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Showing posts with label science is kewl. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science is kewl. Show all posts

Sunday, July 01, 2007

IPhone Nerds!

I was in the mall with Mrs Chainik Friday, just chillaxin. We bought some maternity stuff, and I am just going to have to take my wife's word for it that simply buying normal stuff in larger sizes will not be sufficient.

While we were there, we passed by a group of hippies sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Gymboree. This confused me, as I hadn't heard that Phish was reuniting and playing the Freehold Raceway Mall (which has its own Wiki page? of course it does, what doesn't?). More hippies and nerds of various descriptions lined the walls of the mall. The mystery was solved when I got to the Apple store and remembered about the iPhone (looks like Apple has an employee in charge of editing wiki pages).Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket


Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

I went into the Apple Store to look around. I've never been to an Apple store before but I figured it couldn't be very different than any other of the countless computer stores I've ever been in. Boy was I wrong.

Have you ever seen an iPod? It was like that but in retail form. Everything was clean and white and perfectly proportioned and beautifully lit. The bright lights illuminated squeaky clean, helpful, knowledgable, interestingly multiculti staff. I looked at some of the computers there. Did you know that Apple laptops only have one mouse button? How the hell does that work? And the computers look pretty, like desk lamps designed by Frank Gehry. What in the hell? Computers need to look big and clunky and kludgy and functional, like they came out of the boiler room of a Russian submarine. This place looked like Dell had been bought by Ikea.

What a good metaphor. I need to write that down somewhere.

My cellphone is the Motorola Q. It's PC based, with Windows CE (which means it crashes about three times a week, badum-pshh!). It's very awesomely cool, and I get compliments on it wherever I go.

Okay, that last part was a filthy rotten lie. But I still like having a cellphone with an enormous screen and a full sized keyboard and a 1.3 megapixel camera and rotten battery life and the ability to hack into the registry and change stuff.

Mrs Chainik couldn't understand why people would stand in line for a $500 cellphone.

The lonely, misunderstood life of a nerd, I suppose. If only they had girlfriends.

On a related note, some lady in Texas decided to buy a whole big bunch of iPhones so she could sell them on eBay. She got $10,000 in cash and drove to an Apple store, where she paid the nerd who was first in line $800 cash to take his place.

The punchline?

Apple, unlike Sony, placed a 1-per-customer limit on purchases the first day to ensure everyone got one. Mwahahahaha, lady got iPowned. Watch the video here:





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Sunday, May 13, 2007

Buzzwords a go go!

What, exactly, does Web 2.o mean?

I tried Wikipedia, which is never incorrect, and they say that "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

Which means precisely bupkis.

I think that Web 2.0 is one of those marketing buzzwords that have no real meaning, like paradigm, or synergy, or fair trade. These words are the prostitutes of the English language, willing to work for anyone at all. Words like these have no definitions, just connotations. You don't know what it means, but you know what it implies, and you know if some slick Rick in a Hugo Boss suit mentions two or more of these words in a single paragraph you are going to be paying about 20% more than you thought.

Here's a cute little viral video about Supermarket 2.0. Enjoy!

Full disclosure: as I wrote this post, I realized that I'm probably going to up my Google hits quite a bit. X Box 360. IPhone. Paris Hilton.


Tee hee.

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Thursday, April 26, 2007

Stopping the next pandemic before it starts.

Interesting stuff from Wired. This scientist guy wants to track epidemics in the jungles of Whoknowswhere and the rain forests of Yougottabekiddinme before they hit civilization.

Mrs Chainik has been studying to be a medical assistant. As a training tool for the "don't do anything stupid or you'll get a horrible disease and die" module, they watched the Dustin Hoffman- Morgan Freeman- Ross's monkey medical thriller Outbreak. That night we went to Walgrens and bought a big bottle of hand sanitizer and a little keychain full of hand sanitizer and some Lysol.

Mrs. Chainik is funny.

H/T Instapundit.
clipped from www.wired.com
HIV, Ebola, SARS — any of the world's most horrifying diseases are caused by animal viruses that made the jump to humans. Now a UCLA scientist thinks he can stop the next pandemic before it even starts.

Today it may seem like the only opportunity to contain HIV came after its discovery in the 1980s. But what if the disease, which has infected or killed an estimated 63 million people, could have been stopped decades earlier? What if that hunter had carried the chimpanzee more carefully that day? For Nathan Wolfe, a biologist at UCLA and head of the project sponsoring Akem's data-gathering, those are the kinds of questions to build a career upon. "Very few people ask whether we could have prevented HIV," Wolfe told me over beers one night last fall in Yaound , the capital of Cameroon. "That's what I encourage people in my lab to think about."

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