. now a good thing is even easier, considering that all the interviews are available in one tidy collection. just in time for a trip to chicago

{ intertwingled since 2000 }