Hmmcast #133 mp4

My favorite non-tech magazine growing up was Mad Magazine. The spoofs on tv shows and movies are legendary. It’s good to see their humor is still as zany as ever. With Pirates of the Constitution, your desktop may never be the same. Mad also offers a Fanatic Four download. It’s still too bad Mad isn’t available digitally, but maybe they are recycling.

Hmmcast #128 mp4

Hmmcast #123 mp4

What board games do you own? I looked through a list of ours today and was surprised at what I ’saw’.

Hmmcast #121 mp4

I’ll never look at a spatula and spices around the barbecue the same way again.

This fake beer for kids TV in Japan commercial reminds me of those fake gum cigarettes I used to buy as a kid. You know, they had powered sugar in them and they would blow out “smoke.”

I keep laughing over the music and children’s expressions here. TV in Japan rocks! Unlike the last one and being that it’s a commercial hopefully YouTube will keep this one up.

On a musical note, While My Guitar Gently Weeps is one of my favorite Beatles tunes and must admit that I’d never heard it played on ukulele before until the video below. Impressed by Jake Shimabukuro’s mad ukulele skills? I was.

Jake makes it sound like he’s playing a 12 string guitar and yet the ukulele only has four strings.

This intriguing Flags by Colours breakdown of country flags by colors has some countries looking like different colored Pac-Man. To toggle on and off the actual flag, just click on the pac, er, pie chart. The list is sorted alphabetically so looking at the screenshot above it should be easy to pick out the United States.

If Tunisia were yellow, it would be Pac-Man. Nieu without the other colors could also be a good pill chomper. Bhutan is multi-colored. Bahrain and Georgia look like Pac-man was just chomped.

Sure I’m biased, it’s Memorial Day — and it doesn’t have much Pac power comparatively — but I prefer American flag the best. The United Kingdom flag looks cool too. Which flag design do you like best?

Of all the places in the United States to hear complaints about billboards, signage and especially the American flag, Las Vegas would seem an unlikely source — but that is exactly what’s happening at a Hummer dealership.

Dealership owner Dan Towbin said his big flag, which at 30 feet by 60 feet is about the size of a competition volleyball court, fits his dealership. “The building’s oversized, the sign’s oversized, the cars are oversized,” he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The man in the CNN article complaining that he can’t sleep because of the flag waving sound is hilarious. Vegas has to be about the noisiest town in America and he’s being woken by a flag fluttering in the wind? Dude can sleep through neverending neon but goes into instant alert when there’s flag wind action.

Also seems strange to have the dealer admitting — though not in as many words — the vehicles he sells are road hogs. Hmm, my second Hummer mention of the day already and it’s not even 11am. Ronald McHummer, anyone? I suppose it would be appropriate for the main blogger of a site with Hmm in the name to own a Hmmer, sans the U. Too bad no such vehicle exists yet.

My dream Hmmer would be eco-friendly, fuel efficient, affordable, roomy interior, computer networked, GPS, EVDO, solar panels and not be a road hog. If anybody wants to design and build the Hmmer, let me know when I can test drive. Would gladly pay more than $10,000 for the Hmmer.

Hmmcast #120 mp4

Microsoft chose Xbox Live Arcade Wednesdays, but Sony tempts the saw with (somewhat) weekly updates on Thursawday. Today an image quality update found via USA Today article. Check out the final sentence:

Sony isn’t expecting to post a profit in its game business until the fiscal year ending March 2009.

That puts the battle of the nextgen gaming systems in better perspective. Sony feels they need 18 more months to ramp up the game library for the PS3 and perhaps get the price of the PS3 down. They just released an 80GB version, but it’s not available in North America yet.

After seeing this I’m ready to swallow every icon on my desktop. Iconicide!

Look, I’ll sign up for just about anything but every once in awhile I see a good company — which I think the design company behind the following site is a good company — being suckered into the latest, greatest trend for the sake of, well, being trendy.

You know where I’m going: social networking. We have it for videos, for students (Facebook) for Geocities/Tripod (Myspace), music, etc. Now we have it for icons.

Umm, not quite.

My friend Lestat showed me that Icon Buffet has gone — or is trying to go — social. They have completely redesigned the site, added a token and stamp function for sending and trading icon sets with your friends online. They are also upselling “VIP” access for $6/month or $42 a year.

I’ve been signed up for Icon Buffet for awhile and it’s been a decent service, although I don’t recall ever using any of the icons in any project. I do appreciate and like some of the icons I’ve been sent. Someday I could see maybe using a few here and there. I was happy with the former system which emailed you free sets once a month.

Originally I turned Lestat onto the site when he asked me one day a (legit) place where he might acquire some icons. There are a bunch of icon sites out there that use trademarked images and their legality is questionable at best, Icon Buffet seems to be one of the good guys operating above board. I like to link to sites like these and share these type sites with friends.

The way Icon Buffet works is they email you notification of free icon sets once a month that you can download. This way you can pick up some different free sets of icons that you might use in a project someday. For a non-designer type like me, this is a worthwhile service. These icons can be used in your projects with the following licensing:

You may use the Product in your personal, commercial, and client projects, including advertising, web designs, software applications, on-line or multimedia projects, presentations, film, video, and computer games.

Icons only for personal use aren’t much use to a webmaster so it’s nice to see flexible licensing.

The catch here is most of the free icons — at least from myself and my friend Lestat’s perspective — aren’t really that fantastic. They aren’t bad, mind you, and certainly better than anything I could create without a lot more training, but the design technique is very similar across all icons and because it’s a free for all you’ll see these icons used on other sites. Maybe even other sites in your same niche. It could make it look as if you were copying the other site’s icons even though you both were using a free icon set. The really good usable icons are the ones that cost $$ and have much more limited use. I’m not saying all their free icons suck but when you factor in the saturation factor, well, they aren’t very real world usable.

It would be better, although more costly, to pay a professional designer for some custom icons or if you have the skill create them yourself. Aha, now you get what the real Icon Buffet pitch is here. The free icons are merely a loss leader.

That’s understandable and not a bad business plan.

Blogging about icons, come on
Now enter a site where adding blogs for the registered users makes little sense. Ok, maybe if I want to make one blog entry that says: everything in life I have to say about icons can be said in the following blog post (the one you are reading now) and link.

What else am I going to blog about? How much the free set I received for the month rocks but will be used by a bunch of other blogs? How I just sent a webmaster buddy a few mostly unusable sets of icons? Vent about how he tried to send me icons but I didn’t have enough “tokens” to accept them this month? If the icons sets are free then why is there a token charge to trade them?

Wait, I do see one use for the blog. A blog at Icon Buffet would be useful if I was a competing designer who sold icons. Come on over and buy my icons when you get tired of this design! Icon Buffet just opened the door to their competition to come in and blog on their turf. Oops.

As for the whole bug my invite my friends spiel (emphasis mine):

There’s another important way in which you can earn a whole lotta points, and that’s by inviting your friends to come join in the pandemonium. Hit the “Invite friends” link on your profile and send somebody a note about the fun you’re having trading Taipei Monkey and Manhattan Metroplex.

Join the pandemonium trading icons? LOL! Man, they can’t be serious. Just so it’s clear with Hmm readers, there are no invite or referral code links in this post for Icon Buffet.

The slogan: Welcome to the ice cream social
Icon Buffet has been the type of site that has existed for one purpose: a place to search and acquire free or pay icons. Call me an anti-social icon shopper if you like, but I don’t want to stop by and search for icons and have people asking me to visit their Icon Buffet blog or make them my Icon Buffet friend. The problem with most (all?) these social sites is they are bleeding our attention and time. We only have so much of ourselves to spread around and I don’t see a MySpace of icons being a good place to spend time.

While the site is very nicely redesigned none of what they’ve added makes me any more likely to buy icon sets nor do I see a point in dropping 42 bones a year to be a VIP member and get a surprise once a month and some more of those 31 flavors tokens. I had already invited my friend to this site before any of this social crap. I see them trying, the wheels spinning, but they aren’t going anywhere.

And what do icons have to do with ice cream? Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s like hanging around the ice cream parlor. Old school, but it’s 2007, not 1957. Johnny’s ice cream just melted.

Solutions?
Now if these tokens could be amassed and used to buy the good, unsaturated icon sets that could be worthwhile, but it doesn’t appear — at least neither Lestat or I saw — that the tokens have any value beyond charging your friends (in non-value tokens) to send them free icon sets they don’t have. It’s not like we’re trading baseball cards or comic books, free icon sets are not that valuable.

I could understand if you could create your own icons with flexible licensing and share into the Icon Buffet pool, but it doesn’t appear that we can. It’s a one way gig where Firewheel Design (the company behind Icon Buffet) is the only one who gets to share their creations but nobody else can. That’s some kind of warped social networking.

Now if they change that then they might possibly have a worthwhile community building site. Instead all I can do here now is beg my friends to join so I can earn points to earn tokens which have no value, or become a VIP member where I get more tokens with no value.

This is not social networking, it’s social networthless.

Update 8:51pm PST: Wow, a number of strange and mostly humorous things happened this morning after making this post. You can catch the gist of it by visiting the comments below, but let me see if I can summarize the sequence of events:

1. Post published above here.
2. One of the lead “Chef’s” Josh Williams (comment #4 below) stopped by to say he was sorry I didn’t like the site and that they were “… growing at a faster clip than ever before since the launch, and I think we’re willing to call the experiment a massive success.”
3. I posted a new blog post at Icon Buffet under the “my blog” section pointing to here. There was no hyperlink just the text. You can read the post and all the replies here. I’ve made a copy on the outside chance it will be taken down and will post it over here instead if that happens.
4. comments started to appear over at Icon Buffet and here from the VIPs at their site as well as Hmm readers. VIPs are people who paid the $6/month. You can judge how those comments fared yourself, but from my perspective, my opinions clearly weren’t shared by the VIPs.
5. I replied questioning why only VIPs were responding. I mean, after all if it’s such a massive success where are all the non-VIPs … or are they all VIPs?
6. More comments flood in. Icon Buffet closes comments on the thread so I can’t respond to more people that responded to me.
7. More VIPs keep adding comments to the thread but I still cannot reply. Neither can my friend Lestat who I mentioned in the piece above. Confirmation that comments could no longer be left.
8. I point out here that comments have been closed on a blog thread created by me under the heading of “my” blog at IconBuffet (comment #8 below). See the screenshot of the green message.

9. More angry VIP Icon nerds appear angry that how dare I question the value of a service they are paying for both here and yes, even on the comments at Icon Buffet where I still couldn’t respond. Social networking … how?
10. I begin receiving email notifications from other Icon Buffet members trying to send me free icon sets — only I don’t have enough tokens to accept them. Still can’t respond to comments being made at Icon Buffet on my own profile and the first and only blog post I made had the comments closed without any official explanation or email.

In comment #21 I tried to explain the joke which, well, if you explain the joke you ruin it somewhat, but apparently some people did not understand what the “humor” category means.

11. Chef Josh Williams returns (comment #24) to accuse me of trying to do this to generate traffic from Icon Buffet and suggest that the number of comments means this blog is desperate to receive comments: “Be grateful you have our paying VIPs to come troll your blog. Looks like you wouldn’t have much to talk about otherwise. Trust me… I’m laughing too. Hope you got some traffic out of the deal.”
12. I respond by pointing out that the third party stats site I like the least (compete.com) indicate this site has more traffic than Icon Buffet and that I would have been more than happy to continue the conversation at Icon Buffet on “my” supposed blog post started over there but couldn’t since they closed the comments. Strangely, other people could continue to leave comments — and all of them were Icon Buffet VIPs — when the Icon Buffet site still indicated to us that comments were closed to me!
13. Chef Josh Williams again ignores addressing the issue of why the comments were closed and how other people could continue to leave comments but not me (didn’t he get how UNsociable that is?) and replies that Alexa stats show Icon Buffet has better stats but concedes third party stats are inaccurate. The big dick contest is on!
14. I point to another third party site stats and that Site Meter has been available on this site for ages showing full TRANSPARENCY of stats here compared to the no stats transparency at Icon Buffet.
15. Chef Josh Williams replies again saying that third party stats are “tools for tools.” I guess he hasn’t yet learned that many advertisers LIKE TRANSPARENCY, but he’ll figure it out someday. Maybe. It seems at this point he can only try to insult me and the blog rather than explain or answer any of the questions I’ve asked.

One of my favorite insults he lobbed was that I still had the Feedster #7 Feed of the Year icon up on the homepage from 2005. You bet it’s there, I’m proud of it too! But it’s not like we’re stuck in the past like a band with a hit record 20 years ago. Tell you what, Josh, I’ll continue to leave that up there until at least the end of 2007, is that OK with you? I don’t think two years is that long for a blog to be acknowledged out of the millions of blogs out there. And CNET added this blog in January 2006 and we’re still on their CNET 100 blogs. I don’t think we’ll be removing that one any time soon either although maybe we should have a separate awards page. Perhaps I’ll solicit reader opinions on that in another post someday. This would have been a good week since it was navel gazing week.

Josh also responds to a challenge from reader darkmoon who points out that you can’t compare time on page for a blog to a social site. And then he says the kicker: I shouldn’t have brought up stats when he was the one who brought traffic and stats up!
16. I still can’t respond to any comments being left at IconBuffet, but I continue to receive free icon set offers from other Icon Buffet members. I receive a friend’s request through Icon Buffet, too. Hey, I’m not hated by everybody over there.
17. I leave to host today’s 331st radio show. After all the playing around this morning, there wasn’t enough time to get today’s Hmmcast (#118) produced, edited and published, so I had to take a vacation day there.
18. As of this evening’s update I can now leave comments on my own profile page at Icon Buffet again but the comments on the blog post I made over there are still closed. No new comments on the situation left over there although there was one strange comment that I’m not sure how to respond to below (comment #35). Seems like the icon nerds have calmed down.

Today I’ll always remember as the day I made the IconBuffet nerds angry. It’s not quite as poignant as The Day The Earth Stood Still, but it made me laugh. Hard. I can’t look at an icon the same way again. The Firefox icon made me laugh the most I think and that has nothing to do with Icon Buffet. It’s this fiery fox trapped in a sphere! It’s me, it’s me!

Chef Josh Williams, IconBuffet VIPs, MakeYouGoHmm loves you, have a nice weekend and don’t spend all those valueless tokens on oversaturated free icon sets at once ya’ hear.