Of course everybody has seen Miss South Carolina. Here she is a week later on TV Skip to 3:46 to find out what her future plans are. If she should ever work where I do, I will make sure to wear this.
Nothing wrong with stupid people. But when they start to be on TV or try to do jobs that they are not fit for (like Prez) then they are a problem.
Voyager still has contact with earth.
It looks like there is all sorts of stuff flying arond out there.
The other day I saw an image of the Pioneer Plaque and wondered if Nasa would be free to send almost authentical depections of naked people into space these days.
NAB 2006 Red announced a new camera, and I wrote that it would never be a reality. Well, not quiet that, but I thought it would not go anywhere. I was wrong. Cameras up to serial number 25 have been shipped and there are an amazing number of orders. Fxguide has anice article about the delivery of Red Camera #22.
I find it very impressive that a couple of dedicated people were able to pull this off. The deadlines announced during the launch of the brand did slip. But keeping those would have been a miracle. It seems that the way RED handled the delay and other modification to their initial plans was what saved the day. People are still happy and excited about the device.
Now comes the interesting part: How will the images intergrate. How much of difference does the real life existence of the RED camera actually make.
Of course I can not resist to follow a failed prophecy with another one: It’s not gonna change that much. It’s not only the camera that makes a movie a movie.
Back in the day it was widely mentioned that you had to spend 20% of your worktime at Google at an project that you personally care about and that is not directly your ‘day job’. Rumor has it that gmail got started that way. I could guess that the google earth flight simulator was such a thing. It must really really suck to work for Yahoo and having to observe how your competition runs circles around you.
On the other side people are guestimating that the average google employee gets up to half a thousand emails originating at google. A day. It is interesting to see how Google will do in the future. It’s history and application are truly unprecedented. It’s impact is quiet astonishing. My daughter, being 7, never was on the internet. Try to keep it that way for as many years as possible. But she is a curious person. The other day she wanted to know what I am doing. I explained that I added another internet server. She wanted to know how many I had and what they were used for. The next question she had after she heard me talk about my current and future setup was: “And Google, how many servers do they have?”.
The day that the most people lived on this planet: Today.
A couple of years ago, during those preYouTube days – in case your memory goes that far back – I thought it would be neat if there would be a site where people could store videos and share them. I wrote a quick little thing, called it vilodex and shared with a couple of people. It’s by invitation only. Some people watched, it has an RSS feed with media enclosures. So you can subsrcibe to it via iTunes for instance. All this was, as said earlier, a very long time ago. I still use it to keep copies of interesting things that I find. It did annoy me that I could not find a link, or that content simply had vanished, when I wanted to reference it.
Something else had happened as well. I noticed, but did not care. Nor do I know. A couple of Skate Board Enthousiasts started to use it. There are more than 200 logins in Vilodex, created by people posting videos like this. Why they would not use one of the gzillion video sharing sites that bloated with VC millions all want to become the next youTube (good Luck)? I have no idea.
It would have been nice if I could have let this continue to grow. The problem is that links to those skate boarder clips appeared in their forums. That I can totally understand as well: You want to share what you did. But it also means that there could be significant bandwidth uses. In the end something I would need to pay for. Digg hits one cool clip and overnight I have amused some hundred thousand US teens. Nothing wrong with that part, but paying for it? No, thanks. Ask Murdoch or Google to do that. Please.
So I started to move the clips around. They are still all there. When you login to vilodex then they work as usual. It’s only 16GB. I couldn’t care less about that part. But all those links to those clips do no work anymore. Updating them would be short sighted: I could tell the computer to move them automatically to random positions. So, kids, sorry:
Stay on my lawn, but no more free Pizza deliveries on my account.
Over here everything is high tech. Pointless or not. Of course there are ads on the paper towels. Not real time printed blog content (yet). Missing urinal feature: real time analysis of blood alcohol. Bonus for womens restrooms: instant pregnancy test. Imagine the possibilities: Google could place ads for abortion options and/or pregnancy products on the paper towels. Right now health insurance companies could track your lifestyle a little bit via your credit card trace. Technically they could. Not sure if that is legal, and if they are smart enough to do so. But with personalised mini lab in every toilet you would get an interesting trace of activities. Of course lab technology does not follow the trend of hard drives of other micro electronics and computer related stuff. So this brave new world option will remain scifi for quiet some time. Possibly forever, since we just might run out of cheap energy -that is the basis for all of your lifestyle after all- before high tech might become that sophisticated.
Update:
Like with any sci-fi story there is a google angle popping up minutes after I ramble about it. Coincidency? Of course. Almost everything is. Actually. Get used to it.
Funny how names become somewhat Harry-Potterish at a certain level:
Seven Sisters
White Shoe
Magic Circle
Also interesting that they all seem to run asp website. Nothing is easier to hack. Maybe even the tough kids in Russia know whom to mess with and who has future peer potential. Better erase that, would be no fun to get in trouble with those twenty companies all at once.
boingboing can’t help themselves over the virgin computer stuff. Even though it is a joke. Some preloaded crap. 3 long years ago I had full freaking internet on flights between LAX and Frankfurt. 10 hours of decent internet speed and real connections. I worked in ssh on my servers while being over iceland. In 2004. And BoingBoing jumps up and down about preloaded content. Ignorance being bliss.
Naomi Wolf writes about Porn and the influence it has on people’s view of sexuality. While I think that some of her conclusions are a bit simplifying her essays is truly an exception. Compared to the booming multi billion dollar porn industry there is virtually no public discurse about the matter. Many views and discussions get stuck and some moral questions that originate in a world that seized to exist a very long time ago. Arguments that first were heard in the 70s, and that made sense then, can still be heard when the matter gets attention. Which is similar misplaced as if Pfizer would try to use 500 year old alchemists notes to create medication. The world, specificially the world of media consumption, and precisly the ubiquitousness of porn have changed. Changed in matters that are breath taking. Much of the problems in the middle east for instance originate from the clash of the availability of the entire internet with the moral framework from a couple of hundred years ago. Porn, like it or not, is a reality of the media landscape. It grew radically while nobody was looking. It’s high time that we pay attention and figure out how society can exist with it.