I’ll remind everyone that I have no musical ability, and my tastes are rarely shared by others. With that said, I think the new CD from Keane, Perfect Symmetry, is going to take them from their current status of “Someone I have heard of and kind of like,” to “Total World Domination.” Check it out on Rhapsody or your mp3 download of choice. I’m on my 3rd run through the CD. Good stuff.
Category: Uncategorized (Page 16 of 26)
“A Nigerian Muslim court Monday detained an 84-year-old Islamic preacher with 86 wives after he failed to heed a call by local leaders to divorce all but four of them…..The authorities charged Mohammed Bello with “insulting religious creed” and “unlawful marriages” after local chiefs and Muslim leaders gave him until September 7 to comply with Islamic sharia law, which allows a man to have no more than four wives at a time.”
I see it now – “Elimina-wife.” 82 eliminations to get to the remianing 4. Endless possibilities on an International stage here….
Funny clip from Google News. Notice who the headline is slamming.
I really like what Hulu is doing. If you haven’t checked it out, go to the site and play around one evening. It really seems to be run by some smart folks.
So, I’m not picking on them for launching a promotional TV schedule with graphics that display the wrong calendar dates. It just shows that no one is perfect, so if you are going to launch something on your web site, it’s never a bad idea to have someone review it. That way your boss doesn’t have the chance receive a snarky email froma “colleague” that asks why the creative team can’t read a calendar.
So i won’t be one of those people who pretends to know how the new Google browser, aka Chrome, will affect the stock prices of Google and Microsoft, or what it means to Mozilla and the Open Source Community.
But I think it’s fair to say that the launch of Chrome fundamentally changes the landscape of the how the tech industry will operate. I mean, you have to be curious about what the Google Browser will look like, and how they will integrate Docs, Calendar, mail, etc….
Now, contrary to the Open Source guys, I won’t be saying that a Google Browser is a Microsoft killer. For example, as much as I love Google Docs for collaborating on a shared whiteboard, as an actual device for building a real document, it’s fairly useless. So while there will be a lot of anti-MSFT sentiment that will put Chrome on a pedestal, I’ll test it out with an objective mind.
But my point is, Chrome will be a game changer on the tech environment one way or the other. After years of people saying, “Google will kill Microsoft when they release a browser,” they will finally have to deliver. So mark this date as a critical moment in technology. Chrome either rocks (like Gmail), is ok (like Docs), or becomes irrelevant (like Froogle). Test it out and see what you think.
I’m starting a new category, covering some interesting tactics the Presidential campaigns are using when it comes to technology or social media marketing. Here’s the latest email I received from the Obama camp:
People keep asking me if we’re really going to announce Barack’s VP directly to our supporters.
The answer is yes.
Let me be very clear. You are the ones who built this campaign, and
Barack wants you to be the first to know who will join him in leading
our movement for change.So, if you haven’t signed up to receive an email or a text message, sign up now. Or you can text VP to 62262 from your mobile phone.
Make sure to forward this message to your friends and let them know about this special opportunity.Thanks,
That’s a pretty neat gimmick. I don’t know if it means that if you text the campaign, they will call you later to ask for money. But it’s a neat way to use text messaging to communicate directly to their base.
Here’s a debate some friends and I stumbled into. We were looking for ways that a bad economy could help us correct behaviors that lead to better long-term decisions. For example, if gas is expensive, we start looking at alternative sources of energy, or public transportation.
So in an economy where it costs us more money to drive places, where we have less money for disposable income, and more expensive food costs, we will have to change some spending habits. The question became, will we get healthier.
One argument is that with ridiculous gas prices, I’m more likely to walk to the stores that I need to buy things from. I may start walking to the bus stop and riding it to work. With less disposable income, the average American group of friends might skip a movie or night at the bar to go shoot hoops at the park, thinking that the $100 they would spend together on beers could be used more wisely.
But I can see the flip side as well. Depressed people may skip a night meeting up with friends in order to buy a $5 bottle of wine and never leave their couch. The $8 a pound they spent on turkey could be replaced with $.25 Top Ramen and $1.99 bologna. People could take an attitude of “This sucks, I’m going to sit at home and sulk.”
So I don’t know. I’d like to think that people will move to more urban centers, congregate at parks and places of shared interest, walk and bike places they normally drive, and feel like when all else that they can’t control fails, they can at least take care of themselves. Thoughts?
Nothing brilliant to comment on this week, though there’s a ton of odd unrelated stuff going on. Here are a few things that made me stop and take note:
- Here’s my friend Dan from Manchester making his national television debut on America’s Got Talent.
- I really have to go back and figure out how Nick Licata gets elected to Seattle City Council. I’m beginning to think that moderates and conservatives simply don’t vote in Seattle. Either that, or there’s some weird transition that anyone who is moderate or conservative bolts for the Eastside as soon as they can.
- For all the talk about Erik Bedard not speaking to the press, maybe with all his millions Larry Holmes can find a speechwriter, or at least someone who will keep him on some sort of consistent train of thought. This could literally be a SNL skit.
- The U.S. Embassy told Americans living abroad: "Be Wary of Soccer-Crazed Germans." No word if the Germans responded by warning their people to stay away from stadiums in Detroit, Cleveland and New York, just as a general rule.
- After months of hearing about how U.S. elementary, high scools and colleges are sub-standard, the graduate programs get blasted with this report from Business Week. Apparently there was actually a Web site up for years that claimed to give people answers to the GMAT. Yes, Years. As in, for years the guys at GMAT never thought to Google "How to cheat on the GMAT" in order to fix the problem. Note to MBA grads – there may be job openings at GMAT soon.
- After the purging of the Mariner front office this week, someone asked me an interesting question. If all decisions had been left to the Wisdom of Crowds approach where fans could vote on all matters, could they really have done any worse than Bavasi. In 4.5 years, he’s the only person I’ve ever seen where you look upon the body of work and see no success in the past, no success in the present, and no hope for success in the future. How hard to you have to try to take an 90+ win season in 2003, and decimate the major league and minor league talent without replacing it with much in return?
- And of course, today could be the day that we find out for sure that our millionaires and legistalors all got out-hustled by an Oklahoma oil guy.
What a fun week.
No, not those 7 words. But in memory of Carlin’s passing, I want to relay a funny quote I heard today. When asked how he wanted to be rememberred when he died, George replied, "Gee, he was just here a minute ago…"
For no reason whatsoever, I decided to close out my trip to Taiwan with a long hike in the Tawianese forest. I guess I can’t say "no reason." Vittorio and I had taken a gondola up to the hills to see some pretty big temples, but he had to leave to catch his flight back to Europe. I still had another 5 hours to kill, so I thought 3 of them could be effectively used wandering around the woods.
Plus, my Lonely Planet guidebook, which hadn’t really been right or useful all week, said there was this crazy temple buried in a wall behind the waterfall. I had to see it. So off I went, up the rock stairs into the unknown forest.
I’m not sure why I expected it to be less humid in the middle of the forest. But it wasn’t. And I guess I forgot about the fact that there would be bugs, because there were. Otherwise, the hike started stupendously.
It didn’t take too long for me to start talking to myself, mainly cursing how this idea had enetered my head. Why couldn’t I have stumbled on the page in the guidebook that mentioned an air conditioned museum, or better, maybe a martini bar.
But I would carry on. After all, when is the next time I would be able to see a temple in a waterfall?
After a few km, I reached a key fork in the road. Unfortunately for me, the brilliantly marked signage did not mention which diretion my destination was. I would be forced to use the guidebook, which to this point had gotten me lost on well marked city streets in two different countries. Now I would use it for an unmarked forest trail. Yippee.
I slogged through the trail when a frightening thought hit me. Vittorio had left me in a totally different place than I was now. Literally no one in the world knew where I was. If I fell, I’d be one of those guys that just vanished off the planet. Hmmm….
The hike was beautiful, except for the fact that I had no confidence in where I was going, and not very much hope that I was headed toward my mysterious temple. The path kind of disappeared, but I finally found a creek, which seemed like a pretty good thing to follow if I was looking for a waterfall. The bridge I came across did not instill confidence, but luckily the water was shallow enough to cross.
Anyway, after a few hours, I actually found this temple, and it was pretty cool – especially for something built into the side of a waterfall. I walked through to take some pics from the other side, and there were actually some people inside there, which kind of freaked me out. And they offered me tea. Now, I thought it was a funny thing for people who don’t speak English to offer to sit down and pantomime with me. But I appreciated the gesture, despite the fact that drinking unfiltered Taiwanese forest water before getting on an 11 hour flight seemed like a poor idea. I passed on the tea, and headed back to the gondola, content with the way the trip was coming to an end.