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I’ve been blogging more in recent times. The increase in activity has brought me additional attention from comment spammers, I think. Most of my comment spam has been claiming to be from bloggers at Harvard Law School. I’m not even sure why that is. The e-mail addresses and URLs all appear to be legitimate, but the comments are all nonsense like I would expect from spam.

So, if you really are a blogger at Harvard, and you want to leave a comment here, shoot me a separate e-mail at mark [at] ask-mark [dot] com.

My friends don’t listen to enough pop music. So, here’s almost five minutes that will recap the year’s top 25 pop hits, according to Billboard. Enjoy!

DJ Earworm has also made the mp3 available.

I’m approaching 6,000 tweets on my main Twitter account. I will probably blow it, like I did for my 5,000th tweet, and post some trite nonsense. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the next 24 hours.

Update: And so it has happened at 11:15 CST on December 15, 2009:

"If you received an F, this means that … your final case writeup was abysmal." – my Strategic Marketing Professor. #6000tweets

I’m supposed to be working on my take home final for my Strategic Marketing class right now. Of course, I have allowed myself to be distracted from that task, but I think this one is worth my attention.

My mother-in-law forwarded an e-mail to me about a Ukrainian sand painter named Kseniya Simonova. Simonova won the 2009 Ukraine’s Got Talent with her unique interpretation of the Great Patriotic War (as the Russian portion of WWII is known there). She painted scenes with sand on a light table, accompanied by various pieces of music (including Apocalyptica’s Nothing Else Matters).

Have a look at this video, followed by the body of the e-mail I received (after the jump):

What the hell is with all of the multiple DVD editions of movies these days? Once upon a time, a single edition of a DVD was available that contained the movie (both widescreen/letterbox and pan and scan versions) and the special features, like commentaries, deleted scenes and bloopers. Then along came things like special editions with fancy packaging (which may or may not have contained the exact same discs as the "not so special" edition) and collector editions with even more fancy packaging (again, it might have been the same discs, but maybe something extra).

OK, fine, so there was something more that people who really loved the movie could spend a few extra bucks to get. I understand that – the perceived extra value is the feeling of belonging to some sort of exclusive club.

Then came the director’s cut and the slew of unrated editions. While the director’s cut was made to show off the director’s intended vision, without editors and censors tainting their "masterpiece," the unrated editions were created, I’m sure, just to lure men into thinking they’d see boobs (or more – think Eyes Wide Shut). OK, so these would include some footage that was not available in the theatrical release (assuming there was a theatrical release) or on the standard/special/collector edition DVDs. OK, I sort of get that, too.

I just saw an ad for Amazon with not one, not two, but three different editions of Star Trek. Target sometimes tosses on another two editions with their "Target exclusive" DVD and Blu-Ray editions, although I’m not finding them for Star Trek.

And somewhere along the way, the widescreen and pan and scan versions of the DVDs got separated from one another. Let me tell you, there is nothing more annoying than picking up the wrong version (e.g. pan and scan) of a movie and playing it for the first time. This is especially true for those pan and scan movies that still use widescreen for the opening scenes, because you don’t know how badly you’ve screwed up until you’re up to ten or so minutes into the movie. Then you have two options: take the disc out and hope you can make the exchange for the proper version, or sit there for the remainder of the movie terribly annoyed every time you see the scene scan across to fit everything in the 4:3 frame.

Anyway, I am just annoyed. Not that I buy a lot of DVDs any more (thank you, Netflix), but when I do, it’s annoying that I can’t just drop into a store and quickly pickup a DVD. I feel like I have to waste time comparison shopping when all I want to know is which edition has all of the things I want, minus Blu-Ray (upscaling seems to do just fine, thank you – or at least that’s how I’m supposed to feel right now). And let me just mention gifts – there are a few occasions where I have received the wrong version or edition of a DVD on my wish list. I know, #firstworldproblem.

OK, my rant is over.

OK, I admit it. I was distracting myself tonight from reading my Gillette Fusion case for Marketing by browsing through some Facebook photos. I was just clicking through a photo album when BAM! an ugmo popped up (no, it wasn’t mine, smart ass). After the initial sting went away, an idea hit me.

One of the latest features in Picasa is the ability to tag people in your photo library by using facial recognition. With just a few training photos, I have been told that Picasa can quickly identify someone in a whole library of images. Kyle tells me that Picasa was even able to tag Abraham Lincoln in a few photos from DC.

"So what?", you ask. Sure, facial recognition isn’t really anything new, but what if it could be used to tag ugmos in a web photo album? You tag a few faces that were hit with the ugly stick, and then let the facial recognition software take care of finding the rest. Instead of putting a frame around the ugmos’ faces, a blue dot is placed over the face to obscure it from view. Instead of appearing when you hover over the name or face of the tagged person, the blue dot will always be present, unless you hover over the dot for an extended period of time, say 5 seconds. At that point, the face will be revealed, and you will only have yourself to blame for seeing it.

I know, this is crude and shallow of me to even think of this, but you know you’ve accidentally viewed a photo on Flickr, Facebook or MySpace that you wish you hadn’t opened because of one super ugmo. If someone creates this mashup, once you come across an ugmo for the first time, just tag it. You may have to tag it once or twice more, but then the facial recognition should take over and save your retinas from that awful exposure in the future.

ZOMG! New theme!

Yes, I haven’t posted much of anything in a long time. Don’t think that this is going to change that. I decided to change my theme for no reason in particular. It’s called pixel, and I found it at Wordpress.org’s theme page.

I promise to try blogging again in the near future, but grad school is still time consuming. That’ll be done in June, and then I’ll be back to blogging again (I hope).