Vela afternoon
A typical Saturday afternoon. I was supposed to review some process templates for work; instead, I spent the entire do-paher surfing the Google Video. Those of you who haven't been initiated to GV yet - it's an egalitarian collection of personal and (some) broadcast videos. This includes "funny" movies passed around in emails, "cool" commercials submitted by fans (or advertisers themselves), and even personal videos of weddings or bored teenagers with digital camcorders. As you can guess, I was in prime procrastination form today! Some stuff I saw: An indian wedding [link], Aamir Khan's cross-dressing act for Coke [link], A Jewish Duracell commerical [link], A mushy Nokia commerical [link], even a condom commerical [link]. And some homemade commercials - good [link] and not-so-good [link]. (Update: Nov 16: Russell Peters' desi standup routine [link]).
It reminded me of Carnegie Mellon, when I used to "surf" the internal network of student's publically shared hard drives. They had similar videos (especially the guys in the Film/Animation departments), awesome freeware, and a whole bunch of movies and MP3s. This was before big, bad RIAA came to campus, forced everyone to remove the movies/songs, took away their network access for a semester, and forced them to attend property-rights training classes (I'm not kidding)!
