DanThat'sCool!

To all of you who have managed to make an Art Form out of wandering aimlessly in circles while attempting to run errands or simply make it from Point A to Point B…I salute you.  It has already been well documented that I could write the eBook on bobble heading around in child like discovery instead of actually paying attention to other pedestrians and incoming traffic, and have somehow so far lived to tell the story.  So I jumped right on this one.

The Photosynth App for iPhone is made for people like us.

There are hundreds of photo panorama apps out there, but most of them end up looking like you scotch taped a bunch of polaroids together on the refrigerator.  That was nifty back when the Brady Bunch went to the Grand Canyon, but it’s 2011, people.  This app is how it should be done.  It’s amazing.  It’s easy to use.  And it’s free.  A triple score.

Plant yourself in one spot and turn on the app.  Then just do what we do best…spin around slowly while looking up and down and right and left.  The app automatically snaps a photo every couple of feet, using a neato overlay marker, so you don’t miss a spot in your panorama.  The more photos you shoot, the bigger and better your photo ends up.  Shoot the subject, the sky, the ground and all the details until you end up back where you started.

That’s it.  Using some kind of high tech software magic that is way beyond me, the photos are stitched together seamlessly and then…wait for it…BAM!…a little bit of your world is now in 3D panorama that you can spin, tilt and show off on your phone, Facebook or the Photosynth website.  It is only available for the iPhone right now, but it’s coming for other systems.  (One, relax…it’s coming.  Two…you should have an iPhone anyway.  Just saying.  Snap.)

But right now I’m still a little light headed from my last 360, so check out the corporate vid on the subject.  You need to see it in action, and they explain it better anyway.  Very DanCool.

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Be Cool while you annoy the crap out of people.

There is no escape.  They are everywhere.

They’re waving their fingers in the air at imaginary people while fighting with their Boo.  They are yelling at their Bank representative or making dinner reservations.  They are talking dirty or reminding themselves to pick up dry-cleaning after work.  They are buying stocks or figuring out where you be at, girl?

And they are doing it all on their cell phone, and could care less who hears it.

We’ve all been there.  Trapped on a bus or subway while someone carries on a loud, broken english conversation apparently unaware that Mass Transit actually means…umm…Transit for the Masses.  Is this a private bus?  I wasn’t aware when I swiped my monthly pass.  I also didn’t realize that the 10 Items or Less line has officially become 2011′s version of a phone booth, giving both the cashier and the customer cart blanche to text and talk while my freeze pops melt in my clenching paws.

Before I get all Grandpa crotchety on cell etiquette and those new fangled Internet Cafes, I’ll focus.  This one isn’t about all that, even though I keep promising to one day write the best book ever, made up entirely of overheard cell conversations.  Instant best seller, guaranteed.  Even as an eBook that those young bucks can multi gesture through at the afore mentioned Cafes.

This is all about the Cool factor.  If you insist on driving people nuts by yakking on your Android through the entire second floor of the Mall, then at least do it in style.

The YUBZ retro handset is living proof that everything old is new again.  I don’t want to even hazard a guess as to how many cell users today have actually never gone old school with a corded receiver in their lifetime.

Simmer down, Gramps.  But this thing is pretty cool, and actually more comfortable for the long calls then smashing some warm glass plating against your skull.  YUBZ tosses a little “No Radiation” marketing into the mix as well, but the handset sells on Cool alone.  Not getting brain cancer is probably a good selling point, but if my phone matches my outfit…even better.  The handset comes in loads of colors, as well as a sleek Urban silver which gets my vote, and they all fit pretty much every cell out there, thanks to adaptors.

Even Lenny Kravitz has been photographed in the Village yakking away to his peeps on one.  Like his music or not, he’s a cool dude.

Grab one of these bad boys and start working those calls like a Style Icon.  You’ll still push me one notch below going full postal, but you’ll get props for your cellular accessorizing.

DanCool.

When I decided to unleash my random samplings of What’s Cool on an unsuspecting internet audience, whether they wanted it or not, I was hoping that every so often I could find some gems that were so Shut Up Cool that no one would even dare disagree with me.  Things that would, for a brief moment, make me the Finder of All Things Cool, at least in my own head, and for at least one full hour.  Cool things so cool that the President would need to use his special cool BatPhone to call me and say thank you for making the world a cooler place.  The kind of things that would allow me to use the word Cool 40 times in one paragraph and not annoy anyone because the thing was so cool.

That kind of Cool.

I just didn’t think I would have to buy a subway pass to Korea to do it.

Check out the vid down below.  Korean grocery store chain Home Plus/Tesco has just made shopping for your snacks fun again.  It’s a way to check things off your grocery list that until now only Comic Con attendees could have envisioned.  Instead of miles and miles of Nike ads and generic Mass Transit posters, Home Plus has lined the subway platforms with wall to wall life size grocery store murals.  You literally feel as tho you are pushing your wobbly wheeled cart down the ketchup aisle instead of waiting for your Metro train.

Every shelf in your favorite Korean store is there.  All the basic core items that any household would need, on either side of the pond.  The neato part is that every virtual item is marked with a QR code that can be snapped into your cell phone and sent to that big Home Plus cloud in the sky.  Instead of standing around twiddling your thumbs waiting for your ride home, you go grocery shopping.  You take scans of everything on your list.  Then you pay for it with the same phone.  Then you get on your train, feeling warm and fuzzy, safe in the knowledge that your groceries will be at your house by the time you get off the Jungang Line.

I know, right?  Shut up.

The only flaw that I can see in this new high tech shopping is that you no longer get to (unintentionally, of course…) stand in the longest line and read your free copy of Soap Opera Digest.  Which you would never do if the line wasn’t so long.  But people can’t read the 10 items or under sign.  Ever.  And it’s the only magazine at the register.  And All My Children just got cancelled.

Or so I heard.  From someone else.

Gotta go.  My train is here.