For the past couple days, I’ve had music from a Mercedes commercial stuck in my head. The commercial is for the Mercedes Benz C-Class Coupe and is mostly simple shots of a thirtyish guy driving across a bridge (SF I think) with a plastic bag blowing around the passenger side. Great photography even if the bag thing is a cliche now.

The song is Whoever You Are by Geggy Tah. Thanks to LimeWire for helping uncover that. I’m looking for other songs by them to see if I want to buy any of their albums.

Interesting case of media cross-pollination, who was the ad actually for? I’m not going to be buying a car anytime soon…

I’ve been thinking about creating something about how to open a CD. It would be somewhat the opposite of this: How to unwrap a CD box by Tibor Kalman and Lulu Kalman.

I don’t know how I’m just now finding out about Cockeyed. Absolute genius.

I wonder if he’s seen Empty?

The past two days I’ve seen three people missing a total of four legs. Today I saw a double amputee, yesterday I saw two singles. The one that sticks in my head is the man in the wheelchair outside the LIRR escalators into Penn Station. The stump of his right leg was swollen around the truncated end of his lower leg bones, a ring of blotchy purple flesh about the diameter of a basketball. He was drinking a 32oz soda from McDonalds and smoking a cigarette.

Even if the Patients’ Bill of Rights passes, it will only help those who can afford to see a doctor. None of these people looked as if they could afford health care, an economic reality quantified by their missing limbs.

Last night I saw the Mike’s Hard Lemonade Lumberjack ad where one man chops off his own leg, then a second man buys the first a drink. I didn’t laugh.

I received an email from Jerry Kindall about the mysterious “joe maller.exe” thing I found on GNUtella. He suggested the file was produced by “a hacked Gnutella client that renames the file in question to whatever you’re looking for, to distribute a virus or worm or at the very least a Trojan horse. If you had searched for ‘Adobe Photoshop 6’ I bet you the same server would have returned the same file, only named ‘Adobe Photoshop 6.exe’.”

In the meantime, I had a small but signficant breakthrough with Perl.

Update on “joe maller.exe” – I opened the file in BBEdit to see if I could figure out what it was. Looks like porn advertising or something based on a list of embedded sites. The phrase “Fun Loving Criminal” appears several times. One funny thing I found was a path to SimCity3000: “C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimCity 3000\Game\SC3.EXE” I’ve never played SimCity3000.

Maybe if I remember I’ll try opening it with Virtual PC, hopefully this will just go away.

So I was searching for my name on GNUtella (via Limewire) and I find a file called “joe maller.exe” on this host 24.68.178.120. Since I don’t even own a PC, I have no idea what this is. I just hope it’s not the next global sircam virus or something.