Hyperquake Blog

Ok, I’m going to hop on the hipster train for this blog post and do a little writing about moustaches (or mustache if you prefer, personally I like throwing the “o” in there so I can pronounce it “moose”stache, but that’s just me.) Anyway, I was sent a link by one of our clients in NYC about the Moustache Man. If you live in NYC  this may be old news, but for those that live in other locale (like Cincinnati, which has been notoriously dubbed by Mark Twain for being 10 years behind the rest of the world) this may be interesting. The images are from NYC subway ads and have been spotted around the city for about a year. Judging by an interview with the artist, the Moustache Man (aka Moustache Bandit, Madcap Moustache Man, etc) there doesn’t seem to be any agenda behind the moustaches, just plain ‘ol fun, which I generally support so I’m sharing it with you.

Note the m”U”stache imposters that have also started popping up.

Another noteworthy stache endeavor is the Mustaches for Kids program. No it’s not an outreach program that helps poor needy children grow mustaches as one of my friends gullibly believed at one point. Mustaches for Kids is a volunteer-run organization started in Los Angeles in 1999 to do good and have fun by growing Mustaches for children’s charities. Typically a bunch of guys will get together and use it as a charitable excuse to grow mustaches for a month. It’s good fun to watch them attempt to “out man” their friends, specifically the follicly challenged and it goes to a good cause in the end. If you’ve got time to kill, check out the rules, kind of funny.

Another charitable mustache cause is Movember. Pretty much the same deal as Mustaches for Kids, but this one happens specifically in November and benefits Prostate Cancer research.

And for good measure I’ll end on another fun one. Carstache. Pretty self explanatory.

Great weather in Cincy means a stroll down the street for a food truck lunch. Today’s choice was Cafe de Wheels. They do a lot of things right, one being the Tower of Power Burger (beef + BBQ pork, mmm). On their window is a QR code that directs people to their Twitter, Facebook and website. After I find a QR code reader app and take a picture of it I wonder if the payoff is really worth it. QR codes and the possibilities that come along with them are really exciting to me, but I just don’t feel like too many folks are nailing it yet. Tons of potential though. Give me something really great on the other end of that QR code. Make it some kind of scavenger hunt game or even give me a coupon. It’s pretty dang awesome that in 2011 I can point my phone at a visual code and reveal something directly on that device. It makes me feel like a spy. When companies/restaurants/teams/stores can tap into this excitement and deliver exclusive content that a user can only receive by snapping a photo, THEN we will start to see QR codes become a fun and relevant part of our daily lives.

Saturday, March 12, marked the 2nd annual Race to Anyplace event here in Cincinnati. The Spinning themed event in which participants ride for 6 hours in 15 minute heads, is lead by the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and helps raise awareness of and funding for the continuation of the ever-important fight against blood cancers.

Team HyperQuake participated in the event for the second time this year and boy did we have a ball. Once again, 12 brave, committed, and energetic souls showed up to pedal as fast and as far as they could for 2 heats of 15 minutes each.

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Last week I posted about the Extinction of IE6 and now this week Internet Explorer 9 was released.  In the rapidly changing, ever evolving environment  that is the web, this release is only the 4th major release of IE in the last 10 years.  Contrast that with Google’s Chrome browser that has released 10 major versions (though some may argue the actual “major”-ness of some of those released) since 2008. An article from Webmonkey summarizes it best:

Despite some shortcomings in the web standards department, IE 9 is a competent browser and well worth the upgrade from IE 8. If you’re interested in taking advantage of the latest tricks on the web, clearly IE 9 is not the browser for you. Still, for those that have no choice in their browser — for example, on a work machine, in a corporate environment — IE 9 is obviously good news. For the web at large IE 9 represents a step, if not a giant leap, forward.