3D TVs. guess what? I don’t want one. The problem is people who make TVs need to come up with new ways to convince people to buy new TVs because that’s the only way they can make more money.
So I thought I would just throw up my 2 cents on what would make me want to buy a new TV. Do you know where the current action seems to be going on? Set top boxes. Cable Boxes, x-box, Roku. That’s the current battle ground. That’s where I get added value.
If I made TVs I would be pissed that people felt the need to add a box to my TVs. Why not just build that shit right in to the TV? That’s part of the reason I think GoogleTV is interesting. It will come installed on some TVs. With enough internet services all I need is a TV and Ethernet cord. Who knows what other software you could put on TVs. An apps market place? Inputs for game controllers? Camera for filming video or teleconferencing? What if the TV worked with TiVo to make Tivo even more awesome (even though I’m pissed at series 4 tivo)? I feel like TVs are in a good place to undercut a lot of these boxes that people put under their TVs (BTW with flat screen TVs set-top-box doesn’t even make sense any more).
And to be clear. I’m not buying a 3D TV. So build me something I would want to buy.
Hey. Mike Viola has a new album out. I’m pretty sure that’s the girl who played with Mike when we saw him open for Fountains Of Wayne in one of the best concerts ever. And hey Kelly Jones seems pretty awesome (myspace), so I just picked up her most recent album.
Bespin updated and they seem pretty excited with the project. I was excited with Bespin when I first heard about it but it has yet to really solve the problem I was hoping they would tackle. I really wanted a TinyMCE or FCKeditor replacement where I can just drop some JS files in my webroot and then plug Bespin in to textareas on forms. There has been a ticket to do that for a while and it seems like they have written it but didn’t seem to make it out this build.
Bespin is still young and has a lot of growing to do. Right now their focus is on developer tools and making Bespin very customizable. I’m sure this will give Bespin a solid foundation to move forward with.
I hope that they shift their focus from education developers how to customize to educating people who make webpages how to easily get Bespin up and running and why they would want to. Some easy things to do would be to offer a download of just the needed scripts to run and not a tar ball with python generators. Or even have a big download button instead of a small link that leads to a server generated index of files.
I always think jQuery is a great place to look. They put a lot of focus educating people how easy it is to use but also build what seems like a strong community of developers. Bespin is awesome and I think I just needs to better focus it’s marketing message.
The current numbers for the amount of oil leaking in the gulf before June 3rd have just been updated to up to 40,000 barrels a day. That’s a large number but I really think it’s hard to put in to perspective.
A good way to put that in context is to compare it to the amount of oil the USA uses a day. The US Energy Information Administration says the USA in 2009 used 18,686,000 barrels of oil a day (chart).
(18,686,000 / 24) / 60 = 12,976 barrels a minute
40,000 leaking barrels a day / 12,976 = 3.08 or 3 minutes and 4.8 seconds
So while that’s a lot of oil, it’s only a small fraction of the oil we use a day. Even over the whole 47 days between April 20th and June 6th only 2 hours and 25 minutes of oil were spilled.
I’m not saying that it’s not a catastrophic disaster but every day we pollute by several magnitudes more and it’s good to keep these things in perspective.
I’m a big fan of Donald and I’d love to see him get Spiderman (as well as some side campains) but america is still so bad at talking about race that there is an odd dialog going on.
The big question seems to be “why go black?” and “does it make a difference?“. These questions seem to just be a failure of imagination to me. It’s as if people are expecting the exact same movie with just a black lead. And to me that would be a tragedy.
Race matters and should have an effect on the story. Different cultures have different perspectives and viewing those through a prism of a well known tale is a great way to talk about those experiences. This is even more interesting as comics have oftain been a haven of white only characters and have made grave missteps trying to represent other cultures. Hollywood is obviously not the kindest to other cultures but still comes off as worldly compared to comic books.
I hope Donald gets the role and I hope it had a meaningful impact on the story. I hope it’s a success and has broader impact on comics and how we view races other then whites as lead roles.
go here: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME?v=2 and replace USERNAME with your username
Search for videoWatchCount
kind of a pain but hopefully that data will stay in the feed. We know google is tracking us all very closely. we might as well have access to that data.
One of the things that really gets me about racism is when people complain about the the stuff that doesn’t matter. Here’s two version of a poster for “Couples Retreat”. Your supposed to supposed to be offended by the UK version that has edited out the black couple.
Guess what? If you want to be angry at racism then you should be pissed at the US poster as well as the whole movie. I agree with the movie Studio. They edited out the more minor characters and put the more famous people up front. I’m supposed to feel better about the US poster with the tiny black couple in the background? I’m supposed to feel better about a movie industry that does not give leading roles to blacks unless it’s a film for blacks?
This is just an instance where people see their own biases and become uncomfortable. I’m not singling this movie out. I’ve not seen it and I hear it’s fairly good. But in an industry where blacks are marginalized don’t get pissed if the poster reflects that reality. Instead of adding more black people to posters why not just go see more movies with black people?
Vista was a pain. When I got my new computer with it I had trouble getting the network card to work. Also an attempt to install it on a family member’s “vista ready” totally borked their system and I was up till 4am trying to restore xp. They never upgraded to vista.
But so far Windows 7 is coming up roses. The $50 upgrade I got was a pretty sweat deal and the upgrade was easy. Granted vista and 7 are similar enough that there are no huge architecture changes but the upgrade was super smooth. It asked all the questions in the first 15 minutes and then the upgrade ran with out any hand holding. It took 2 hours. It still did that thing where the progress bar stalls for long periods of time and then races forward. It would have been nice if 7 was more clear that I didn’t need to watch it install, but that might just be the tech geek in me.
I’ve literally only used the OS for 10 minutes but it seems snappy. It also seems to only take about 6-700mb of ram instead of the 8-900mb that vista took up. The task bar seems super slick. I like the idea of pining applications in place in theory but the open programs seem hard to distinguish from the programs that have yet to launch.
I’ll try and keep more notes as I have more first impressions.
Alt + Ctrl + X 
