Paul Saucido has made his career with edgy, ethnic comedy celebrating his Mexican-American heritage. So he was pretty amazed when a ringtone he developed for Barrio Mobile was called racist and yanked from Cingular's deck earlier this week.
The ringtone, "La Migra Alert," is Saucido pretending to be an immigration official with a really bad fake Southern accent, saying, "I'm deporting you back home-o." (Barrio Mobile sent me the ringtone, but said I couldn't publish it.)
The character came from a brainstorming session between him and a few other Latino comedians, Saucido said, citing Dave Chapelle and Carlos Mencia among his comedic influences.
"It was inspired by other comedians who riff on the same stereotype of the immigration officer ... you know how people try to phonetically speak when they talk down to you, like, 'where is the bathroom-o?'" he said.
The ringtone came as part of a package of comic ringtone characters developed by Saucido, including a hovering, novela-obsessed Mexican mom, a Mexican dad, and a "barrio kid" who would say "I can't make it to the phone right now, I'm busy rotating the tires on my low-rider." All of Saucido's ringtones have been removed by Cingular, he says.
"I think because of the times, right now people are a little extra sensitive [about immigration issues,]" he said. "I'm sensitive to this issue! But people obviously leave their senses of humor behind when they get so much fever in them. I thought the Migra character was the last character that would get that kind of reaction."
Saucido says there's "absolutely" room for edgy comedy in the ringtone world.
"I've played it for all my friends and they love them - they're waiting for them to be sold, and they're like, where can we buy them?" he said. "These companies have got to have some backbone to say we bought this content, we believe in it, and we're not going to get rid of it just because the first advocacy group calls racism. Dude, everyone that produced them and worked for them - we're all Mexican!"
The two companies have partnered to conceptualize a new mobile phone service which will allow you to use your camera phone to "robotically recognize products on sight, and have it automatically collect and report prices, reviews and more for those products on its screen," says PC Magazine's Lance Ulanoff.
Dubbed Search By Camera! ER Search and the Mobot Mobile Visual Search, these mobile services will utilize Evolution Robotics' (ER) visual pattern recognition technology (ViPR). So basically, while you're shopping at your local Wal-Mart, RadioShack, or other store, and you're unsure how much an item costs, you'll be able to pick up your camera phone, take a picture of it, and the camera will match it to a database of product patterns and images on a remote server. The concept goes beyond the tangible experience, too: you could even be home, browsing through a product catalog or magazine. You come across an outfit that you really like, but you want to get reviews and more information on the designer. You just snap the picture and the service will feed your brain with all sorts of specific details.
How does one get the service? U.S. cell phone users must have an NTT DoCoMo FOMA N902iS phone. However, the company could take any existing phone and bring you the Mobot service.
So far, only ten companies have signed on to provide their product images for the service.
I love the tag line to PCMag.com columnist Lance Ulanoff’s recent column, “Design Software: The Artist's Best Friend”, which reads ‘Forget what the professors say. The PC will save your artistic life.” I’m not sure if I'm in total agreement with that first statement, but because I’m an artist and an art teacher, I found the column provocative.
It also reminded me to do a little informal testing on Wacom’s Cintiq 21UX, an expensive but exceptional interactive pen LCD. Quite simply, I wanted to take the Cintiq for a test run and see if it fell short, met or exceeded my artistic expectations.
Introduced in the winter of 2005, the Cintiq 21UX takes the concept of the pen tablet, which Wacom also makes, and combines it with the LCD screen. Letting you work directly on the screen. The 21.3 inch LCD has a 170-degree viewing able, has a screen resolution of 1600 x 1200, and on each side of the screen, the Cintiq 21UX has touch strips and express keys that can be programmed for a variety of tasks.
Most importantly, I loved the pressure-sensitive, cordless pen that ups the levels of pressure sensitivity to 1024 levels (up from 512 levels). This allows you to mimic the expressive lines you might see on in an Old Master drawing, with the same line growing thicker, then thinner, darker then lighter as it moves around an object or figure. It’s what separates a cartoon from a Corregio. In my preliminary testing (mainly, creating various types of doodles and test swatches), I got pretty close to how I might draw on paper, but found I either overshot or fell shy of the mark, never quite getting the exact line I like to use (although it may just be a matter of spending more time with the display). When I’m able to sketch the way I can with a number 2 pencil on a tiny sketch pad , then I’ll be completely satisfied.
The Cintiq 21UX also gives you the ability to tilt the pen, which adds yet another dimension to the drawing experience. For example, if you’re using an airbrush type of tool, and you tilt the pen as you’re using it, you can simulate the effect of scattering the spray of the airbrush. Or if you’re using a pencil tool in your graphics program, you can simulate the effect of using the side of the pencil, instead of the pencil point.
Of course, this type of display doesn’t come cheap: it goes for about $2400. But at this time, I haven’t come across a more intuitive interactive screen.
Setting up the screen took very little time (about a half hour to install the drivers, connect the display to my laptop and to make sure everything was working). Then, I fired up Corel’s Painter IX.5 on my laptop, a marvelous program to use with this display. (The display also works with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and other graphics programs.) Since so many of the program’s tool mimicked real-world media, I felt right at home layering with pastels, scumbling with oil paint or sketching with charcoal.
Another nice feature to both the Wacom screen and the Painter IX.5 is that their preference sections were quite easy to use and intuitive. The Wacom screen gives you options for how much pressure you generally apply to the pen. You can also assign different commands to the strips, or you can quickly change the type of tool you’re using by clicking on the pen’s control switch, which is like right-clicking your mouse.
Overall, I felt I could simply immerse myself in the creative experience, whether I was working realistically, expressionistically and abstractly. It’s true it takes some time to get used to the feel of the tools, but once you do, the Cintiq seems to inspire you to get down your ideas. And, print them out, too
Of course, I loved testing this screen. But I also let my seven-year-old daughter try it out during her recent visit to the labs and to see how intuitive the screen was. Sure enough, my little gadget girl took to the screen like a fish to water….or an artist to watercolor.
For more pictures of my hands-on testing, click here.
At ExtremeTech, thanks to Loyd Case and Jason Cross, there's a fun slideshow with the best Gadgets and Gizmos of E3. Take a look at a couple gaming laptops, the odd-looking Novint Falcon Haptic Controller; new Logitech gaming peripherals, and lots more.
Oh, and they just had to include some booth-babe shots. Easy, boys!
The pressure-sensitive, cordless pen has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity and tilt sensitivity.
The preference dialog boxes for both the Cintiq 21UX (above) and for Corel Painter IX.5 (below) were very easy to use.
In the top two screens, I'm drawing value scales (from light to dark) and calligraphic lines (thick and thin). In the bottom screen, the airbrush tool in Corel Painter IX.5 helps show how you can tilt the Wacom pen and simulate the effect of scattering paint, as you would do with a real airbrush.
When using a graphics program like Corel Painter IX.5, the Cintiq 21UX makes it easy to clone photographs using various tools, including an airbrush (top right), a bristle brush (bottom left) and a mosaic tool (bottom right).
Of course, it'll be interesting to see what the next generation of artists will do with a device like the Cintiq 21UX.
As most of us geeks know, the Nintendo Wii controller looks like a regular remote control. The Wii Remote is supposed to provide more freehand control, and includes attack buttons, a speaker, and a rumble pack to feel like you're a part of the game. So, I can see why gadget-challenged folks may mistake it as an ordinary TV remote, as did poor Grandpa in Scott Johnson's comic strip from ExtraLife.com:
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