There have been rumors about this very thing for years. Coke and Pepsi have so many flavor variations around the world and the US really only sees a SMALL portion. Grape Vault? Are you kidding me? I really want to try that.  I’ve heard of Raspberry Coke in New Zealand, but it doesn’t sound THAT appetizing.  How about the discontinued Coke with Lemon?  It’s all up for grabs with this new machine.  However, don’t expect things like New Coke and Surge to be available, because this isn’t a time machine, it’s a soda machine.

Check out a video demonstration of this glorious machine here.

Now that the technology is here to let the dispensing machines do all the work for us, how long is it before we get into a SkyNet situation? I mean, are we just a lightning strike away from one of these machines going Johnny Number 5 on us? Will this be fun Johnny Number 5, or laser weapon fry your ass like a Roman Candle Number 5? How long before we see this:

Run tiny, Japanese children!! Run like the wind from the giant Coke branded inhuman monstrosity!!!! Save yourself!!!  It feeds on CHILDREN!!!  CHILDREN!!!!

Speaking of bad ass Coke dispensing Terminator machines, people have been hacking vending machines for years to make them better. One of the more popular things to do to a Coke machine is to connect it to the internet. Connecting your Coke machine to the internet allows you to check inventory levels and dispense sodas remotely from your computer. While this is quite awesome, it also calls onto the carpet not only your laziness, but the fact that you can’t even wait 30 seconds to put money in the machine and make a soda selection.  No surprisingly, this trend was started by Computer Science students.

One of the first and most popular of the online Coke vending machines is the remote controlled vending machine at Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU). This machine even made PC Magazine’s Top 10 Greatest Hacks of All Time. The machine began as an idea by a few students in the early ’90s who had to walk several floors to the soda machine. They felt there had to be a way to put the machine’s load status on their school’s network so they could avoid wasting trips to an empty machine. After building hardware and a software interface they attached the device to the innards of the machine.  Once online, the team was able to query the machine using Unix to find out where exactly the coldest bottle of soda was, what the inventory in each bottle column was and what the purchasing statistics and history of all the bottles was. Anyone with access to the school’s computer network could query the machine to find out the info.  Since the soda interface was Unix based, it was command line driven and provided no graphical tools.

Several years later, students in the Computer Science House at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) hooked up their own Coke machine and used a graphical user interface (GUI) instead of the earlier Unix interface.  The GUI for this machine was much more user friendly than the earlier CMU incarnation.  This version also got a mention in the PC Mag 10 Greatest Hacks.

Today there are tons of online vending machines.  Here is a list of remote controlled vending machines. As you can see, they are everywhere now.

As a matter of fact, here’s a random dude that put his personal Coke machine, dubed “Coke-puter”, on the web — Click here for the “Coke-puter”. You can see the history of purchases as well as inventory (he has not only Coke but Guiness and Cheerwine in the machine).

Eventually, I wonder if all Coke machines will be attached to a national network so people can query them to see if their particular soda is empty or not.

This seemingly trailer park attire has become incredibly popular the last few months causing the shirt to become the #1 best selling apparel item on Amazon.com.  That’s right, this shirt is the #1 selling clothing item on Amazon.  WTF, you ask?  The popularity is based on the customer reviews.  People have started writing ironic and snarky comments expounding the virtues of wearing one of these shirts. People talk about how the shirt will increase your success with the opposite sex, fill the empty void in your soul, raise the dead, transport you to another dimension to meet the Wolf God and many, many other incredible feats.

Here are some of my favorite reviews (Click the images to see them full size):

That last one is probably my favorite. I still laugh whenever I read it. And that’s just some of the craziness. There are over 980 customer reviews for this shirt! It’s addicting going through and reading some of the funny stuff people put out there. I even got in on the act and created a review myself.

Cutting together a trailer has almost become an art form in today’s Hollywood.  How many times have you watched a trailer and one funny line kills you, then you go see the movie and that was the only funny thing in the entire flaming pile of “poo doo”?  Too often.  Movie trailers should be considered a social contract.  If you promise to deliver an ass-melting action movie, then you better damn well deliver or I get to go to the director’s (or actors’, or producers’) home  and suplex them through their glass topped living room table.  It’s only fair.

Let’s take a look at a list of movies that had really awesome trailers, only to not deliver on said promise of awesome.

Snakes on a Plane (2006) - When the trailer for this movie started making the rounds on the internet in 2005-2006, it blew up big. Everyone was talking about it. People thought this movie was going to open HUGE. It didn’t. Turns out the movie kinda blew. The best part of the movie was Samuel Jackson and his one line about muthaf’n snakes which, by the way, was not originally in the film and added during post-production.  The expectations were too high for a Grade B horror movie that works better late at night, on HBO with like 5 drunk friends.  Surprisingly, it’s not as entertaining when you’ve just paid $10 for admission, $20 for concessions and aren’t completely bombed.

Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) - If you can look at that poster and tell me this movie doesn’t look like seven kinds of bad ass, then I would call you a LIAR, sir.  However, glance at the top of the poster and see the names of the starring actors;  Lorenzo Llamas and Deborah Gibson.  Well, crap…nevermind.  Surprisingly, this movie is the latest “buzz” movie on the internet.  Remember Snakes on a Plane (see above)?  This is Snakes on a Plane 2009, but with a much worse trailer.  MUCH worse.  Be prepared to be disappointed that neither Deborah Gibson nor Lorenzo Llamas is eaten by a shark or octopus.  Harry from Ain’t It Cool said, “…it delivers on the title, if nothing else.”

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) -Kerry Conran, over four years, shot a black and white trailer against blue screen in his living room and cut together effects using his own Mac.  The trailer was cut to look like an old movie serial from the ’30s-’40s.  This is what Conran shopped to all the movie studios, a trailer for a movie that didn’t exist.  Most studios turned him down until he found some private financing for filming and New Line footing the bill for S/FX.  Maybe he should have spent that four year span writing a script instead of shooting a trailer, hmmm?  In the end, the movie was a gimmick.  All style over substance.  Very pretty and stylish, but the story and action were boring.  At best, a novelty that didn’t even make back its initial investment.  However the concept and trailer were top notch, too bad the entire product wasn’t.

Double Take (2001) - This movie had a fantastic trailer. There was one scene in the trailer with Orlando Jones ordering Schlitz Malt Liquor at a dinner table then when he’s informed they don’t have it, he goes off about keepin’ it REAAAAL and REPRESENTIN’. Hilarious. Steph and I were quoting it for months before the movie came out. Then we went to see it, and that was the funniest one minute and thirty seconds of the movie. I don’t actually even remember anything else ABOUT the movie other than that one scene. So disappointing, but I’m not sure how the movie could have lived up to the hype Steph and I created by shouting “SCHLITZ MALT LICKAAAA!!!!!” at the top of our lungs to each other. FYI…we still quote that scene to this day. The clip below is the Schlitz Malt liquor scene in question. It really amps up around the 1:30 mark.

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) - Now, when I saw this trailer I thought, “Holy CRAP!! This movie is gonna be awful yet awesome at the same time!  Awe-ful!!!” I mean, it had Bruce Campbell playing Elvis in a retirement home trying to fight off an undead mummy.  How can this go wrong?!  Well, it went horribly wrong, and not in an awesome Plan 9 From Outer Space way.

Soldier (1998) - I had really high hopes for this as an action movie. I love Kurt Russell.  And I know that Carpenter movies tend to be lower budget, but they are usually fun. I saw this as a more action-y version of Big Trouble in Little China (which I loved). The trailer is even really good. However, this movie, as a whole, isn’t. Watch the trailer, at the :30 mark there is a huge planetary battle in space with tons of ships. There is no scene like this in the movie at all. There is no place for a huge interplanetary space battle in the story. So how the hell did it get in there?  Hello Hollywood marketing machine.  What we get with this is Kurt Russell bred as a bad ass soldier and all we see him do is teaching a little boy how to kill snakes.  SNAKES.  Yeah, I know.

What movies have you been super excited to see based on their trailer only to have been dissapointed?

I absolutely agree with the judge’s ruling. The internet has become such a part of our lives now, that it is synonymous with reading the paper or watching CNN. Now, I’m not advocating going out and looking at porn sites or even trolling message forums and chat rooms. I’m just talking about general news searches and information gathering. Most of the time, for myself, when I browse the net, I am looking at news/info sites or I’m on Google looking at tech sites for an answer to a problem. I’ll also check and answer email, but, if you ask me, this has become such a common communication tool for so many people, it’s become analogous to talking on the phone. Instead of calling someone up and seeing how things are going, I’ll email them. The same is true for most people.

If you don’t want people using the internet, then block it with firewalls. I’ve been to several client sites that blocked certain domains from being accessed. Many of my clients blocked popular job searching sites Monster and CareerBuiler.com. Many others blocked sites suspected of inappropriate subject matter. It all depends. I think, though, that internet use has become so benign and widespread, that in downtime at work, when nothing is going on, you should be able to check a few websites as if you were thumbing through the morning’s paper.

Technorati Tags – Technology Internet Web Surfing

When you download Firefox for the first time, it’s pretty bare. It gives you some basic browsing functions, but to fully appreciate Firefox, you have to download extensions to completely customize your browsing experience. The image above is a pic of my Firefox browser. It will look very different from the default Firefox browser you download. I have over a dozen extensions and a customized browser theme. There are a lot of useful and cool extensions out there, so lets take a look at a few of my favorites. You can pretty much get any one of the extensions I’m talking about here at the link I provided earlier. Extentions are listed by categories, but you can also search by name.

Adblock – This is one of the first extensions you should download. This will block any popups or webpage ads on any website. This does, sometimes, cause issues with free webmail accounts like Gmail. I usually include Gmail to the Adblock whitelist, which allows ads. This will keep you from having issues seeing some images in your emails. A companion to this extension is Adblock Filterset.G Updater. This extension helps to automatically update the Adblock extension’s ability to recognize web ads.

Fasterfox – This is another one at the top of my list of extensions. This extensions tweaks the network settings for Firefox to allow it to run faster. It pushes a lot of the browser’s workload to the webservers and decidedly increases your browsing speed.

Google Toolbar for Firefox – I love Google. I search it at least once a day. More often than not the images in my blog are from Google Images. Needless to say, I have to have this extension. It’s the Google Toolbar, complete with AutoFill utility, ability to search webpages or images right from the toolbar and a cool feature called Autolink to help search map sites and the dictionary. Too much awesome for me to get across in one blog article. There are two extensions that are unofficial companion extensions to the Google Toolbar. The first, CustomizeGoogle and Aggregate Yahoo! & Google. CustomizeGoogle completely customizes how Google works for you. You can eliminate ads and force Gmail to use a secure connection. You can also tell Google how to behave based on your searching criteria. Very nice. Aggregate Yahoo! & Google will put Yahoo! Search results in the result lists of your Google Searches. This essentially gives you two search engine results with one query. Every other entry will be a Yahoo! entry and it’s highlighted blue. Very cool.

Tab Mix Plus – One of the coolest default features of Firefox is tabbed browsing (coming soon to Microsoft Internet Explorer). This extension gives you total control of how tabbed browsing works. There are several extensions pertaining to tabbed browsing (nay, even an entire extension category) but this extension pretty much includes all those other extensions into this one. It’s super customizable and I love it.

Download Manager Tweak – Based on how much stuff you download from the internet, you may want this extension. It gives greater functionality to Firefox’s anemic download feature set. Believe me, you want this.

MediaPlayer Connectivity – Allows you to tell Firefox what applications are associated with what files. Play windows media files in Windows Media Player, play real audio files in Real Audio Player, etc., etc.

The extensions you see above, are pretty much the must haves for me. When a new install of Firefox goes down, these are first on my list. Now I’ll look at some of the nice-to-haves, ones that I really enjoy, but don’t really HAVE to have.

AI Roboform for Firefox – This extension exists for another application. I currently use Roboform’s Pass2Go utility on my USB drive. It stores and encrypts all my online passwords and allows me to quickly logon to my favorite password sites. To check it out, go to Roboform.com. Pass2Go does not natively work with Firefox, so this extension/adapter is needed to make it work.

Colorful Tabs – This extension is nice for when you have several browser tabs open at once. It will make each tab a different color so you can easily distinguish between them.

Flat Bookmark Editing – This is a nice extension to help edit/organize your bookmarks. One of Firefox’s exceptionally cool features is the ability to read RSS. Websites now use RSS as a means of dynamically updating users of their content changes. Firefox can take an RSS feed and store it as a “Live Bookmark”. You navigate to it like a normal bookmark, but it shows up as a list of subject titles. Very cool feature, and this extension helps to manage this.

Restart Firefox – When new extensions are installed or when an extension is updated, you usually have to restart the browser. This gets tedious after a while. This extension gives you the ability to shutdown and restart the browser with one click. Very simple, very nice.

Forcastfox Enhanced – Very cool extension to give you updated weather reports for your local area. It shows up as a small alert on your status bar. You can mouse over it to get more information. Very cool.

I have more extensions, but these are the best. This list is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, there’s a world of wonderful little extensions out there for your Firefox browser and I hope you explore it well.

Technorati Tags – Technology Review Mozilla Firefox Firefox Extensions