hello, typepad

OMG shirt

OMG shirt
Originally uploaded by Mike Monteiro.

I recommend the purchase of this shirt, with apologies to my more sensitive readers.

Things I Learned Today

The symbol of snowman is ☃ (Unicode: 0x2603). (thanks, Null)

I'm Feeling Lucky in Bengali: "Bhagyoban Money Korchhi" (thanks, Finn)

Wasps aren't animals. (thanks, YSA)

The Gang Rule of Four Fourteen Four Four Four Four Four

True friend Meg tagged me with four things. Kenyatta almost did, but apparently he was worried about a self induced overdose of vitamin M(eme). Nonsense!

Four Jobs I've Had:

1. Perl Programmer - From the first iteration of nea.org in the summer of 1994 to my current work as a full time software architect and programmer, I've always been a programmer at heart. Also at the NEA, I built a link sharing program from teachers in the summer of 1996. There was no auth (or tags) but it did have comments. (I should have kept going with that. :) The search was a regular expression, and the "view all" button was simply a search on the letter 'e.' I'm pretty good at this, but after 12 years I should be even better!
2. MediaRights - Director of Technology and Distribution. The "and distribution" was only added to my title in the last year I was there, but I loved my job at MediaRights helping filmmakers get their messages further. It was my boss Nicole who gave the folks at Netflix the idea of releasing films from PBS/POV to Netflix subscribers the day they were broadcast, and now that distribution model is all the rage.
3. Teacher - Both at SEI and the House of Umoja in Portland, Oregon. Both my parents are life long teachers, so it seemed completely natural for me to take teaching jobs in Portland during a semester off from school and again after I graduated. It actually never occurred to me to look for programming jobs after college, although obviously I came back to it.
4. Odd jobs at Oberlin - I had a million jobs at Oberlin, including working at conference services and in the student union.

Four_{teen +2} movies I can watch over and over:

• The Celebration
• The Chungking Express
• Contact
• Fireworks
• The Fugitive
• The Hulk
• In the Mood for Love
• The Incredibles
• The Iron Giant
• Mullholland Drive
• Rear Window
• Rushmore
• Tampopo
• Star Trek VI
• The Third Man
• Toy Story 2

Four places I've lived:

1. Fairfax, Virginia
2. Oberlin, Ohio
3. Portland, Oregon
4. New York City

Four TV Shows I love:

1. The Wire - All 4 entries could be Wire episodes, especially the last half of the third season.
2. Monk - I'm monkish.
3. Deadwood
4. Mets Baseball

Four Places I've vacationed:

• London, England
• Paris, France
• Tokyo, Japan
• Vancouver, Canada

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Pepperoni Pizza - I'm vegan, but this is still my favorite food.
2. Adriana's Beans and Rice
3. Dumplings (regular old fried dumplings are fine for me.
4. Dosa (hopefully from the Dosa Cart)

Four sites I visit daily:

• http://davidjacobs.livejournal.com/friends/
• http://dj.riceweevil.com/
• http://google.com/ig/
• http://flickr.com/photos/friends/

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Montreal (never been!)
2. Alaska
3. Portland, OR
4. Houseboat

Who's next???

1. Adriana
2. Angela
3. Mr. Sun!
4. Claire

Tuberaider Video

It's come to my attention that not everyone knows about Tuberaider, J-Smooth's best of YouTube blog. Enjoy The Meters live, Popping and Locking Lessons and Chaka Khan Playing the Drums.

How Pixar Adds a New School of Thought to Disney

How Pixar Adds a New School of Thought to Disney is a fantastic article in the New York Times about how Pixar shunned the Hollywood style freelance/contract working model in favor of building long term talent. You're going to see this article linked everywhere because everyone in the world who takes pride in their work can relate to the lessons herein.

"The problem with the Hollywood model is that it's generally the day you wrap production that you realize you've finally figured out how to work together," Mr. Nelson said. "We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people."

This reminds me a little bit of Big Mouth Productions and MediaRights, where I used to work (they're hiring, by the way).

The title of the article is a little misleading since Pixar obviously hasn't added much to Disney in the six days since the merger became official. As a movie and animation lover, here's hoping that some of these ideas find their way into the notoriously worker-unfriendly Disney workflow.

Marketing Brokeback Mountain

There's a nice article in the Wall Street Journal about how delicately Brokeback Mountain was marketed. The goal was not to draw controversy, but rather to avoid it. The strategy worked, and Brokeback is one of the biggest hits this year. They also played very close attention to the social "microclimates" of New York City, bringing a little chaos theory into their marketing ideas. Me likey.

Like microclimates in Napa Valley that can produce dramatically different wines, neighborhoods in Manhattan can draw entirely different audiences: Chelsea attracts gay viewers, the Village students, the Lincoln Center-area affluent boomers. Word of mouth from a Manhattan opening can determine with what audience a film succeeds or fails.

Normally, 'Brokeback' would have opened in downtown theaters in the SoHo-East Village areas -- typical for an art-house film. Instead, on its opening weekend Dec. 9, Mr. Foley placed 'Brokeback' into a megaplex in Chelsea, another uptown at Lincoln Center, and only one near Greenwich Village. 'I didn't want New York to say this is an art-house film,' says Mr. Foley. 'I wanted a mix of voices talking about it to defeat it being called 'a gay cowboy movie.' '

Being a romantic, I also think that the movie does well because the crafting of the cinematography, editing and sound is well worth repeated viewings on the large screen. The incredible acting from top to bottom helps too - I think people are taken aback when they see actors who really act.

You can track the box office results at the always excellent Box Office Mojo.

Yojimbo

Yojimbo is a new snippets-saving app for OS X. I've been enjoying it and I'll probably stick with it. It allows you to drag text files, text snippets or URLs into an unobtrusive sidebar, which adds them to your "library." Your Library is a sortable Mail-like view of all your snippets, and you can sort them into sub-libraries that are like iTunes playlists.

I've tried a bunch of note taking solutions but never quite stuck with one. vi was my old favorite when I was on Unix and a terminal was always open, but that's often not the case on OS X. BBedit is fast, and I love the diff tool and other flourishes, but keeping "notes.txt" open all the time felt ... wasteful. Voodoo Pad was fast and fun, but I always forgot to open it, and then I would have versions that were out of sync. I felt like I had to maintain it more than I wanted to. Most commonly I had a file of URLs and short snippets "to sort," but that was obviously suboptimal. I know people love and swear by DevonThing, but it just seemed like overkill for my needs, which are "keep" and "search." The absolute best-in-class notekeeping app in the world is still Microsoft OneNote, but Yojimbo is the first piece of OS X software that deserves mention in the same sentence as the heretofore undisputed champion.

There are some more features I'd like to see. I suppose this is a wish list of features that would be true of any of the above apps as well, but like I said Yojimbo is currently closest to my ideal.

• Clipboard Integration - Jumpcut is still the best-in-class OS X clipboard manager, but it's getting a little long in the tooth. I'd love to be able to sort and save anything from my clipboard within Yojimbo. I often realize too late that I actually wanted to save that thing that was in my clipboard ten minutes ago. A nice view of the last n (50?) items from my clipboard which I could easily mark as "saved" would be a lively feature people would appreciate. Like I said, no one besides Jumpcut (not even Quicksilver or Launchbar) does this right.
• "Smart" Collections - Right now you can create as many "collections" as you like, but their behavior is static. What I really want is smart collections as intuitive as iTunes' smart playlists. For instance, I'd like everything that starts with "#!/usr/bin/perl" to be a code snippet, and I'd also like to to look at everything I bookmarked last Tuesday. Luckily for Bare Bones, the company that produces Yojimbo, the text factory tool built into Uncle BBedit is a great start on the kind of intelligent regular expressions that regular people may want to use.
• A Better Dock Icon - The Dock icon looks amateurish, dare I say beta. It's the kind of "cool" dock icon that a college kid would put out or that would be attached to an internal build of an application. I don't keep any "persistent" icons in my dock, but at any given moment I may have fifteen to twenty applications open and Yojimbo's icon just doesn't sit right yet. Unless you're the Adium duck, your icon should make some attempt to describe what your app is doing, even if it's in a very abstract way (a la Camino or NetNewsWire's dock icons). And no, "kick ass" does not qualify as descriptive enough.
• Image support - This is the one area where OneNote eats Yojimbo's lunch $4.99/lb buffet style. Image support would be useful in a million ways, especially for web developers who often have desktops full of chopped up web mockups and icons. I could say "media" support, but I don't care about audio at all. I know other people will, I just don't.
• Outlining - I don't need this, but if I can't have smart collection lists I'd like some way to group items together logically, and an outliner is a tried and true way to accomplish that. It only needs to be one level deep, and it doesn't need any of Omni-outliner's magic. It should output OPML and XHTML lists regardless.
• Scriptability - This is a no brainer, and I'm shocked that it was absent from the first release. Bare Bones has always had fantastic Applescript support in their software, but in this case it's totally missing in action. Blog posts always start as fallow thoughts and bits of text or a few URLs open in tabs. Scriptability would also allow cool things like social bookmarking support. A few examples:
  • Show me all my bookmarks about espresso!
  • Post this to my weblog! Anil will link to you. This can work quickly with Atom, MarsEdit, or XML-RPC.
  • Immediately slurp in my photos tagged nyc!
• MacBook Tablet Support - This is obviously notional, but it has flawless support for capturing chicken scratch and funny sketches so that the app is ready when Apple drops the Maclet on us. This is another area where OneNote absolutely thrives.

Didn't mean to spend so long on that. While writing this post I realized that I really want a better "snippet" management app. All told, Yojimbo 1.0 is a great start.

I AM SHARING THIS WITH YOU

I always envied Stewart's subtitle I AM SHARING THIS WITH YOU, it perfectly captures the essence of blogging. Now that Anil has stolen it, I can too. I've been real sick the last week, bedridden. So all I have today are links, but it's still good blogging.

• Stewart's sharing energies are probably directed internally at Yahoo! now (I'm guessing, not knowing). Apparently Mena's are too. Somewhere there is a spreadsheet that reads RSS, and it is tracking the number of days since Mena and Stewart have updated their company blogs (Flickr phone "snaps" don't count). The X-axis "days since blog updated and the Y-axis is "total awesomeness of Flickr 2.0 and Typepad 2.0". The Y-axis (in this spreadsheet of the mind) is growing higher and higher, as Mena & Stewart's respective companies absorb the wonderful creative energies that we are being deprived of.
• Caterina's "blathering" response to the "Yahoo! throws in the towel" meme is wonderful. Who else can shame the CFO of one of the biggest web brands in the world in a post, and then go on to school her audience on Simpsons trivia in the comments? That's good blogging.
• Last Tuesday I handed over the reins of the Eyebeam reblog to Mr. Evan Roth. You can view my author archive going forward if you ever want to revisit those posts. I really had a tremendous time. Blog readers fall into habits very quickly, and reading much more news from a wider diversity of authors was exciting and eye opening. "Watch this space" for more reblog news, and thanks again, Michael, for the opportunity and kind words.
• OGLE is Eyebeam's latest software release. It captures 3-D data from software like video games and Google Earth which can be easily imported into Maya, the Photoshop of the modeling world. I love the image of the Secondlife dragon-thing eating its way through lower Manhattan. This means we'll probably see those 2-D Google mashups working in 3-D pretty soon, and beautifully.
• Pauline Oliveros will be performing at Eyebeam January 26 (tonight).
• I have an idea for the Contagious Media contest. It's "play"ful. There's a 5% chance I will actually have the time to implement it. Now that I've blogged it, 7%. It's mobile! 8%. 8%. You'll need some major luck on the 5d5 to see this happen.
• On Brain Training is the next Electroplankton. It looks to be yet another DS game that threatens the very definition of what a "video game" is. I do have to say that some of those exercises look a little menial. Wario Ware and Puzzle League were also groundbreaking games that challenged people to think in different directions and at different paces, and I think that's just as important as remedial math and shape transformation. Still, my hopes are high.
• Loyal readers get an awesome reward for reading this far! Chaka Kha playing the drums, 1976. From J. Smooth's exceptional "best of youtube" blog, tuberaider. Kenyatta - add this to the unmediated reblog feed list!
• It's pretty geeky to be reading Google's "Web Authoring Statistics" at this hour, or at all. I plead the fifth. But "Of the top twenty most-used attributes on body, fourteen are purely presentational." That's depressing.
• Adriaan's Kung-Fu is still strong. His web service "Info balloons" how-to is clearly written and immediately useful to anyone with a weblog and a Delicious, Flickr, Upcoming, yahoo! web service account. The thing about all of the amazing javascript hacks coming out nowadays - it's always done in, like, 12 lines of code.

Confession Time

The trouble with Whole Foods: "I know I'm fast and focused and aggressive. That's one of the reasons I *like* living in NYC, I feel like I'm surrounded my people -- except when I go to the Union Square Whole Foods!"

I'm fast and focused and aggressive too. But when I go to Whole Foods a spell comes over me. Look at all those salsas! Can we buy a sampler pack? They have seven or eight different kinds of wasabi. Who knew? And the aisles are just not wide enough for two carts - so while you think you are not blocking people, you definitely are.

I'll try and get better, I promise.

Time Shifting Ink

It's like TiVo for books for free.: "So how about it, friends? Who among you has a library card?"

I do, both NYC and Brooklyn. Bloggers should feel comfortable in libraries, the shelves even have permalinks!

More: iPalimpsest, Librarian.net.

Humor in Dark Times

It's always sad when fake news outpaces real news when it comes to sharp, direct coverage of current events (e.g. The Daily Show, The Onion, drudge).

But we've fallen to a new low, as ESPN's Page 2 breaks down the US relatioship with Cuba more succintly than I've seen anyone else do it.

First, forget that Cuba was allowed to compete in Atlanta in the 1996 Olympics. Next, forget that it played an exhibition game against the Orioles in Baltimore in 1999. Then forget that even our current administration allowed Cuba's national soccer team to compete in last year's CONCACAF Gold Cup in Seattle.

While you're at it, forget that our government is letting that well-known global leader in human rights -- mainland China -- play in the World Baseball Classic. Forget also that our myopic foreign policy toward Cuba has failed to oust Fidel Castro after more than 40 years while hurting Cuban citizens far more than Castro. And oh yes, forget that our own government has prisoners locked up in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay for an indefinite period.

For those of you not following along at home, the Bush administration is threatening to shut down the World Baseball Classic over Cuba's involvement.

The U.S. Treasury department is enforcing the WBC ban, but this isn't about money. Cuba is not going to benefit financially from this tournament. The tournament is not likely to make much of a profit this year -- perhaps a couple million dollars, perhaps less than that. The winning nation will get only 10 percent of that, the losers even less. Further, Cuba is offering to donate its meager payout to Hurricane Katrina charities. So what's the problem, other than that Cuba does not produce oil or have a billion-citizen economy?

If you want the United States to look like a petty tyrant with a hypocritical foreign policy, then by all means, ban Cuba from playing. That way, we'll drop right into Castro's propaganda hands. We'll look like the big bully afraid to see our millionaire players get beaten by little Cuba, afraid to take charity from an island off the coast of Florida.

/Root markets

I've been wondering what /Root Markets are for a while now, since so many people I respect from vastly different markets are involved. Now "r0ml" (r0ml?) has finally posted his What do I do? post, so I can begin to grok what they're doing. And it sounds great.Makes me wonder what else Mike Frumin, Lew Ranieri and Ed Batista are up to over there.

update: Just saw this News "2.0" feature: Everybody else is spying on me," [Goldstein] says, "so I want to spy on myself.

"Oh, really? Because I happen to have Mr. Bray right here."

In his latest A List Apart column, "Web 3.0," Jeffrey Zeldman perfectly nails the tension between style and substance that is poisoning the well for many of us web people.

At first I tolerated the pain by mentally modifying the famous scene from Annie Hall:

HIM: "I teach a venture capitalist workshop, so I think my insights into XML have a great deal of validity."

ME: "Oh, really? Because I happen to have Mr. Bray right here."

Later I gnawed my knuckles. At some point, in a kind of fever, I may have moaned. Blessedly, at last the lights dimmed and the night's real speakers redeemed the evening.

But the ass whose braying I'd endured left a bad taste.

Holidays

Kenyatta says:

"Television is one of the bad things that happens when Sunday isn't a school night. After watching about 15 minutes of Access Hollywood, I come up with the idea that we should all add 'Jolie-Pitt' to our last names so we could all be part of the extended family."

I feel more beautiful already. Why not just give them their own holiday? We could immerse ourselves in Jolie-Pittness for 24 hours straight and reclaim the rest of our free time from those beautiful mind thieves.

And speaking of thieving, my time as guest reblogger is almost at an end. I stole all my MLK links from Jason Kottke of kottke.org. I'm surprised that in the 200+ feeds that make up the reblog reading list, only Jason and one other blogger mentioned Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday at all. I guess Bloggers know no days off.

New Years Resolutions

Caterina says:

I've been considering, since New Year's Eve, a possible Resolution that I will not, in 2006, buy a single book, but instead read only books that I've already bought. ... And as a friend recently noted, when I buy a book, I am also, with great optimism, buying the time in which to read it. Now if *that* were true, by God, I'd be a Methuselah.

We have a similar resolution, but less constrained: We're only buying one book for each one we read and sell or give away. So far we've sold three books (on Amazon, via the wonderful Delicious Library), but the only glue bound pages I've spent any real time with this year are the puzzles found within Sudoku to go: Tough.

My other resolutions are pretty straightforward, nothing you wouldn't expect.

No, really! I open plenty of Black tabs all the time!

Originally uploaded by david.

With apologies to George.

Places I Went in 2005

Brooklyn, NY*
Fairfax, VA*
Paris, France
Oakland, CA
Cary, NC
Sagaponack, NY*
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA
Washington, DC*

My favorite thing about watching this meme spread is that there's not yet a "google maps mash-up" to support it. Plain text is so refreshing sometimes!

Places I visited but did not spend the night:
Princeton, NJ
Sacramento, CA

MisfitsCentral.com

MisfitsCentral.com Lyrics:

20 EYES
-------
20 Eyes in my head
20 Eyes in my head
20 Eyes in my head
They're all the same, they're all the same

20 Eyes in my head
20 Eyes in my head
They're all the same, they're all the same

When you're seeing 20 things at a time
You just can't slow things down, baby
When you're seeing 20 things in your mind
Just can't slow things down
 
Then all those eyes
They're just crowding up your human face
Then all those eyes
Take an overload

Before 43 folders and 20 things, I had Glenn Danzig and the Misfits.

"Oprah ain't no punk," James Frey and the Definition of Memoir

Angela on the Million Little Pieces scandal and James Frey's appearance on Larry King Live last night:

Towards the end of the show, Oprah called in. This call was a 'surprise' to most but not to me. Oprah ain't no punk. She's gonna make her opinion known and not via publicists. She said it was up to publishers, whom she said she relied on to document the authenticity of a book, to decide what rules govern memoirs and how they differ from other forms of nonfiction. She felt this whole thing honestly was much ado about nothing.

I did not know there was a difference between non-fiction and memoir. If memoir was a genre onto itself, why is there no memoirs section at Barnes and Nobles? It seemed to me to be a variation on the autobiography genre, a member of the non-fiction family.

This makes sense to me. In addition to autobiography, non-fiction and memoir[1], I've also heard the genre "creative non-fiction" bandied about, which is more or less autobiography with a declaration that facts have changed to make the story more interesting. I wonder what genre most weblogs and weblog posts fall into. My guess is autobiography, because it's easier to tell the truth. Lying takes effort, which is one reason I also take people at their word.

[1] Make no mistake: Dave Winer will be writing a "memoir."

Don Quijote Day / Tips for Reblogging

Over at Reblog (where I've been a having little too much fun) it's Don Quijote day.

We Make Money Not Art and Eyeteeth pointed me to X Reloaded, a parade of "proposed new readings" of the classic story. Regine's highlights are the best.

Jason pointed out the story of a French Monk who bound an edition of Don Quijote in the skin of his dead dog. Marcus Trimble, who originally blogged the story writes: "Funny, I happen to be reading Don Quixote at the moment/last eight months, so now all i need is a pet..."

And since I'm probably going to have stop hogging the Eyebeam Mic soon, I thought I'd offer a few observations about reblogging. Reblogging is nothing more than fast blogging, so it's no coincidence that making your content friendlier for rebloggers has the pleasant side effect of making the user experience more pleasant for all of your readers.

Dave Winer will end your career

Today's free association comes courtesy of my main man Dave Winer:

Someday, Murphy-willing, I will write a memoir. You may be in it. It's going to be a best seller, I promise you. Please, be nice to me.

Dedicated readers know what's coming! The amazing KRS-ONE will End Your Career:

KRS claimed that when he hears a new artists come on the scene.. that he immediately writes a rhyme that will totally dismantle him and his career. He keeps those rhymes in the back of his head just in case he has to take some kid out..

new powerbooks!

new powerbooks
Originally uploaded by adampsyche.

Big Numbers

Jason Calacanis: 9:46AM: We just hit 87K pages a minute.

That's a lot of freaking page views. Nice that Jason gives props to memcache for holding up under the load.

My most "interesting" Flickr photos

Not the list I would have chosen, and many of them are popular only because flickr had less traffic in the past, but it's still a fun list. Created with Scout's tools, via Finn.

1. that looting/finding image., 2. New York Times, 3. Gmail Mouse Hack, 4. Hipster PDA, 5. Up the Gate, 6. Tribeca Space Invader, 7. Space Invader, 8. Three Kings .... Noses., 9. cake25, 10. Snowman, 11. Work, 12. Hello_60.jpg, 13. Hello_55.jpg, 14. Marathon Course Map, 15. Houses outside our Kitchen Window, 16. Chopping Block, 17. Marathon Kickoff 5 miler, 18. Finn Lives!, 19. iredsoxny, 20. Cones in the West Village, 21. My Mom is Blogging, 22. Hello_57, 23. Hello_08, 24. Hello_15, 25. Hello_22, 26. Hello_16, 27. Hello_03, 28. Hello_28, 29. Hello_20, 30. Hello_20, 31. Adriana at the bar, 32. Hello_12, 33. Hello_70, 34. Hello_73, 35. Hello_34, 36. Hello_36, 37. Hello_38, 38. Hello_18, 39. On Clark Street in Oakland, 40. Hello_05, 41. Sunset Park, 42. The View from Sunset Park, 43. Sunset in Sunset Park, 44. The Cemetery, 45. Tea Tree, 46. Lauren, 47. Tree Tea, 48. Lauren, 49. Lauren's Book, 50. MORE CITATIONS, 51. DSCN9968, 52. DSCN9964, 53. DSCN9950, 54. DSCN9951, 55. Tea Tree, 56. Tree, 57. My Family, 58. Tree, 59. Tree, 60. Lauren, 61. Lauren and her book, 62. What is going on here?, 63. Layout of Show, 64. Pictures of Trees, 65. Adriana is in Deep Concentration, 66. Angry Squirrel, 67. Clean Apartment, 68. Dobie

If Walmart had a Blog...

"Hey, Idiots! It's a film about race made in 1968! Of COURSE it shows up next to MLK in searches. Nosy reporters: get back to the wiretapping story. Bloggers: Typepad has been up for two whole weeks straight! Now let us get back to the Mary-Kate and Ashley line. kthxbye!!!"

Wal-Mart, Planet of the Apes and Racism

Wal-Mart's recommendation of films about race alongside Planet of the Apes has thrown newspapers and blogs across the world into a tizzy. I don't get it. The primary theme of The Planet of the Apes movies and shows is race relations. It's not Eyes on the Prize, but the subtext is very shallow. It's entirely appropriate to recommend films about race next to Planet of the Apes.

It's not at all racist to suggest that the apes in the film represent African Americans - they absolutely represent African Americans. The movie was made in 1968, during the height of the civil rights movement. Race was on every American's mind. Angela says: 'I am not 100% sure that people "see" that film as a "race film".' I say people who don't are living under a rock. The last image of the film is The Statue of Liberty, which is one our lasting symbols of freedom and resistance to oppression, and especially slavery. In Tim Burton's (underrated!) Apes remake, the last image is of the Lincoln memorial.

Of course, if they don't, and if the film was intentionally placed next to movies about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dorothy Dandridge with bigoted intent, that's bad. But I doubt it. All big e-commerce sites have Amazon-like recommendation engines that analyze consumer browsing and purchasing habits, and that's where the association came from. There's no "racist programmer" to be fired. The style, production and social commentary of the Apes series may leave much to be desired, but love it or hate it, the movie is about race. It's not at all outside the realm of possibility that Walmart customers buy movies about Civil Rights and Planet of the Apes in the same shopping carts, whether they're racist assholes who think Black people are monkeys or they're college professors who are examining images of resistance in popular culture.

2005 Filing Techniques

2005

Desk Apprentice

Post-its (now reduced)

I have my completed today's sorting and list making goals.

Hello, Doggy

P1050719a
Originally uploaded by Steve1949.

Ad supported

Ad supported
Originally uploaded by david.

Go back in time to January 5, 2005 and tell someone that in one year the New York Times paper edition will be free, supported by ads, but you have to subscribe on-line to read Maureen Dowd.

I like this move - not just because I get a "free" paper out of the deal, but also because it shows that the New York Times is willing to take some kind of risks to widen their distribution. It's a conservative first step, but it's a first step nonetheless.

The Wire over iTunes (very meta)

I want my HBO:

HBO employs people who probably do math much better than me, and they can figure out offering $2-per-episode downloads of certain shows is a good way to lose subscribers. So if HBO and Apple do have some sort of deal in the works, it's possible to probable that the fee will be a little more than the $1.99 you're paying for Knight Rider reruns. Either that, or the shows won't be available until months after they appear on HBO. However Apple and HBO work things out in this still-theoretical deal, you can bet that it will be in a manner that keeps HBO subscribers down on the farm."

iTunes on HBO faces revenue cannibalization challenges not only from the subscriptions side, but also from the DVD sales/Netflix side, which is arguably more important. Two possible solutions: iTunes video subscription (it's built out, just has to be shipped) and $2 episodes of The Wire for people who already subscribe to HBO. I already feel like the sick amount of money we pour into Digital cable allows us an "all you can watch" TV buffet, which means some back episodes of Deadwood and The Wire were watched on our powerbooks completely without guilt.

By the way, what the heck takes HBO so long to put out DVDs?

Yahoo/Microsoft merger rumors

John Battelle on the Stock Market Predicting That YHOO and MSFT Will Hook up: "it's not clear what Microsoft brings to Yahoo's party that the company does not already have." What a preposterous statement! Here's a short list of what Microsoft brings to "Yahoo's Party:" MSN Spaces, XBox 360, OneNote, Exchange Server, 90% of the browser market (with Internet Explorer 7 due this Summer) and live.com. And - oh yeah - an Operating System or two.

For what it's worth, I think this merger makes perfect sense, and I never think these big mergers make any sense. Yahoo and Microsoft aren't good at any of the same things, and GAOgle vs. Microhoo! would be a death match worth buying ringside tickets for.

The New Rules

Lifeblog post
Originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.

• Please do not flickr the artworks
• Please do not sms the artworks
• Please do not Powerbook the artworks
• Please do not Hot Coffee the artworks

Happy New Year

happy new year
Originally uploaded by david.