ExpanDrive

“Autonomously folding a pile of 5 previously-unseen towels.”

Vueling is a small discount airline based out of Barcelona that runs much in the style of JetBlue. Vueling is a young company with a young staff. They put together this single-shot lipsync and dance number to David Guetta’s “When Love Takes Over” to help customers get to know them better.

Happy Holidays. 2009 has simply flown by. 2010 has almost landed and this year, to celebrate, we want you to get to know us better.

Because it’s been a great year, because next year will be even better and, above all, because you’re Vueling every day.

Go Vueling 2010
The Vueling Team

The video is pretty raw and underproduced. I love it.

You may have notice from out sidebar that we’ve played a little bit of Flight Control, a simple but extremely addictive iPhone game. If you think Flight Control is exciting, then this FAA simulation of real events at Charlotte Douglas International Airport will probably get your heart racing.

I’ll set it up for you a bit, because the radio chatter can be hard to follow if you’re not used to listening to it. The blue blip labeled JIA390 is a regional jet with 46 people on board. It’s leaving the commercial airport and planning on taking off from the end of runway 18L, which is the left end up the upper horizontal runway. On the radio they’ll refer to this aircraft as “Blue Streak 390”.

The yellow blip labeled N409DR is a single engine turbo prop with 3 people on board. It’s leaving from the civil aviation part of the airport, and it’s told to expect to take off from the middle of runway 18L, by means of taxiway A (which is pronounced “Alpha”). This aircraft has the radio call sign is 9DR (pronounced “Nine Delta Romeo”).

The that after the incident:

ASDE-X is a radar and transponder system that sounds an alarm in the control tower if it thinks there’s a “runway conflict”.

ExpanDrive 1.8.4 is now in testing – you can download it here:

www.expandrive.com/windows/1.8.4b1/ExpanDrive1.8.4b1.exe

The most important new features for this release is that Strongspace [our upcoming online storage service] users are automatically licensed when they connect to their Strongspace account using ExpanDrive. In addition quite a variety of small bugs surrounding some installation quirks and Windows 7 problems have been fixed.

Werner Herzog is the director of Rescue Dawn, Grizzly Man, and many other films.

Some lawyer friends of mine just pointed me towards a website redesign that just went live for the law firm Morrison & Foerster. If you do nothing else today, please go to their front page and click on “Imagination”. Then write me an email and tell me what these guys were thinking.

There is a detailed review at Above the Law. I actually like the graphic design more than wood-panels-and-old-money look of most law firms. But the site’s content. Oh man. Here’s a few of my favorites:

• The “Imagination” page.
• A page of optical illusions mislabeled as “puzzles”, and presented with out solution or explanation.
• An integrated bookmarking / PDF export system called “MoFolder” (incase you want to save an optical illusion).
• A directory directory of lawyers searchable by “law school”.
Search for lawyers by law school.
• A “Commitment” page that claims they’re so committed that they don’t even have to explain it.

Don’t get me wrong, Foursquare is a fun little social network and beautifully adapted to the iPhone platform. But their points system incentivizes some activities that I think are detrimental to the environment as a whole.

So in the interests of making things more awesome, I’ve designed some Foursquare Badges intended to shame users into more appropriate behaviors:

A must-have if the Boston Top 10 is any indication.

You’re checking into the venue “Phone Booth in front of Whole Foods” from your cell phone?

Obviously, Foursquare would have to add a relationship status for this to work.

For the Mayor of your local “Starbucsk Coffee”.

Make friends with Cosmo on Foursquare and buy some shirts or mugs featuring these sweet badges.

Maybe there’s a killer app on the way, something on the order of VisiCalc for the Apple II, but as far as I can tell, this’ll be the biggest dud since the G4 Cube.

–Cosmo on the iPad. Saved for posterity.