More videos, of a less embeddable kind:
Speaking of the eee PC, here’s a video that takes a good long look at an actual machine. The clip bears a disturbing resemblance to a porn video, with the pretty thing being carefully unwrapped, posed, poked and probed. I suspect this borrowed skin flick aesthetic might be common throughout the gadget-porn video genre.
Anyway, I found it very instructive. The keyboard does look worryingly small (I don’t think there’s a camera angle that makes the guy’s fingers look bigger…)
The IDF is trying to fight a “plague” of draft-dodging with nauseating conformist peer pressure, and Nir contrasts this with an Ukrainian army recruitment campaign, where a uniform (with a dandy striped sailor’s vest!) and an APC will get ya da bitches.
But through that clip you get to a whole series of army ads from around the world, including one for the Lebanese Army. No war machines or weapons here, as a single unarmed young man in uniform walks through European-style boulevards and is greeted with patriotic pride by passers-by. Knowing (or rather, knowing of the absence of) the Lebanese army, one can’t help wonder if that young lad is all of it. But still, one can’t help but feel envious. Instead of appealing to machismo or spineless conformism, this ad tries to touch your heart, and show you that serving your country is a noble and worthwhile thing to do. It may not be very effective in convincing me to join the Lebanese army, but it does a very effective job at making me feel very reluctant to fight such nice people as the Lebanese. And that, at least, might help that country’s national defense.
I lust after an Asus eee pc , but I’m wondering how usable it’ll be with its tiny keyboard and tiny screen. What’s it like, browsing the web at a resolution of 800×480?
Over here I found a link to the wonderful map site mapa.co.il; of course Israel showed it to me a while ago, but for some reason I never quite recalled the URL once I sat in front of a computer, and for a long while I’ve been using the far inferior flash-based site at walla. In contrast, mapa is much more like google maps, except, it can be used for places I actually care about, rather than for overseas curiosities.
A funny thing I discovered, while playing around with the site, is how it handles inexact locations. For example, if you ask it for a route from “Tel-Aviv” to somewhere – for instance, here’s a route from “Tel Aviv” to “Givatayim”, it will locate the city at the exact point in the map where its name is indicated – apparently somewhere on Rotschild Ave., between Maaza and Balfour…