Dear MC&OI News Reader,
Whatever is beautiful, whatever is meaningful, whatever brings you happiness...
May it be yours this Holiday Season and throughout the coming year!
Merry Christmas, frohe Weihnachten and a great start in the new year,
Frank Piller
PS: For the holiday picture left, I used a new mass customization offering on the web. Printplant.de, a German provider of customized prints (http://www.printplanet.de) has a great technology on its web page called MagicName. This web service enables you to place any name in special fonts directly in a picture, making it part of the picture. Just browse the photos below this posting, and you will see what I mean.
They have a great web site where you can order their print products, but also just play around. The site is in German language only, but select a "Kalender", select a "Magic Name" product, press "weiter" (next), and type your name in the field on the top and have fun … It was a bit painful to order 100s of greeting cards on their site, all with a different name, for my holiday greetings, but the effect is great! This may be also a good idea in case you need a last min present, their turn around time is pretty fast (if you live in Europe).
Appendix: Hacking Santa - User Innovation at Christmas Time
The Boston Phoenix, a local newspaper, reports the following wonderful story how a user hacked Santa Claus. So user innovation and mass customization enter Christmas, as MIKE MILIARD writes:
"For the past two years, whenever Josh McCormick went Christmas shopping at his local Wal-Mart in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a five-foot-tall audio-animatronic Santa Claus, spouting baritone holiday bromides, was there to greet him. At first, McCormick, a computer whiz with a yen for techie tinkering, was intrigued by this jolly old android. But, after multiple visits to the store, Saint Nick started to get annoying. "Every time I went, it hadn’t changed," he writes via e-mail. "I wouldn’t have bought one to put in my own home if all it did was what I could watch it do in the store for free. It would drive me crazy." So McCormick got an idea. He forked over $49.84 for the Kringle robot. Then, like a mischievous workshop elf with a knowledge of microcircuitry, he hacked it.First he found the "personality chip," and the tangle of red and green wires secreted in Santa’s shiny left boot. Then he set to work soldering, rewiring, soldering some more, and augmenting those mechanical guts with a Parallax BS2P40 BASIC stamp, a Quadravox QV306M4P playback module, and a couple 24LC515 EEPROM chips. ... [ read more here: http://members.cox.net.nyud.net:8090/jmccorm/santa.html].
After hours of toying around and having overcome several near-disastrous setbacks, McCormick had a Bad Santa of his very own, one who uttered wicked witticisms — in a voice sounding suspiciously like McCormick’s — such as "I save the best toys for the rich children; poor children can’t be trusted with nice toys," and "I can give you free stuff because I skimp on elf health care! HO HO HO!" before jiggling merrily with a tipsy twist.
"Same is boring," says McCormick. "Mass production is boring. Different is good. Mass customization is wonderful. And that’s why people hack things. To get them to do neat things that their original designers never expected."
McCormick, 33, is a systems administrator for a Fortune 100 company — a job, in other words, that involves ensuring the reliability and stability of computer systems. "You might see some irony in that," he says. "If I were charged with managing an animatronic Santa Claus, my job would be to prevent other people from doing exactly what I’ve done." ...
McCormick toyed with the idea of bringing the hacked Santa back to Wal-Mart, surreptitiously replacing the store’s display version. "It would make for some hilarious moments, and probably make a few kids cry," he says. But, again, fear of repercussions stayed his hand. ... "Another idea would be simply to return the Santa and let them put it back on the shelf to sell to some unsuspecting family. What a surprise that would have been!"
Indeed. One can only imagine little Jr., eyes tear-filled, mouth agape, upon hearing, "Hello, little one. Your parents told me to give you lots of presents because they feel guilty about their impending divorce!" Or, "Last year’s Rudolph was eaten by a polar bear, so I bought a new one from Wal-Mart! Such wonderful things at Wal-Mart." Or, "The polar icecaps are melting. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. What have you people done? Coal for everyone this year."
Read the full story here: http://www.bostonphoenix.com
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