Fox News (yes, I know) is reporting that a digital road sign in Austin, Texas was hacked recently. The impish hackers changed the sign to read “Zombies Ahead”. Heh, zombies.
Foxnews.com says that:
“According to the blog i-hacked.com, some commercial road signs, including those manufactured by IMAGO's ADDCO division, can be easily altered because their instrument panels are frequently left unlocked and their default passwords are not changed.”
The speculation is that it was the work of university students, which is the digital equivalent of drunkenly stealing a street sign for the dorm room.
In addition to reminding me to watch L.A. Story and Land of the Dead again, it made me think about what happens when digital information is more widely dispersed among our real, physical environment. Will it take the ‘true-for-now’ tendency of the web out into the wild?
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Flying the Squirrel Flag
Another new coffee shop opened up in my area recently, called-ahem-Coffee Shop. It's so new, I can't find it online, but it's right by Clafouti, across from Trinity Bellwoods Park. Nothing much unusual about that; every time you walk down that strip of Queen Street there's something new opening up, or--more and more often, it seems--closing down.
What I noticed about it, though, was the clever sign (sorry, didn't have my camera) which combined the generic "Coffee Shop" name in a generic white font, with a white silhouette image of a squirrel. Trinity Bellwoods Park is locally famous for its population of white squirrels--I imagine they have a form of albinism. So, the uber-generic name was matched with a kind of hyper-local signifier of local neighbourhood pride.
It's not the first time I've seen the image. Fleurtje had a purse with one on for a while; one of the neighbourhood shops had t-shirts with a white squirrel logo. I'm intrigued by this hyper-localism. Is it just a reflection of the fact that we're a bigger city now, and so the population base supports it? Is it because so many people in this city were born somewhere else that it's feeding a desire for place, for settlement? Or perhaps it's a reaction to a broader sense of rootlessness. I talked about it on the podcast with Cathi a while ago. Any thoughts?
What I noticed about it, though, was the clever sign (sorry, didn't have my camera) which combined the generic "Coffee Shop" name in a generic white font, with a white silhouette image of a squirrel. Trinity Bellwoods Park is locally famous for its population of white squirrels--I imagine they have a form of albinism. So, the uber-generic name was matched with a kind of hyper-local signifier of local neighbourhood pride.
It's not the first time I've seen the image. Fleurtje had a purse with one on for a while; one of the neighbourhood shops had t-shirts with a white squirrel logo. I'm intrigued by this hyper-localism. Is it just a reflection of the fact that we're a bigger city now, and so the population base supports it? Is it because so many people in this city were born somewhere else that it's feeding a desire for place, for settlement? Or perhaps it's a reaction to a broader sense of rootlessness. I talked about it on the podcast with Cathi a while ago. Any thoughts?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
