It happens every year. It’s 5 o’clock, you have a Halloween party to go to in two hours and you don’t have any ideas for a costume – just a vague idea to wrap yourself in tinfoil, and pass yourself off as a baked potato.
Besides the obvious electrocution hazard, all this costume tells the world is that you’re about as a creative as, well, a baked potato, and that you have a working oven.
To help all the foil-wrapped spuds and tin-tubers out there, I’ve put together a list of Web sites on last-minute Halloween costumes that might just save Halloween this year.
Costume Idea Zone – www.costumeideazone.com
My favourites at this site were Brain Donor and Lost Doggie. For Brain Donor, all you need is a hospital gown, some black eye makeup, some gauze, some fake blood and a pickle jar with a large chunk of cauliflower – it’s fairly self-explanatory.
Lost Dog is a little more subtle. Drop by the Re-Use-It centre and get yourself the biggest clothes you can find, as well as a stuffed dog toy. Pad the clothes with whatever you can find, jam the dog in the butt crack, and walk around handing out flyers and asking people "Have you seen my dog?"
Costume Ideas – www.robinsfyi.com/holidays/halloween/costumes.htm
The "Costumes made from boxes" section is pure home-made costume gold! Rubik’s Cube anyone?
Octane Creative – www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/halloween/
The good people at Octane Creative are calling duct tape a "Halloween Costume on a Roll" and they’re not far off. Dozens of ideas involving wads of duct tape, whatever you have left over after the last Department of Homeland Security Orange Alert, and ordinary household items.
Halloween Magazine – www.halloweenmagazine.com/special/lastminute.asp
Follow these links to ideas. Some are lame, and some of the links don’t work, but maybe you’ll spot a decent idea in there for this weekend.
Your Movie Database – www.ymdb.com
This isn’t a costume store, exactly, but a Web site where people list their top-20 favourite movies, and can compare their lists with others. Since a lot of Halloween costumes come from movies, or have been featured in movies – one vampire flick after another it seems – it could be a good place to go for ideas and inspiration. I also recommend sports magazines, entertainment magazines – anything pop culture. Just looking at the news today there are articles about Siegfried and Roy (stuffed tiger, glue on sequins), magician David Blane (make a wire box and wrap it in celophane – don’t forget air holes), the SARS epidemic (facemasks anyone?), Mel Gibson (Mad Max and Braveheart costumes come to mind), Eminem (die your hair blond, put on a toque and a wifebeater, put some makeup under one eye, and trash talk your friends in rhyme), Johnny Cash (black clothes, guitar), and the Matrix (go shopping for sunglasses and pick a character). There’s eight good ideas from one edition of Google news.
Spam killing e-mail
Billions of spam e-mail messages criss-cross the Internet every day, clogging Inboxes, and robbing people of valuable time. Sometimes, when you have a compromised account (made someone’s spam list), you have to sift through dozens of messages every day just to find one you actually want to receive.
Half of all e-mail messages are spam. Anti-spam forces estimate that the time spent on spam costs billions each year in wasted bandwith and lost opportunity.
What impact is this having?
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project – a right wing thinktank, but then Spam is one of the few things both sides of the political spectrum can agree on – people are using their e-mail less.
In a survey of 1,400 Internet users, most of the respondents (75 per cent) said they felt that there was little they could do to block spams, and 60 per cent said that spam has reduced their use of e-mail "in a big way".
More than half of respondents (55 per cent) said that spam makes it difficult to find messages they want. A third of respondents, about 32 per cent, say that 80 per cent of their e-mail is spam.
One of the most disturbing outcomes of the survey was the fact that the majority of respondents (73 per cent) said they were receiving spam even though they consciously don’t sign up for any mailing lists, shop online, or perform any other online activities that typically land e-mail addresses in the hands of spammers.
It seems that the only way to block spam is to use a filtering device, which also has its downside – 30 per cent of e-mail users are concerned that their filtering devices may block incoming mail that they want to receive.
Microsoft launches new Office upgrade
Last week Microsoft launched Microsoft Office 2003, updating their popular line of office and productivity software for the first time in more than two years.
The new Office suite of applications includes upgraded versions of Office 2003 Editions, Access, Excel, Infopath, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio and Word. Each new addition has new features, including improved compatibility between the various Office programs, and between Office and other software. New server applications are also available to enhance features on workers’ desktops and wireless devices.
The question is whether businesses and home users, facing uncertainty in the economy, are going to bite as they have for previous new editions. Are the new features in Office that much better than the previous versions?
According to Microsoft President and CEO Bill Gates, the answer is yes.
"Other than the mobile phone, really the only thing that’s making (employees) more effective is the software," he said.
The Office 2003 suite ranges from $149 to $499 US, depending on the edition. The server software starts at $5,600.
For more information, visit www.micorsoft.com/office/
