Join us for a free hands-on tour of #Big

Join us for a free hands-on tour of #BigData’s cutting edge next Wed @hackreduce #boston: YARN, Impala, Spark, etc. http://ow.ly/JwA2V

Hype isn’t limited to IT vendors: presenting my new Turbo Force High Velocity Circulator

I went to the store to purchase a small fan to blow nice cool air towards my desk. But when I got it home and took a closer look, it turns out that I had selected an HT-900 Turbo Force® Air Circulator Fan from Honeywell.

Honeywell, eh? They make jet engines and ammonium nitrate fertilizer which won’t blow up! Maybe there’s more to this fan than I realized.

Intruiged, I started to read the Owner’s Manual:

The Turbo Force® High Velocity Air Circulator Fans are aerodynamically designed to give you the versatility of changing this fan’s angular direction simply by adjusting the fan to ANY desired angular output (Fig.1).

I think that means: It tilts.

The introduction continues:

Upon using this fan, you will feel a strong and powerful air stream that will quickly move air in order to cool an area rapidly and efficiently.

Translation: Turn it on and it will blow air.

Suddenly all that vendor verbiage about how cloud computing will increase the synergies between your technology and business priorities sounds… well… not that bad. At least they’re not hyping something as simple as a desk fan.

Where to find clips of Cisco’s over-the-top product placement on Fox’s 24 & others

full-frame product placement

This was the only thing on the Fox network for a few glorious moments of product placement nirvana.

To paraphrase David Letterman’s self-deprecating joke, this was the only thing on the Fox network — a full frame plug for Cisco’s “Self-Defending Network” marketing messaging and this accompanying dialogue:

Bill: “Has it done any damage yet?”
Chloe: “No, the Cisco system is self-defending.”

Cisco even maintains a page to this clip and others — mostly Telepresence.

Thanks to Brad Reese’s Network World blog post for the pointer.