Daedalus Howell

Life, Storied.

Lab Blog

  • Siri, Please Teach Google Voice to Listen

    Sometimes using one’s smartphone is like playing a game of, well, ?telephone.? Half the time no one can hear you and when they can, the message gets lost in translation ? even when it’s not actually being translated. I’m convinced that mine is actually a ‘smart-ass phone? given how it willfully drops calls, truncates texts…

  • Tipply Tributes: Celebrity Beer Names

    For your typical celebrity, it’s to be expected that one day someone is going to name a sandwich or some other edible after you. Every deli menu in Hollywood boasts some kind of transubstantiation of stars into grub. In the world of cocktails, oddly, they’re usually of the non-alcoholic variety (“Shirley Temple,” “Roy Rogers”). On…

  • Phone Drones: Virtual Agents Answer Customer Service Call of Duty

    That a large portion of one’s customer service call are outsourced to India or other exotic locales is old news. We ‘ve all been patched through to a phone bank half a planet away to speak with someone trained to suppress their native accent and make references to your local weather and high school sports…

  • Why Do Men Put Their Penises Online?

    ?To tweet or not to tweet?? ? that should have been the question for former U.S. representative Anthony Weiner whose infamous social media snafu made him and his briefs-ensconced boner a household name synonymous with ?moron.? Not only did Weiner’s foray into softcore porn (and subsequent revelations about ‘sexting? with numerous women) provide a wide…

  • Zombie-Proof House Exhibit Opens

    We’ve all heard of “panic rooms” and backyard bomb-shelters but when it comes to domestic fortresses, few, if any, have addressed the possibility of a zombie apocalypse. Leave it Robert Wuilfe of Napa’s uber-gallery di Rosa to curate a major exhibition of post-apocalyptic-themed works under the comforting title “Zombie-Proof House.” Billed as a is a…

  • iCloudius: Apple’s Man in the Sky

    When it rains it pours for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The lauded gadget guru qua rainmaker came out of medical leave to formally introduce attendees of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to a bevy of new products, among them the much anticipated announcement of the iCloud. Apple’s own spin on so-called cloud-computing, which, sans the…

  • The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

    When those of a certain generation first hear of the “Filter Bubble,” they might reflect on that brief two weeks in the mid-’90s when the band Filter was kind of popular. These days, the Filter Bubble, according to former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser, is the means by which the Information Superhighway functions more like…

  • Venture Capital: Start Me Up

    Money makes the world go around’really, really fast?which is why one’s head tends to spin with each new billion-dollar valuation and smug twenty-something on a magazine cover. This isn’t anything new; it’s even something of a Bay Area tradition. Or at least that’s the impression one might get watching Something Ventured, Daniel Geller and Dayna…

  • Publish Your Goddamn Book Already

    Publishing is dead. Long live publishing. Or at least, self-publishing, which, thanks to a plethora of services and a general de-stigmatization of the so-called vanity press could be entering something of a golden era. So where are the literary breakouts? The through-line from Gutenberg’s invention of movable type to the desktop publishing revolution of the…