Technobabble

Sasquatch is the Next Big Thing So many people missed the last big Internet gossip phenomenon (the pre-release anticipation of the movie Snakes on a Plane ) that I don’t want you, my readers, to miss this one: Blobsquatching. I couldn’t stop laughing when I read the www.boingboing.net posting on the topic.

From Boing Boing: “Blobsquatch” is specifically the object in a photograph of a supposed Bigfoot or Sasquatch that has a lack of definition and detail, an illusion created by a play of light within an often-unfamiliar natural environment. It is literally a “blob” (an indistinct shapeless form) that may or may not, but probably is not, a Sasquatch.

There are photo sites that solely post these possible Sasquatch/ Yeti/Bigfoot/Yowie photos and blogs, or blogsquatching sites, that talk about this possible distant cousin to humans.

Trade your PS3 for Beans (and cheese) When I lived in San Francisco, there was a small mom-and-pop taco joint that offered a lifetime’s worth of burritos if you tattooed their logo, a cartoon image of a guy wearing a sombrero riding a rocket in the form of a corn husk, somewhere on your body.

Now, Taco Bell is making a similar offer: free tacos for life for your PlayStation 3. Taco Bell puts the worth of a lifetime’s amount of tacos at $12,500, or around 20,000 of the Bell’s basic tacos by www.nextgen.biz math. That is a daily taco for the next 54 years; but there is a catch: you need to be the first to send your name, e-mail and phone number to <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript"> </script> to be the one lucky geek to make the trade. And the CEO is not trying to get the hard-to-find console for his kids. The corporation is donating it to the California Center of the Boys and Girls Club.

Google is a Royal Pain in the Ass Cyber-activists in the tiny Arab kingdom of Bahrain are using Google Earth (earth.google.com) to spy on their royal family, according to a recent article in The Financial Times. By the time you read this, the small island country in the Persian Gulf will have held parliamentary elections in the Shia-dominated country ruled by a Sunni royal family.

Activists are teaching Web-savvy Bahrain citizens, some of the most connected people in the Arab world, how to view the nearly 80 percent of countries with land owned by the royals and a handful of other elite. Those without sufficient bandwidth can access photo sites or Adobe PDF files of the maps via e-mail.

Google recently boosted the resolution of these satellite images, making it easier to see the detail of yachts, swimming pools, palaces and golf courses, some of which occupy land that was once national park area. So how did the royal family react? They blocked Google Earth and roughly 25 other politically sensitive sites. The blocking of Google Earth lasted only three days, though, after younger members of the royal family pointed out that the censorship caused much more interest in the topic—surprise, surprise.

Video Sign I was recently in a cyber café in Argentina (these South American cyber cafés, for your information, rarely serve coffee or anything else “café”-related) and saw one of the greatest uses of technology I have ever witnessed. I was struggling with a slow, virus-filled PC with a Latin keyboard, trying to concentrate while an Israeli next to me was talking on Skype, not using his indoor voice, when I looked past him and saw a teenaged girl signing into a Webcam. She was “talking” to an acquaintance via some brand of video IM using sign language.

I usually like to bring stories of technological absurdity to you, my Chico neighbors, and though I at times have real contempt for this technology I love so much, it brought a tear to my eye, literally, to see technology making this type of affordable international communication possible where it was not before.