Live Internet Television

A muse has been invented to guide the designers at Ford in better envisioning who their target customer is and what this person will respond to positively. Mother Jones reports based on a Business Week story:

The challenge was to come up with a design that could suit the tastes of consumers around the globe, thus cutting the cost of selling different small cars in every market. So, it made a Fiesta hatchback that has with a rear end that looks like that of a small SUV, a dashboard inspired by a cell-phone keyboard, and oversized headlights that belong on a bigger vehicle.

Ford’s target Fiesta buyer: Her name is Isabella, a name that consistently ranks among the Top 5 baby names for American girls. Isabella isn’t American, though. She is stylishly Italian, a recent college grad living near Milan. She’s a modest earner, hip, urban, creative, and way into social media.

She’s also considering journalism as a career.

In other words, she’s nuts. And entirely fictitious.

Since I’m on something of a sensitive bent this evening, thought I’d share something else about brave new technologies that caught my attention today, and not in an altogether good way.

Over at Rough Type, Nicholas Carr points out the the Kindle and other e-readers make publication fluid and can make it impossible to have a permanent record of published words we can share as a touchstone.

Automatic updates can be sent through the network to edit the words stored in your machine — similar to the way that, say, software on your PC can be updated automatically today.

Consider that for everything we gain with a Kindle — convenience, selection, immediacy — we’re losing something too. The printed word — physically printed, on paper, in a book — might be heavy, clumsy or out of date, but it also provides a level of permanence and privacy that no digital device will ever be able to match. In the past, restrictive governments had to ban whole books whose content was deemed too controversial, inflammatory or seditious for the masses. But then at least you knew which books were being banned, and, if you could get your hands on them, see why. Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous.

I’m not big on women’s ensemble shows (Desperate Housewives, Sex and the City, Gossip Girl) but I love Cheryl Hines eough to be  excited about In the Motherhood, a new show premiering on ABC in March.

I fell in love with Cheryl as Larry David’s onscreen wife in Curb Your Enthusiasm.

She was just, well, awesome.

On the Huffington Post, used by top-tier writers and frequent commenters: Two hyphens together, posing as a long ("em") dash. Ugliness caused by Windows. If it's not that, it's the dreaded Underscore posing as an em dash.

I really try hard not to be an insufferable Mac snob, and I think I do quite well, considering by what an enormous margin I prefer Apple computers.

But I have to vent about two things that are effortless on a Mac and deeply annoying in Windows.

1. Screenshots.With a Mac Command-Shift-4 gets me marquee-dragging crosshairs adorned with the window dimensions. When I drag, the adorners read out how big the screenshot would be if I released the mouse button. When I do release the mouse, a auto-named png file is there on my desktop waiting for me to use whenever I feel like it.In Windows, I have to open a Snipping Tool app with dialogue, or I can use PrintScreen/Alt-PrintScreen key input, but then I have an image on the OS clipboard and I need to put it somewhere. I need to paste it into an Office doc, or into an image editing program document. That’s right, I need to have a program open either way I do it, with dialogue boxes, choices, etc.

   Grrrr.

2. The em dash. It looks like this: —. I use it a lot. It’s more than a comma, and sets things off nicely in a way that offers an alternative feel to parentheses. On my Apple machine, Command-Option-[hyphen] inserts a lovely em dash into my text wherever I want it.Contrast that experience with the Windows way: First, you have to have a keyboard with a 10-key pad on the right, or to turn on NumLock (I think). Then, you have to hold down Alt while typing 0151 into the 10-key pad.

There are two reasons why #2 is especially annoying:

1. It slows me down and is stoopid.
2. Other prople do not know how to get an em dash in Windows and have begun to use _ instead, as well as – and – -.Why should Windows’ shortcomings create new punctuation?! I find it kind of uncaring that they will ignore user needs to the point new punctuation is created out of frustration.