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Sebastian Wernicke gave a great TED talk that was posted in April. He analyzed some statistics on the history of TED talks and discovered how to create the best TED talk, or the worst TED talk that would be allowed to be presented:

You can go create your own TED talk using Sebastian’s tedPAD.

At work, we recently transitioned from using Novell GroupWise as our enterprise mail application to Gmail. With this transition has come a lot of headaches, mostly trying to explain to our users that the loss or change of some features they are used to using is not the end of the world. One feature that has changed is that mailto: links are not working properly. Since we have not uninstalled GroupWise from all of our computers, the desktop client still opens up when a user clicks on a mailto: link on a web page.

Our initial research only revealed solutions that required Gmail Notifier or Google Talk to be installed. Those are pretty much non-solutions for us, because we don’t want to install yet another client on these machines. What’s worse is that these clients tend to want to remember your username and password; that’s a “no go” for our many multi-user computers. Digging a little deeper finally brought me to a solution involving only Windows XP Registry changes.
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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.