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20031101
Posted
11/1/2003 11:21:06 AM
Mark Cuban is a Dallas legend. He started AudioNet in September, 1995 selling it to Yahoo! less than four years later for $5.7 Billion. (As an aside, I was working in at another startup in Dallas at the time. AudioNet was just down the street.)
With the take over of Rysher Entertainment, an investment in Magnolia Pictures and the purchase of the Landmark chain of theatres (parent company of the Inwood) Mark and his business partner, Todd Wagner announced that they were aggressively moving into the film sector. This week they announced their intention to bring real experimentation to the well defined motion picture lifecycle and distribution channels.
By owning a film company, cable channels and a theater chain, Mr. Cuban and Mr. Wagner can experiment with how they distribute films....
The company might try releasing a movie in theaters, then offering a DVD of the same movie for sale as viewers are walking out of the theater. Or they might release a movie to theaters and on cable at the same time and let viewers decide which experience they want.
It is amazing how simple it is to fall into familiar patterns--especially when large sums of money are involved. This new Cuban-Wagner venture is the kind of innovation that "faster, better, cheaper" Internet-thinking can bring to older industries.
Posted
11/1/2003 10:51:32 AM
According to the November pictorial of my Half Price Bookstore calendar, if it were not for a 100,000 Franc 1891 French lottery winning it is unlikely Claude Monet would ever have been able to quit his job and pursue his passion--painting.
Posted
11/1/2003 07:39:31 AM
Stamping Out Short People
It's official. We've entered the Age of Enhancement, an era in which medicine's job is not only to heal the sick but to enhance the well. As of this summer, doctors have the US government's approval to make humans taller. Can stronger, smarter, and faster be far behind?
The milestone was passed July 25, when the Food and Drug Administration officially recognized the practice of giving supplemental injections of human growth hormone to healthy but short children who have normal levels hGh. Four years of shots could mean an extra three inches...
20031031
Posted
10/31/2003 02:34:49 PM
{when repentance follows just on the heels of loss; when desperation and the irreversible collide a staggeringly honest, brutal fetus of a person is delivered from the womb of selfish posturing screeching with lungs unaccustomed to life naked and exposed, wide-eyed and helpless in the divine insanity that is the afterbirth of being born again.}
I'm in a Kinko's writing this. I haven't said that yet. It's downtown and open twenty-four hours. It's maybe one A.M. and I'm the only customer here on this side of the store. Two other people--homesick German tourists, I'm guessing--are across the room trying to send a fax.
I think heaven must be a little bit like this place--everybody with a purpose, in a beautiful clean environment. They even have those wonderful new full-spectrum lights that make you look like you've just returned from a stroll in an Irish mist.
Why am I here? I'm here because I still don't have a computer, and I'm here writing this because today I got a call from the RCMP out in Chilliwack. They called to say that they'd found your "highly weathered" flannel shirt, and in its pocket, your Scotiabank debit card. It was tangled in some bulrushes in a swamp beside a forest out there, found by some kids shooting BB guns. I asked the RCMP if they were going to organize a manhunt, and while they didn't laugh aloud, they made it clear that one was not bring planned. How dare they. All they gave me was a map.
And so I'm typing this letter out. I'm going to print it and make a thousand copies, and come sunrise I'm going to go out to that swamp and its surrounding forest and I'm going to tack these letters onto the trees there with a pack of brightly colored tacks I saw by the front desk when I registered to use this machine.
....I haven't lost you, my son. No no no. And you will find one of these letters. I know you will. You never missed a trick of mine, so why stop now? And when you do find this letter, you know what? Something extraordinary will happen. It will be like a reverse solar eclipse--the sun will start shining down in the middle of night, imagine that!--and when I see this sunlight it will be my signal to go running out into the streets, and I'll shout over and over, "Awake! Awake! The son of mine who once was lost has now been found!" I'll pound on every door in the city, and my cry will ring true: "Awake! Everyone listen, there has been a miracle--my son who once was dead is now alive. Rejoice! All of you! Rejoice! You must! My son is coming home!"
 Hey Nostradamus!
A Novel
Douglas Coupland
20031030
Posted
10/30/2003 11:33:01 AM
Salon.com | Camille speaks!
via Rudy
Q: Why aren't you a fan of blogs?
Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you're condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There's a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one's mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there's no editing -- it's free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn't masturbation -- you've got to self-edit....
Posted
10/30/2003 05:40:41 AM
I think you
should focus
on trying to find
cool things to do in
less crowded spaces.
Don't be worried because
there's no one there yet.
-Joi Ito
20031029
Posted
10/29/2003 07:46:34 PM
Israel’s Chief of Staff Denounces Policies Against Palestinians
Israel's top-ranking soldier said that current hard-line policies against the Palestinians were working against Israel's "strategic interest" and had contributed to the downfall of the previous Palestinian prime minister, Israeli news organizations reported on Wednesday.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was described as "furious" about the comments, attributed to Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the military's chief of staff...
"In our tactical decisions, we are operating contrary to our strategic interest."
20031028
Posted
10/28/2003 06:39:45 PM
Wired 11.09: The New Diamond Age
De Beers has been warehousing mass quantities of natural diamonds for generations in an effort to control the international diamond market. Former military man Ian White, with his startup Gemesis, is looking to topple the De Beers monopoly by growing real diamonds from diamond fragments.
Aron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond up to the stainless steel jeweler's loupe he holds against his eye. We are in Antwerp, Belgium, in Weingarten's marbled and gilded living room on the edge of the city's gem district, the center of the diamond universe. Nearly 80 percent of the world's rough and polished diamonds move through the hands of Belgian gem traders like Weingarten, a dealer who wears the thick beard and black suit of the Hasidim.
"This is very rare stone," he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented English. "Yellow diamonds of this color are very hard to find. It is probably worth 10, maybe 15 thousand dollars."
"I have two more exactly like it in my pocket," I tell him.
He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for the first time. I place the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and size. To find three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 times and never seeing tails.
Posted
10/28/2003 05:49:46 PM
Old News is Good News...
» LittleThinkTank «: RSS Lurking
Since installing the new version 1.0.4 of Ranchero's excellent RSS aggregator, NetNewsWire, I've gotten myself a new hobby. For lack of a more appropriate descriptive, I've decided to call it RSS Lurking – spying on weblog writers as they edit their work.
One of the new features (read, ways of losing more of your valuable time to your information fetish) incorporated into this version is the ability to see changes to an RSS post. Switch it on (you have to tick "Highlight changes" in Preferences), and refresh your newsfeeds.
The fun starts when someone changes an item after posting it; I do this myself all the time – for some reason, I never seem to see some typos in my weblog application's entry form, but they stand out like a beacon on the main page of LittleThinkTank. When NetNewsWire refreshes a feed subsequent to a change, you get to see the differences.
Here's an example from a Yahoo RSS feed with an excerpt of this Yahoo News item (the red stricken text was the original post, the green the new text, the black was unchanged):
Fixing NASA Culture May Be Hardest Task (AP)
AP - NASA's overconfident management and inattention to safety doomed Columbia every bit as much as Fixing NASA may be harder than fixing the chunk of foam that struck the shuttle with deadly force, investigators concluded Tuesday. Without drastic changes, they said, another disaster is likely. space shuttle.
And one more from another Yahoo item:
Mars Sweeps 'Close,' Delighting Onlookers (AP)
AP - Mars glowed bright in the night sky Wednesday as bright as the moon Wednesday when the red planet moved closermade its closest pass to the Earth than it has in the past 60,000 yearsyears, delighting astronomers and clouds that had threatened to spoil the view cleared, to the delight of thousands of onlookers.
It's fascinating to see the decision-making process that the author, or editor, goes through. This could be a fantastic learning tool – you can virtually (no pun intended) see into the writer's mind as they choose one phrase over another, a new word here, a clarification there. And if nothing else, it makes for an innocent voyeuristic thrill.
___________________
oh, and while we are talking about old news you really should check this out.
the one thing i miss is my "Blog This Now" button on my IE toolbar.
{update 10.29.03}
daniel.miller:
like this?: http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/#blogthis
or this?: http://texturizer.net/firebird/extensions/#googlebar
Posted
10/28/2003 05:07:53 PM
Ancient Christian Commentary: What is War Good For?
It is fascinating that, across the board, the earliest church Fathers were pacifistic. That it took nearly 300 years to move from the man Jesus, who gave his life rather than take another's, to, with Lactantius (240 - 320 CE), an interpretive stance that condoned armed conflict should not be dismissed lightly. Especially given the convenience of such an interpretive shift after the balance of power tipped in the Church's favor with the ascent of Constantine during this same period.
Most, if they return to Church History at all, do not consider anything before Augustine in their search for an ethic of war. It is easier to wave the Emperor's flag in the name of Christ than to live with the Emperor's chains in the way of Jesus.
Posted
10/28/2003 08:53:34 AM
Infone has an interesting phone based concierge service that is only $0.89 per call (up to 15 minutes). Restaurants, movies, directions... basically, you would use it anytime you can't reach a friend sitting in front of their computer.
Infone is using XWT (which is licensed under GPL) as their application architecture.
20031027
Posted
10/27/2003 01:26:08 PM
Bad Mileage: 98 tons of plants per gallon
via /.
"A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles." For a reasonably efficient car, riding 25 miles per gallon, this translates to 4 tons of prehistoric plants per mile, or more than two tons per kilometer.
Posted
10/27/2003 10:38:29 AM
Microsoft to Color Web Services 'Indigo'
With Indigo, Microsoft is moving from a primarily object-oriented development paradigm to a service-oriented one. In effect, Indigo takes many of the key processes by which Microsoft currently handles programming interfaces—including the Common Language Runtime (CLR) and its associated .Net APIs; the .Net Enterprise Services, which include the COM+-like technology; ASP.Net and .Net Remoting, and Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ)—and brings them all together into a single approach that's service-oriented
20031026
Posted
10/26/2003 12:19:34 AM
 Trevor and Béate
Trevor (my brother) and his fiancée Béate have known each other since early elementary school. This is an old photo, taken in Peshawar, Pakistan circa 1995, that turned up recently. More recent pics can be seen here.
I wanted to take a moment to let everyone know that things are still moving at a brisk pace behind the scenes at Land Of The Free?.
We have requested every piece of documentation that could possibly relate to this story from the Department of Homeland Security.
Trevor's Senator, Ben Nighthorse Campbell, has filed a complaint and inquiry with the DHS and they are obligated by law to formally answer it within 30 days.
We are also in contact with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Sub-Committee for Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship and are seeking his support in this effort.
On the media front, Trev and Béate have been contacted by a number of major European magazines and news outlets.
Some of you may have noticed that the images on their blog were missing for part of one day this week (the same day that TheyBlinked was completely down). The host that we were using for the images could not handle the traffic so we are now using Blogger's Blogspot Plus25 service for image hosting on the Land Of The Free? blog.
Thanks to everyone who has written in to tell us of their own, similar horror stories. This is a wide-spread phenomenon that has had insufficient public scrutiny. Thanks also to the many who have sent their emails of support and signed the guest map.
As has been stated repeatedly over the course of the last few weeks: if you are able please contact your government representatives. It is simple and each of you who does this helps to build momentum behind this issue.
Trevor wrote to me this morning and said,
The one thing I really want people to do... is to get a link and letter to Edward Kennedy's office. People writing their own senators is great, but we need them all to end up at the same place so that the outrage can be felt. I would like to get everyone I know to write Kennedy this week. I think the time is right to inundate his office with letters and requests.
Here is the e-mail to use when writing Kennedy:
senator@kennedy.senate.gov For those who wish to write Kennedy and who would like help summing up the issues involved a template is available here. Thanks!
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