I bet people who registered and voted had a better chance of being a part of this community before they were told their votes meant nothing. Is it really fair to change the rules right after voting has ended? Or to suddenly explain what the point of this contest was. Why does it matter?

Ah, that's a shame; I guess I should have registered a few days earlier, but nothing for it now. For the record, my vote was for SunWalker2007 and no, I am not some best mate of his trying to pad the votes. In fact, I was working on my own entry to the contest but got discouraged when I saw that (perhaps unsurprisingly) some of my ideas for it overlapped with recently-uploaded submissions. Anyway, I no longer have any way of viewing the current tallies thanks to the vote wipe, but I assume the woman with the cute kid will win, as that's the most predictable outcome.

I think the reason I give Dan kudos isn't necessarily because of this insane contribution to the community - - it's moreso that he put himself in this spot. Sucker.

Guys, I'm a data analyst by trade. I eat data for breakfast, massage it for brunch, ETL it for lunch, crunch it for afternoon tea, and deliver a polished log (pun intended!) for dinner. Data is also very high in calories, which explains my appearance. I digress. I refreshed a few times a day and watched the votes change. I don't know the reasoning for a lot of it, but the trends were disturbing as Dan (who actually had the data) pointed out. I don't buy that certain time zones (thay may or may not be local to the people garnering the votes) are naturally predispositioned for certain content.

I know that feelings of exclusion might be high right now being told your vote doesn't count, but what would you have him do? Being around here for a while, there people here are fair. The only time I've ever seen the board as a whole team up against someone was when they were deliberately being a poop-disturber (damn you censorship) and deserved it.

I guess what I'd like to say, is that if you want those feelings of exclusion to go away, stick around for a while. We're a pretty eccentric bunch here. (TexRat, for example, is a 7 foot 2 inch Turkish punk rocker with a 2 foot neon green fan mohawk and plays the squeeze box in a band that uses an actual ring tailed lemur as their drummer.)

*edit: If you're gonna vote on the video with the kid, c'mon... do it based on the contest criteria, not out of sympathy/charity/gender/etc. reasons.

You forgot to mention he likes to wear purple, snake skin cowboy boots and most of the times has his pet boa constrictor draped around his neck...

... and I always thought he was Ukrainian.



Enjoying a day off...

The guys choosing the finalists had a tough job. I liked DentalHTcorp's, theicerabbit's and sjgadsby's entries but none made the final .

Hedgecore should get a prize just for coming out of the bathroom with his tablet but alas his video is now gone or at least I couldn't find it.

Some of the video's submitted did make excessive claims for the tablet. For example it would never be chosen to be used in a medical environment - the slowness of data input for one thing would count against it and it's also not robust enough and when you also consider that you cannot add medical applications to it then it's obviously a non-runner.

There's a reason Nokia have positioned the tablet as an N-Series device and not an E-series device - it simply does not stand up to the requirments of a business environment.

joedavi's motorbike entry didn't impress me initially but, on review, I thought it was the best response from the finalists to Thoughtfix's original specification for the competition i.e. show how you've integrated the tablet into your life and thus it got my vote.

Oh and major kudos to Thoughtfix for running the competition and paying for the prize out of his own pocket.

You're just jealous.

I came up with all sort of ways I would use the N810, that I ultimately cut from the video because they're fairly esoteric to most people. That little bit I kept in here about the Society for Creative Anachronism? It's a world-wide organization with over 30,000 members. Being that we're often at campsites, electricity isn't always easy to come by; and I often don't want to bring along a laptop in case of bad weather, and it's way too big to be unobtrusive (I don't really have theft concerns). Back when I was still toting around my little Visor PDA, it was darned useful at events. See, I'm a big heraldry geek -- that's coats of arms and stuff, and who outranks who in the award structure and so on. There's only so much of that I can keep memorized at once, and it's far far easier to look something up electronically than to carry around 1500+ pages (no I am not kidding) of printout -- or worse yet, to have to say "Uh, sorry Your Majesty, but can you email me when you get home and ask?"

Yeah, it's darned geeky, and pretty nerdy to boot....

-Jennifer

jdsemma: Y'know, if you made a steampunk case design for it, you might be able to get away with it (or mount it in a crystal ball or something).

(Oh, and I took my entry down now that I'm done with it. I never show my face on the internet in the hopes I can still drop off the grid some day.)

*edit: Oh, and I'm glad someone realized that bathroom thing, I didn't think the flush was loud enough, hahahah.

*slaps Hedgie with a large trout*

Seriously, though, to me Jennifer's entry best fit the spirit of the contest among the finalists-- but there were nonfinalists who, IMO, got that part down well enough to be finalists.

But ever since I quit running from girls I've understood that the world is a very subjective place and you just can't quantify raw opinions, no matter WHAT data analysts like Hedgie and I might swear. We just say otherwise to make Marketing folks go away.

After the walk I plan to settle down in a fairly small town to teach English, it's the most marketable skill I'll have over there. I doubt my Japanese will be fluent at that stage because I won't be talking that much while I walk alone in the hills so I'll need some help translating. I follow JapanesePod101.com for weekly lessons and having device to retrieve those lessons is essential. I'll still be keeping a blog of my integration into society there and I'll still be looking up Google Maps for views of local walking tracks. I don't think a laptop would be suitable, even a little EEE PC. With a Solio and a Nokia power cable I'll be free to take off and roam where I want to, capturing my musing as I go and not having to knock on doors for a power socket. I do intend to make daily use of the tablet when I'm done and would choose it over a laptop which is never going to be light enough and independent enough for back-packing.







P.S. If the "looks" thing is a comment on not being able to afford a decent hair cut I should mention that's for charity. NZ, UK and Aus have a thing called MOvember where guys grow mustaches for the month, I thought a mohawk would be funnier.

I find that fascinating because the video struck me as being disingenuous. I'll have to rewatch it and see if I get the same feeling. I wonder what cues I'm picking up on that make me think one thing, and which you are picking up on that lead you to the opposite conclusion.

I really need to find a book or take a class on this sort of thing. Non-verbal communication is intriguing.

~!M