Auction sites are blocked by our corporate firewall. This prevents people from buying goods on company time and not associating purchased goods with our company (IP-tracing and all). It wouldn’t look good if our company’s IP was linked to the purchase of fake/stolen Tiffany & Co merchandise [link]

However, the biggest auction of the year – nay century is the FCC’s sale of the 1,099 licenses in the 700MHz spectrum. This colossal sale has the potential to shape the way this country communicates and we can all look in on it [link] . The icing on the cake is that the Java applet that displays the time, actually works on the Mac. Excelsior!

I haven’t been a while since I’ve been this tickled by a web application. UNIQLO, the Japanese casual clothing designer has been on my watch list since December 2006 [link] when it was featured on CBS Sunday Morning. Caught by it’s distinctly cute Japanese portmanteau name for “Unique Clothing”, it has now sucked me in with its UNIQLOCK.

A fun flash clock showing the current time in Tokyo. The hook is not finding out what time it is in a foreign country no, vignettes of modern dance performed by lone or groups of Japanese women are punctuated by a bell with all set to the interpretations of over-hectic jazz by Tomoyuki Tanaka [link].

Not owning a stitch of the clothing, due to size and distance constraints, [link] I am still drawn to its pop feel and their way of making fashion vis-a-vis their simple pieces that adumbrate complexity. Much like IKEA, I think I’d have to clear out what I have now and start anew before venturing into the UNIQLO world.

**Updated: The clock has switched to a sleepy-time sound track and the dancers are dozing off. **

As if I didn’t have any more reasons to fall for John Flansburg of They Might Be GIants, I find out that he has an iPhone. Gearlog had an interview with the Flans, touching on the band’s use of technology. If I do ever get to meet him, I wonder if he’ll pose for a photo like I had with John Ong.

Link to Gearlog interview part 1 [link]
Link to Gearlog interview part 2 [link]

Consumer Reports has been a seemingly closed resource on the web, leaving us non-subscribers to the print magazine shut out of the any deep consumer information. Bigger net toobs and quite literally dump trucks of information, as given way to the “Car Crash test” website. One can input in their late model vehicle into the web-page and see how it fares in impact tests.

Take that, will it blend you’re not the only one artfully destroying objects on the internet. Let’s see you race into a NHTSA wall.

See your car in a crash test [link]

See crazy stuff blended [link]